At Northwestern, being queer is the new normal.
According to a recent poll conducted by The Daily Northwestern, 44% of undergraduates labeled their sexual orientation in a way that wasn’t “heterosexual or straight.” For many students, having any kind of LGBTQ+ community – especially one that makes up almost half the student body – can be a clear departure from hometown norms.
“I had queer friends back home, but I had never met any openly queer people my age before – and that was really cool,” one second-year biology student Katie Jones* said.
Growing up in a small rural town in Eastern Texas, Jones said she was afraid to come out to her family. She describes her hometown as conservative with strong Southern Baptist values, meaning being openly bisexual wasn’t an option.
“Going on a date with somebody of the same sex back home would have just led to many stares, a lot of talk around town, and would have been quite the scandal,” Jones said.
Jones was surprised to find that coming out to peers at Northwestern didn’t change their perception of her. She partly attributes her comfort here to her engagement with NU’s resources and student groups designed for queer students: studying at the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC) and attending meetings with oSTEM, an LGBTQ+ community group for students studying science, technology, engineering or math.
“It’s just really nice to be in an area where you see other queer people. It makes you feel a lot more normal,” Jones said.
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On a different side of Texas, computer science and psychology major Chris D’Angelo* was discreetly shoving his pride gear into his backpack – his rainbow socks, fan and bracelet – when his mom entered his room to help pack for the flight to Evanston.
D’Angelo, like Jones, hides his queer identity from his conservative parents. But at Northwestern, also like Jones, D’Angelo is unapologetic about his sexuality.
“I typically wear this rainbow rubber band around my wrist at Northwestern, but I take it off when I’m in public in Texas because I just don’t feel safe with it on,” D’Angelo said.
D’Angelo admitted that Fort Worth is “one of the more liberal cities in Texas,” and he considered his high school to be “accepting and diverse.” But feeling safe at home didn’t make high school dating any easier for him.
Before coming to terms with being gay, D’Angelo’s freshman year “situationship” was with a guy who became a self-proclaimed “homophobe.” Afterwards, he dated his best friend who later came out as a lesbian. Coming to Northwestern, D’Angelo felt “behind” in his dating experience with gay men, but he has since accepted his own path in finding a relationship.
“I realized I shouldn’t compare myself to other people’s dating journeys. I will find someone when I find them,” D’Angelo said.
D’Angelo has used apps like Tinder and Hinge to find a partner, but he’s rejected using the popular gay dating platform Grindr. He said he’s worried about exploring hookup culture: the danger that may come with meeting with a complete stranger on the app, the potential transmission of an STI and discomfort about not having monogamy. D’Angelo said that many of his gay friends at Northwestern have had same-day hookups on the app, some who hooked up with people much older than them. He believes that these actions could come from a place of suppressed sexual and emotional desire.
“If you’re a gay man and you didn’t have experiences with men in high school, and you come into college, you have a lot more liberty to do what you want, and you can give into your impulsivity,” D’Angelo said.
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Bryden Behrens, a fourth-year political science student, agrees with D’Angelo about Northwestern’s hookup culture. He went to Loyola University Chicago– just a ride away on the Red Line – before transferring to Northwestern in fall 2022.
“Hookup culture is very prevalent here. I always hear about, you know, ‘this person has hooked up with X, Y, and Z person, right?’,” Behrens said.
Like Jones and D’Angelo, Behrens said he’s out of the closet and navigating dating for the first time in college – meaning he’s processing feelings differently than his straight peers.
“I’m experiencing that high school intensity of crushes now: those butterflies that you get. I’ve never experienced those before — because I didn’t allow myself to.”
Behrens is from Ballwin, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. He has been on an ongoing journey of understanding and accepting his queer identity and the LGBTQ+ community at large, especially the gay community’s sometimes exclusionary beauty standards.
“There’s lots of closed-mindedness that comes with living where I lived, and I didn’t really feel safe or accepted — not only at school, but also just within family,” Behrens said. “So those two things created the perfect storm for just sinking in and not living my authentic life.”
Behrens recalls a time when his family members shunned his cousin for being gay at a Christmas party. His other cousins left the room screaming and sent out an email to his family saying that “the devil showed his face,” pleading that certain people needed to “repent and consider the paths they’re choosing to go forward in.”
“I think there comes a point when you realize… you’re kind of a monster or an imposter among them that they have no idea, and you have to kind of come to terms with that,” Behrens said.
Other trauma and anxiety at home and in school, among other factors, created some challenges with body image for Behrens. He developed a binge eating disorder in high school. Looking at the gay scene at NU, he believes that today’s beauty standards are extremely limiting in what’s considered the most attractive among gay men, with the spectrum ranging from “extremely short and skinny” to being “completely jacked and ripped.” Behrens said this mentality makes it difficult for people to accept themselves who fall in the middle of the spectrum.
“There’s two layers of self-acceptance here. It’s like, one, you’re okay with being gay. Two, you’re okay with having like a ‘non-traditional’ gay body type,” Behrens said.
Even though the road’s been tough, Behrens has gone on to accept himself through the help of his queer friends on campus. He said it’s comforting to have people towho you can relate to — whether it’s needing a friend to confide in about serious issues or for “dancing the night away” in Boystown. Behrens said that he’s felt comfortable in the classroom too, thanks to the professors who’ve spoken about queer stories openly or simply taken the time to stress that their classroom is a “safe space” on the syllabus.
Although Behrens, Jones, and D’Angelo come from different backgrounds and share varying perspectives about being LGBTQ+ on campus, they all concur that Northwestern has enabled them to feel more secure in their identity.
“I think I’ve grown so much in the past two years, not only academically, but also just like being comfortable in my own skin,” Behrens said. “That’s the direct product of the people that are here walking among us: the admitted students, the faculty, the resources on campus, and they’re really trying to make it a great place for queer people.”
*this person used a pseudonym for privacy/safety reasons
cover image by joss broward
