Right of the Rainbow

Consequently, he explained, “the idea of marriage has always been really important to how I see the world.”

In sixth grade, Claros came out as bisexual. Still, he said, he remains committed to the conservative ideals of his religious upbringing — including the importance of chastity and marriage.

At a university where most students see the LGBT community and the conservative community as two sides of a strict dichotomy, Claros said identifying with both groups can be challenging.

“I’ve been very involved with the LGBT community at Princeton … and I understand how the [LGBT] Center and a lot of the programs at the center can be really off-putting [for conservatives],” he explained.

“Since the issue of gender has been brought into academia, there has been a push to break down sexual norms … and I think because academic queer society goes in that direction, the LGBT center goes in that direction,” he said. “The center does try to encourage wide understandings of sexuality.”

Andrew Blumenfeld ’13 identifies as gay and as a social conservative. Though Blumenfeld acknowledged that the LGBT community is traditionally associated with a “more liberal agenda” because it “inherently attracts a more liberal audience,” he explained that his understanding of social conservatism is not at odds with the agenda of the LGBT community.

While he has found College Republicans to be “a very inclusive group,” he does not like to associate himself with groups espousing a “narrow spectrum of conservatism,” he added.

“I think that, in order to increase loyalty, [student groups] try to go for the most extreme of either one of their respective ideologies,” Blumenfeld said.

Though Blumenfeld has found a conservative niche on campus in the College Republicans, Claros said some of the conservative student groups — especially the Anscombe Society — make him uncomfortable.

“I do think there’s something very off-putting about the fact that Anscombe is so related to [politics] professor Robbie George, who is so associated with the [National Organization for Marriage] … It seems like Anscombe is not just pushing for chastity, but for a heteronormative view. At least, that’s how the public views it, and that’s a very bad thing,” Claros explained.

“In a place that puts such a high value on intelligence,” Blumenfeld said, it’s important for the LGBT Center and the conservative community to work to break down the barrier dividing them.

“I think it would really be beneficial to both groups to … hold a joint event, or something like that, or [sponsor] a speaker that identifies as both conservative and gay,” he said. “If people view [the gay and conservative communities] as mutually exclusive, it only furthers that belief if they support programming that is mutually exclusive.”

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Claros said he thinks the tension between the two communities arises from a focus on their differences, rather than on their similarities. Explaining that both groups have been “ostracized” on campus, he said, “It’s really unfortunate that students within both of these groups have engaged in a kind of ostracizing of each other.”

“I don’t think that we’re essentially very different,” he explained.

“When we come up with names, it’s where we get into sticky situations, where we somehow think that we’re different, that we’re entirely opposed to different people,” Claros continued. “I think that it’s unfortunate that a certain kind of animosity has developed between the LGBT community and the Anscombe Society. And I think it’s really sad that people see them as the antithesis of each other.”