Swarthmore College Bulletin (June 1998) - ITS

A personal account of coming out at Swarthmore.It is March 1998, and I am sitting in a building onthe Swarthmore campus—the Lang PerformingArts Center—that didn’t exist when I was here inthe 1980s. I am back for the first time in 13 years,invited to speak at the Sager Symposium’s 10thanniversary—an event that didn’t exist when I washere—about coming out at Swarthmore.I scan the room and note that the students todaylook not so different from the way we looked, exceptfor the trend toward shaven heads and nose rings. Butsitting in front of me is something I never experiencedat Swarthmore. It is a son sitting next to his father—unmistakably related by the same bend of theneck, sweep of the hair, tilt of the head. It is Parents’Weekend, and this father has accompaniedhis son to a seminar on being queerat Swarthmore. I wonder if my fatherwould have come to such a lecture whenI was a freshman, had anything likethis even occurred 17 years ago.In the years since I left college,lesbians and gays have been onthe cover of News-week; havehad a popular televisionshow; have died of AIDSand started a nationalhealth campaigntopreventtheHomeistheSpiritBy Laura Markowitz ’85spread of HIV; have been addressed by a sitting president;and have come out in every walk of life, includingthe foreign service, military, academia, and entertainmentindustry. Some of the queer students at Swarthmoretoday were “out” for more than five years beforethey came to college; are already mentors for otherqueer youth; went to their high school proms withsame-sex partners; speak easily about parents, brothers,and sisters who are queer. Swarthmore has thenewly endowed James C. Hormel Professorship inSocial Justice, thanks to James Hormel ’55, a gay manwho serves on the College’s Board of Managers. [Seepage 43 for more on Hormel.]Swarthmore also has the longest-standing queersymposium on any college campus, ever, anywhere.What’s clear to me, as I survey the crowd at the 10thanniversarySager Symposium, is that queers have“arrived” at Swarthmore.Icame out for good in 1984, during my junior year ofcollege. A close friend who came out around thesame time I did recently remarked on how beinggay means spending your entire life coming out. “It’s aprocess that never ends,” he said. “You make newfriends, change jobs, move house, meet family membersand all of these events typically require us tocome out anew. I think how you come out changes,how you feel about coming out changes, your desire tocome out or not changes with time.”I had started to come out on my first day of college,to a new friend I met in the hallways of Willets—inthose days the rowdy, party dorm for freshmen. Thisnew friend and I went for a walk and tried to analyzewhat faux pas we had made on our housing form to beassigned to Willets. Eventually, we talked about ourhigh school boyfriends and then she said she thoughtshe might be a lesbian, and I said out loud, for the firsttime, “I know I am.”I was astonished at myself for having said outloud what had been terrifying to acknowledge tomyself. I was 17, and I had nowhere to put this informationabout myself. The fact was, I had neverknown an “out” lesbian before. I wasn’t sure what itmeant to be one, apart from the obvious attractionto women. But I did know it wasn’t safeto be out. In this, my experience as ayoung lesbian was much the same as itis for queer youth today. A recent surveyof 2,000 gay, lesbian, and bisexualyouth ages 10 to 25 shows thatmost take three years to come outto someone else.SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BULLETIN