Gay at Yale: inside the 'out' game

It's about 11:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, and there's a sizable crowd at Gay Night in BAR. The Front Room is all lounge-hip—subdued couples on couches gesturing with cigarettes, a cluster of guys slouching over a pool table. Walk past them to the Back Room and there's a different scene—heavy beats, flashing lights, a full floor of dancers. There's an enormous tanned man in just a G-string swaying on a platform and another one standing on top of the bar, a towel wrapped (precariously) around his waist. I see a transvestite in a white lace bodysuit knock into a girl with dredlocks and sunglasses. They turn to each other and apologize.

Among the assorted throng, though, there is a noticeable absence. Scanning the crowd, I recognize almost no Yale students.

"Undergrads? No, I don't see that many tonight," Eric, the bartender in the Front Room, says. "There's some that come out sometimes, but mostly these are grad students and out-of-towners."

Finally I find one girl, a senior. "It's my first time here," she says. She's with some of her friends, both gay and straight. "I think it's fun, all going crazy on the dance floor." But, she wants me to know, she's not gay. "I happen to be dating a woman right now, but this is my first time in a relationship like this, and I don't consider myself a lesbian."

Then there is a non-Yalie named Carlos leaning next to me on the bar. He's 25 and has lived in New Haven for several years. "There used to be a huge gay scene around here when I first came," he sighs. Now, he feels, it's dwindled considerably. "People just don't go out anymore," he says.

Granted, a weeknight glimpse into one club—especially one with a tendency to cater to an older crowd—does not justify leaping to any conclusions about undergraduate life at Yale. Nevertheless, it is true that there is a quietness and reserve in the queer community of late—not only in its purely social aspect but also in more formal campus organizations and even in the realm of academia.

The quiet, however, is the kind that exists on the verge of something new. At this moment, small transformations are occuring in the gay community and the organizations that work to support it.

FOR A MAJORITY OF STUDENTS, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,Trans-gender Cooperative (LGBT Co-op) is the face of the queer establishment. Besides overseeing related organizations around campus, it is also responsible for a series of highly visible events throughout the year. There are the well-attended dances; there is National Coming Out Day in mid-October; there is Pride Week in late spring.

Though the Co-op has served as a unified campus voice, no one pretends that it can represent all queer students. "Since there are so many queer people with so many different experiences and opinions, there's no way in hell we're ever going to get all of them under one roof, even if it is for a dance," Maya Gideon, MC '02, a coordinator for the Co-op, said.

There is a feeling that some queer students avoid being associated with the Co-op because they see it as limiting or unsuited to their identity. "I think there's a sense that, for people who are heavily involved in those sorts of things, that's the biggest part of their identity. And for most people here, that isn't the case," Drew Guenzer, DC '02, said.

Indeed, recent years have seen a dwindling participation in the Co-op. There are still discussion groups that meet each week, as well as a newsletter announcing lectures and events, but "not many people are actively involved or come to meetings," Gideon said.

"A lot of people show up at the first one," Ethan Guillen, BK '02, remarked. "You want to see who's come out since the summer, to see the fresh meat. But after that, people stop going." Last year, the effect of this was particularly severe: following some months of organizational difficulties, Pride Week, traditionally the Co-op's biggest and most unifying event, didn't happen at all.

The faltering numbers point to something larger about Yale and even the world outside it: gay issues no longer divide people with the same fervor they used to, and as a result, there is a measured apathy in the community. "The level of acceptance [for homosexuality] has risen to a point where it no longer polarizes everyone who's queer to seek out other queer people for support," Guenzer said.

Mickey Dobbs, TC '92, the current chair of the Gay and Lesbian Alumni Association agreed that the atmosphere now is less charged. "The overall gay community was much more political...during my time at Yale," he remarked.

EVEN ASIDE FROM THE FALLING OFF OF
institutional cohesion, there is a growing sense of dispersal about the queer experience. The nature of sexuality is always intensely private, individual, and nebulous, and at Yale, this seems to be more and more the case.

For some, there's nothing wrong with this. "There's no reason that a bunch of gay guys need to hang out together and be gay," Dan*, a junior, said. "It's like if you're, say, East Asian. You don't need to sit around with other East Asians if you don't want to." The comparison to ethnicity is worthwhile, but it doesn't take into account the fact that there are hugely varying degrees of sexuality—or that people can choose the degree to which they will be open about their sexuality.

This seems to have created a certain world of ambiguity—of experimentation and half-closets and conjecturing. "There's speculation about who's gay on campus, in all quarters, all the time," Jeremy* said. He jokes about "gaydar"—how he has developed an astuteness in detecting other gay men. "I can always tell when other men are going from `closet' gay to `out' gay," he said. "It's the moment when you realize that they're doing the little things that you did as you came to terms with it yourself. You know—wearing a lot of black and gray, and certain mannerisms." He mentioned that trying to retain secrecy makes for a lot of maneuvering. "I once got this e-mail from someone who'd set up a Yahoo! account separate from his Yale e-mail account. It said, `I noticed that our eyes met in the dining hall. They should meet again.' That's a fairly typical thing to do here, that's the screwed-up Yaleness of it."

Jeremy doesn't see this as a harmful thing. "It's nice that people don't feel the need to announce themselves all the time," he said. Guenzer agreed. "I think it's good, because people who would have stayed closeted for probably their whole lives are finding a space where they can try things out."

The feeling, it seems, is that the scandal about being "outed" is not so much a big deal anymore. "When you find out that a guy you didn't know was gay hooked up with another guy, it's not so shocking. You just say, `Ohh.' It's a sign of the normalization of it all."

The current FLAGS office will soon be moved to a more central campus location as part of the Larry Kramer initiative for Gay and Lesbian Studies

BUT THE ATTITUDE IS NOT universal, and some people aren't ready for this new casualness. "People don't realize how fucking traumatic coming out still is," Guillen said, adding that it is especially difficult for people coming from very different backgrounds.

"Some people who've come from a less accepting region or socioeconomic class or ethnicity have a hard time around people who come here and have been out since high school, or at least known people who've been out," Ryan*, a junior, said. He added that Yale's ultra-liberal campus no longer seems as sympathetic about the coming-out process. "People here are so accepting that they're insensitive. They're kind of flippant about it. `Why aren't you out already?' is their attitude."

In some ways, organizations like the Co-op are picking up on these issues. This year's Pride Week has been entirely revamped to include events that address some overlooked aspects of sexuality, a far cry from the Co-op's "near-death experience last year," as Kathleen Eddy, JE '02, a former coordinator, put it. Besides an impressive slew of activists, playwrights, scholars, as well as S&M and drag workshops, there are panels on being "Out in Athletics" and discussions about "Creating a Queer-Friendly Asian-America." Laura Horak, CC '03, the coordinator for Pride Week, said that it is a distinct effort to be as inclusive as possible. "Our definite aim is to include as many different groups as we can," she said, "because every time you ignore a group, from athletes to the trans movement, you're setting up a dangerous trend."

And new organizations forming under the Co-op, such as the Queer-Straight Alliance (QSA), demonstrate a new attitude. It was founded in 1999 "so that straight people could get involved in sexuality," Casey Pitts, BK '03, one of the coordinators, explained. QSA is a mostly politically minded organization that tries to deal with homophobia; its activities include going to high schools in the region to offer panels and lectures about homophobia and intolerance. Also, among its members, it avoids talking about individual sexuality. "If someone brings it up, fine. And sometimes you just start to know, through conversation. But nobody is forced to identify. We try to keep it ambiguous," Pitts said.

RUNNING PARALLEL TO THESE EMERGING PROgrams are changes in Yale's undergraduate curriculum. Only a few years ago, there was steady pressure on the University to create a Gay and Lesbian Studies department. The topic became especially heated in the fall of 1997, when Yale declined an offer from alumnus Larry Kramer, BR '57, the famed gay rights activist, to endow a permanent professorship for the department. At the time, the Administration cited several reasons for its decision. First was its general reluctance to expand the size of faculty (administrative policy always resists creating new faculty positions without cutting positions in other departments); second, it thought the permanence and specificity of an endowed chair conflicted with the relative newness and variability of the Gay and Lesbian Studies field.

The uproar over the events eventually subsided. But the issue never fully receded, mostly because a 14-person faculty committee, called the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies (FLAGS), has continually worked towards keeping it an issue. From a small office sandwiched between some computer labs in the basement of the Department of Music, it has garnered alumni donations for its cause, created a lecture and film series, funded research, and published the Pink Book, a collection of classes from various departments that cover gay and lesbian studies. Every year, it also brings visiting professors to campus to teach Gay and Lesbian Studies classes.

And, in fact, FLAGS and the Provost's Office recently renewed negotiations with Kramer. "We met with Kramer about a year ago," Deputy Provost Charles Long explained. "We basically agreed back then on an outline of what we wanted to do. We've been working out the details since." That "outline," now called the Larry Kramer Initiative for Gay and Lesbian Studies, aims to sponsor visiting professors—and, as Kramer stipulated, to fund a more prominent space on campus for the new program.

To accommodate Kramer, the Provost's office has allotted FLAGS and the new program interim space near central campus, with the promise of a permanent location in the future. "I am hopeful that this will come to fruition in the near future," Richard said, "and I am extremely grateful to Mr.Kramer for his generosity, and also for his vision, persistence, and patience." They are looking to have the center in operation by September.

BUT AS THE ADMINISTRATION AND STUDENT
organizations pursue separate agendas, there is a sense that not much cooperation exists between the two. "There are still a lot of things that I'd like to see done," Horak said about administrative support. "The Administration is patently unhelpful—or at least helpful in name but not in deed." She suggested a freshman counselor program to address queer issues, or having a better-located, better-staffed student center, as do most other Ivy League schools.

The current center consists of, as Gideon said, "two tiny rooms in the back of a building on Crown Street that no one knows about." Eddy, the former Co-op coordinator, also takes issue with the center as it currently exists. "I know space is at a premium," she said, "but when you start talking about the politics of geography, you can read this as a sign of the Administration's hesitation to help demarginalize queer students."

Long, for his part, admitted that the Administration places a priority on developing academics before building a social center. But, he said, "if we get this program working in this new space and people start dropping in, it will probably become a de facto gathering place."

Of course, this points to the main dilemma in any discussion of a queer community. Not all queer people are willing to acknowledge they are queer; not all who acknowledge they are queer will be active in the Co-op; not all who would drop in on a social center will take classes in Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Still, there is a feeling that, on all levels, Yale is adapting. "Look, I couldn't think of a better place to be gay in the world," Guillen said. It's a sentiment echoed by many. Jeremy even wonders how his experience will translate into the real world. "It's slightly intimidating to think of what will happen to some people when they have to leave here. There's so many different scenes here that you can explore at your own level of comfort," he said. "Depending on where you go afterwards, you're not going to have that." *Names have been changed at the request of students.

Graphic by Shawn Cheng. Photos by Erin I. Lewis.

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