Gay on a not-so-gay campus

My first exposure to the gay side of life at Princeton was, ironically, more of a boy-meets-girl story. At the Graduate School's welcome-new-students barbecue, the girl and I found common ground in the area of current department, undergraduate major, our northern looks, taste for arctic travel destinations and our middle name (minus the gender-specific bits). Some days later, I met her again at the reception for LGBT graduate students. Obviously, this wasn't a romantic story, but, maybe more remarkably, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It is a fact that I made quite a few good friends among Princeton's gay and lesbian students and that I felt welcome and well-integrated from the beginning. This set my experience here apart from that at my undergraduate institution, where the LGBT student organization was, at least in my perception, dominated by cliques and aloofness. While this might partly be due to my transitioning from an undergrad to a graduate student environment, I have yet to find another university where the gay (graduate) student group is nearly as closely-knit and amicable as here.

After I impulsively volunteered to write this piece, I started to feel that this was about all I could say about LGBT life at Princeton. But why? Well, for once, I've been out for far too long to find anything particularly different about being gay. Honestly, it's almost like being straight, just that I prefer Cosmopolitans over beer and Desperate Housewives over baseball. The graduate student body is diverse enough that a little norm-deviation in sexual orientation usually doesn't attract too much attention and mature enough not to care too ardently if it does. My personal experiences with homophobia, aside from quasi-voluntary exposure whenever I attend an Anscombe Society talk, are restricted to being accused of promoting immorality (for putting up posters with LGBT-relevant announcements) and to one particular individual crossing the street whenever I'm coming along. (A few similar incidents can be reported from other places I've lived, among them an outnumbered chase induced by my kissing a boy on the street.) Sometimes I feel more discriminated against for my professional (climate science, global warming) than for my lifestyle "choice."

So all is bliss, then? Not completely, of course. While, for all practical purposes, I choose to ignore contemporaries who do not agree with me on the naturalness of being gay, I have friends who are not confident enough in their orientation to do so or who are forced to deal with an overly conservative environment in their departments. Of course, I also know people who have faced severe hardship due to their being gay, but that happens mostly within their own families. When I see acquaintances of mine listening to an Anscombe speaker who mounts a logically bizarre argument that I am a danger to the cement of American society (particularly if I should have a desire to get married), I wish I could look inside their heads. Clearly, it still hurts to think that people I know well and respect might believe that I do not deserve the same rights them for the sole reason that I fall in love with men.

If there is one issue that excites histrionic debates in The Daily Princetonian and on the LGBT emailing lists, it is that of visibility. While the small circle of students who regularly appear at LGBT-targeted events wonder where the rest of the gay population hides, the ideologically opposed campus faction complains about too much postering and the aggressiveness of our advertising. Concerns are being expressed that the closeted members of the community are being alienated by overstated in-your-face gayness, which unsurprisingly is water on the mills of those who would prefer to see the world delivered from all things queer. Either way, I think, the problem is still a lack of general acceptance. It's a small but important addendum to my above remark that being gay is just like being straight. In a way, the applause that "Brokeback Mountain" gets for depicting gays as just as straight as anyone else seems unfortunate, because what we really need is more acceptance towards those of us who are clearly different — more flamboyantly gay, for example. But in order to create more acceptance, we need more visibility first, here on campus as well as anywhere else. I still see too few gay couples holding hands around here, and I'd certainly be the first to further the cause of visibility in such a pleasant way. Of course, that would require having a boyfriend first... Arno Hammann is the secretary for the Queer Graduate Caucus and a graduate student in the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. He may be reached at ahammann@princeton.edu.