Arts & Entertainment
How Do You Know on Campus?
Out and About Campus
How Do You Know on Campus?
Review by Zach Wyman
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You’ve just arrived with a car stuffed with CDs, new sheets, and clothes that won’t see a washing machine until Christmas break. This is no campus visit, you realize; this is entering what is to be your home for the next four years. You’d better acclimate yourself right now. And don’t forget: these will be the best years of your life.
How do you know you are gay? How do you know when to come out? How do you know...? The list of questions seems endless when you’re in college. If you know you’re gay, you still have to know how to come out and who you can trust. College is all about testing the water around you and experimenting with new ways of living until you find what fits you individually.
Some lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning college students may have been completely out in high school. Some may have locked themselves so far into closets that they’ve forgotten where they placed the keys. No matter who you are or where you’re from, you will inevitably ask the question posed in the introduction to Out & About Campus: “How do you know?”
Editors Annie Stevens and Kim Howard, a couple working and studying at the University of Vermont, wanted personal accounts by GLBT college students from regions across the United States for this project. They wanted a collection that speaks to students in a diversity of campus environments, with stories featuring perspectives from and about different segments of campus life. According to Stevens and Howard, this is for students who are questioning, in the closet, coming out, or starting to transition.
The first story begins with a University of California Berkeley student entering the world of higher education, facing his future as a gay student, and appropriately ends with Suman Chakraborty of Princeton University in New Jersey thanking college for giving him the resources to come out. Along the way, a student from Ohio, Ian Fried, speaks about realizing he was a cross-dresser and still straight. Terry Dublinski, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describes how he overcame his own fears to design his own Queer Studies major. Even though he is still confused about his sexuality, Cory Liebmann appreciates his ability to freely think for himself, only after attending bible college in North Dakota.
Several of the students chronicled are also members of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. Out & About Campus provides a more appropriate balance among accounts of LGBTQ students than most queer literature in a similar category, giving adequate attention to issues facing a wider range of identity represented by that acronym. It is a must-read for college students of all ages, or for those reminiscing on their undergraduate studies; whether you’re already out or not, it should easily engage you.
As you get to know all 28 people, you come to realize that everyone is at a different step in the coming-out process. The questions that you start with continue to resurface as you get to know each person individually. And your own questions echo the ones that started the entire journey. How do you know when to tell them? How do you know when you’re dealing with safe people? How do you know...?
Zach Wyman is a Middlebury College student.
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Out & About Campus Edited by Kim Howard & Annie StevensAlyson Books |
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Mark Your Calendar! Out & About Campus October 12 7 - 8 pm Kim Howard & Annie Stevens will sign and discuss their book at the Peace and Justice Store Church Street Burlington |