News :: GLBT
Gordon College students publish LGBT pamphletThursday May 24, 2007 Last month Gordon College, a Christian college in Wenham with a policy banning homosexual acts within the campus community, received a high profile visit from the Equality Ride, a group of young people on a cross-country trek to visit Christian colleges and universities and urge them to support their LGBT students. The college welcomed the riders onto campus for a dialogue on homosexuality and Christianity, and the visit attracted the attention of both the LGBT press (see “Gordon College Takes Baby Steps In Recognizing LGBT Students,” April 19) and the mainstream media. But shortly after the Equality Riders and the press left campus, the Gordon community was again confronted with the issue of homosexuality when two students and one recent graduate published and distributed a pamphlet, “If I Told You,” containing 10 anonymous essays and one interview of Gordon students who are either LGBT-identified or who are struggling with their sexuality. The Equality Riders may have brought a pro-LGBT voice from the outside to campus, but “If I Told You” provided one of the few public airings of the perspectives of the largely hidden population of LGBT Gordon students themselves.
“It certainly made people realize, or at least the ones who read it, that same-sex attraction, homosexuality, LGBTQ stuff, whatever name you want to put on it, is an issue that affects people at Gordon and is not just an abstract thing,” said one of the contributors, a student going into his senior year who asked to remain anonymous because he does not want to be out on campus. “Because I’ve heard that some people at my school, believe it or not, had no idea that this is an issue that people who they know might have issues with or have to deal with.”
The stories contained in the pamphlet provide a snapshot of life at a school where there is virtually no openly gay student presence and where faculty, students, and even the student handbook describe homosexual acts as sinful. Some of the contributors struggled for years to reconcile their homosexuality with their faith, eventually embracing their LGBT identity and coming out to small circles of supportive friends on campus.
One such student warns his peers that anti-gay rhetoric will only drive away LGBT students from the school and from their faith, writing, “Remember that out of being gay and being Christian, only one is a choice. I asked Jesus to be my personal savior, but I never asked to be able to understand the incredible allure of men … So consider that when you say you can’t be gay and Christian, you’re not making people straight. It’s more likely you’re driving them away from God’s love, and from the Gordon community.” [emphasis in original]
Other essays show students who are deeply conflicted about their sexuality. One female student, who describes being tormented by nightmares of herself performing homosexual acts, writes, “As a child of Christ my body is not my own; I was bought at a price and by falling on my face in front of Him I am continually made aware of His heavenly love — a love that called to me even when I was struggling with feelings of homosexuality, thus illustrating that it is ultimately not what we feel that is sinful, but the very act of living a homosexual lifestyle.”
Diana McLean, a Gordon College junior and one of the three editors, said she and her co-editors printed up about 1000 copies of the pamphlet and distributed them at the dining hall two days after the Equality Ride visit. She said the impetus for the project was a conversation she had with one of her friends last February about a gay student who that friend had known from a few years earlier who had been teased and harassed by his fellow Gordon students. McLean also became friends over the past year with another gay Gordon student and learned about the challenges he faced on campus. McLean, who is straight, wanted to do something to give voice to LGBT students at Gordon whose struggles went unnoticed by their peers.
“If people just knew that there were people hurting in this way then maybe that would change something,” said McLean. She and another friend, senior Monica Sakata, contacted a recent graduate, Zach Alexander, who had worked on an underground campus publication featuring the stories of LGBT people and other students outside of the mainstream of the Gordon community. After Alexander joined the team, the three editors put out a call for submissions from LGBT students through campus bulletins and student e-mail lists, as well as through the social networking website Facebook. About a dozen students responded, and McLean said that she was overwhelmed by the anguish and pain contained in many of the essays.
“A couple of them moved me to tears and I couldn’t sleep at night when I read them because I realized it wasn’t just the outer struggle … A lot of these students had a lot of internal struggles, and that to me seemed like the most painful thing, these students who were in agony trying to reconcile their faith to their sexuality,” said McLean.
The contributor who spoke to Bay Windows said he spent much of his time at Gordon struggling internally about his sexuality. Although he prefers not to use labels to describe his sexuality, he realized that he was attracted to men in his teens, and at 15 his conservative Christian parents discovered that he had a boyfriend. They forced him into counseling to try to change his sexual orientation and even had him exorcised. He said he tried to become straight and had hoped attending Gordon would help him in his struggle to banish his homosexual desires.
“I came to Gordon to try to make myself not gay … I came fully aware that it was something that Gordon did not endorse,” said the contributor. “Only toward the end of last year have I started to be okay with liking guys.”
Since then he has come out to a few close friends on campus, and he said all of them have been supportive.
“Most of them actually kept their own personal opinions on the issue to themselves, and whether they were okay with homosexuality or not, they kind of indicated that that didn’t matter to them as much as it mattered that I was one of their friends and they wanted to be supportive of me, regardless of what they thought about the issue,” he said.
But he said he has no plans to come out to the campus community at large, and he said that tends to be the norm for LGBT students on campus.
“It’s so underground that most of the gay people don’t know who the other gay people are,” he said.
Yet despite the closeted atmosphere on campus he said he plans to stay through his senior year. For the short term, the plusses, including his friends, his professors and the rigorous intellectual atmosphere, outweigh the desire to leave. And despite the official stance against homosexuality, he said he has not faced any harassment from other students about his sexuality.
“And I stay there also because I know in just a year I’ll have the opportunity to experience someplace different,” he said.
As for what impact “If I Told You” will have on the college’s approach to LGBT issues, Gordon spokeswoman Pat Jones told Bay Windows that administration officials have read it and see it as a positive contribution to the campus dialogue on the place of LGBT students on campus. The editors printed the pamphlet using funding from a student diversity club which in turn receives funding from the school.
“Certainly everyone has read it and were very pleased that the students did this … I think the main piece that we’ll be looking at is making sure that any sense of harassment, to at least be sure that students dealing with same-sex attraction while they’re here know what the policies are and that they have the same rights that heterosexual students have around harassment and that they’re equally protected by our policy,” said Jones.
From the essays in “If I Told You” it is clear that at least some of the LGBT students at Gordon do not feel protected or safe on campus. One contributor talks about being harassed by his roommates after he tells them he is gay. Another male contributor writes about being called a girl by a fellow student and hearing people in his dorm refer to someone as a “fucking queer.” He also writes about sinking into his seat in class as a professor argues that the Bible clearly condemns homosexuality. On two occasions, once after being raped by a man he was dating and another after being gay-bashed, he declined to tell people about the crimes for fear of being ostracized from his friends, the school and his family.
Alexander, who does not identify as LGBT, did some LGBT-themed activism on campus during his years at Gordon, and he said he was inspired to do that work because homosexuality seemed one of the few issues that was a taboo subject on campus. While he came from a conservative Christian family, his views on homosexuality changed after he roomed with two gay Gordon students his sophomore year. That year he and his fellow co-chair of the campus Amnesty International group organized a Day of Silence event to raise awareness about the silencing of LGBT students on campus. In order to get approval for the event from the administration he said the group had to make clear that it was protesting anti-gay violence, not endorsing homosexuality. Alexander said the College Democrats demanded they remove references to transgender people before they would agree to co-sponsor the event.
“At Gordon it’s like even the people speaking up for acceptance of LGBT people, it’s what’s considered liberal or accepting at Gordon would be considered moderate to conservative in the real world,” said Alexander. He said the second year they organized the Day of Silence all of their posters for the event were torn down, presumably by other students, the day after they were posted.
McLean said that whatever long-term changes “If I Told You” prompts on campus, in the short term she believes it has made students more aware that LGBT people are members of the Gordon community.
“I think that that alone made people rethink the way they talked, the way they act, and maybe their position on homosexuality, I don’t know … It at least gave people something to think about,” said McLean.
To download a copy of “If I Told You” visit www.ifitoldyou.org.
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