Speaking out on coming out

In a recent YouTube video, eight openly LGBT University students added their voices to the “It Gets Better” Project, describing their deeply personal journeys to understand and embrace their sexual orientation.

Princeton’s video and the larger project are a response to several high-profile LGBT teenage suicides across the nation. Begun in September, the larger project now includes more than 5,000 videos that have been viewed more than 15 million times.

Though Princeton’s video has yet to gain official approval from the project, it has garnered more than 4,000 views in just a week.

“I didn’t expect it to be so noticed by people,” said Jack Thornton ’13, an LGBT Center peer educator who edited the video. “I thought that if it just reached one person in a very powerful way, then that would be enough.”

Participants in the video hoped that it would not only offer a message to those struggling with their sexuality, but also raise awareness of the current situation facing LGBT youth.

For many gay teenagers, embracing or announcing their sexual orientation — or simply having others aware of it — can lead to bullying and harassment. In September, at least five gay teenagers took their lives.

“They basically broke my heart,” Sitraka Andriamanantenasoa ’11 said. “For me, partaking in the video was not an easy decision to make, but it was a responsibility I felt. It ... was a way for me to share the gift of an abundant life ... which I have enjoyed to the fullest, but which many kids out there cannot.”

On Sept. 9, 15-year-old Billy Lucas died nine days after hanging himself from a tree at his grandmother’s home in Indiana after his schoolmates began bullying him because of his sexuality.

A few weeks later, 18-year-old Rutgers undergraduate Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate filmed him having a sexual encounter with another man.

And the very next day, 13-year-old Asher Brown shot himself in the head after what his parents said was constant bullying by his peers.

But taunting and discrimination is not always so overt. Andriamanantenasoa pointed to a quieter sort of discrimination and a much more general, nationwide trend of homophobia.

“I’ve been trying to ask people ... to share [the video] with their networks,” he said. “But ... a lot of the people I know actually told me that they cannot, that the message would not be welcome in any way.”

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Fitting in

That attitude is less prevalent at Princeton, the participants said, crediting the University’s community for its warmth and welcoming attitude toward LGBT students and concerns. Some attested to the active presence of the LGBT Center and the University’s caring administrators.

Nonetheless, these same students spoke of a subtle unease on campus.

“I think that there is a divide between what we ... accept in the abstract versus what happens when we encounter gay people living gay lives,” said Elizabeth Borges ’11, a video participant and LGBT Center intern. Though the LGBT Center always sends a powerful and supportive message to the gay community, she said, certain social groups on campus are less accepting.

Andriamanantenasoa tried to pinpoint where in University culture that divide lies. He said that the predominant ethos on campus emphasizes “seeming and appearing” over actually “being” something. Notions of belonging and membership are especially strong, he said, and dictate many of the decisions students make.

“I know of many queer people who will never come out as long as they are here at Princeton because of their surroundings and social zones they are part of,” he said.

Alison Goldblatt ’12, an LGBT Center peer educator who initially felt nervous about participating in the video, said in an e-mail that social expectations often temper communication between straight and LGBT communities.

“Even if someone is completely supportive and wonderful and relatively knowledgeable about LGBT life on campus, there is no way to be on the same page exactly,” she said.

Goldblatt has first-hand experience with both pages: Her bisexuality means that she is sometimes cut off or objectified by both worlds.

Some males on campus, she said, are “completely turned off” by her bisexuality, which cuts off many opportunities for her to relate to them. She added that she feels “uncomfortable” and sexualized when confronted by males who “think it is hot to see girls making out.”

On the other hand, Goldblatt said that her interactions with straight women are colored by the perception that she cannot understand their feelings for males in the same way. She explained that she also automatically became an outlet for “bi-curious” girls to experiment, which she said was just another form of objectification.

Having a foot in each realm, she said, isolates her from both.

“In a community where non-straight relationships are harder to come by, this can be incredibly emotionally draining and confusing,” she said. “It’s hard to know anyone’s orientation for sure, and it’s hard to know when people see interactions as an experiment or game.”

Coming out

Thornton said she struggled with her sexuality throughout high school. Her life was limited to a conservative neighborhood where she experienced open discrimination, so she became a very “closeted” person.

It was only during her Princeton admission interview that she began to get a taste of the wider world. She discovered that her interviewer was a lesbian, and before the conversation was over, she came out for the very first time.

“She really inspired me to push through the hard times to get to the better times,” Thornton said. “She assured me that wherever you go to college, whatever you do, it does get better.”

Like Thornton, some students come to campus already comfortable with their sexuality. But many wrestle through the long arc of the coming-out process.

Rodrigo Munoz Rogers ’12, who identifies as bisexual, grappled extensively with coming out early in his undergraduate career. Hailing from a conservative, Catholic background in Alabama, said he was “terrified” of the LGBT Center and those who were out.

“As a freshman, I actually drank a lot,” he said. “That was my way of coping with it. I’d go out to the Street and hope that I’d run into another LGBT person who wasn’t out somehow, and I’d hook up with them.”

This cycle of sleeping around wore on his sense of self-worth, he said.

Rogers said the 2008 film “Milk,” about gay-rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, inspired him to be vocal in the LGBT community. In his sophomore year, he decided to apply to be a peer educator at the LGBT Center. Checking the bisexual box on the application was his first external, open acknowledgement of his sexual orientation, he said.

Initially afraid of being seen as “too LGBT,” Rogers is now heavily involved with the center, working as both a peer educator and a Pride Alliance officer.

“I know my place on campus; I know where I’m comfortable,” he said. “I know what kind of people I feel comfortable being around.”

For some, the process of coming out during their four years at Princeton is even more gradual.

During her freshman year, Borges came out to many of her close friends but was not very vocal about her sexuality.

By her junior year, she reached a stage where she would not necessarily bring up her sexuality but would not deny or lie about it if asked.

“There are various stages and shades of being out,” Borges said, adding that she now corrects people when they incorrectly assume she is looking for “Mr. Right” at Princeton.

Borges said she is someone who “doesn’t look particularly gay,” and that she finds herself making these corrections often.

Looking forward

Those involved with the video have said they have received strongly positive responses from both the LGBT and straight communities.

“A lot of people are reacting very positively to it,” Borges said. “That goes to show, for me, how this message of self-love and self-acceptance is ... a universal theme. I am glad that it is resonating with people who aren’t gay.”

Participants said they hope that the video continues to spark conversation around campus and in the larger community. Thornton is currently pushing for the administration to post the video on the University homepage. Meanwhile, other LGBT-oriented video projects are in development.

But before those new ventures come out, Andriamanantenasoa had a comforting maxim for those still in the closet.

“Those who mind don’t matter,” he said. “Those who matter don’t mind.”