Inside the secret gay movement at one of America’s most homophobic colleges
http://fusion.net/story/258951/wheaton-college-secret-lgbt-movement/
Five people are watching TV on a laptop on a tepid winter Thursday night in a cozy red house, in an unremarkable suburb 30 miles west of Chicago. This scene would be totally banal except that all five are gay, and that would be probably ho-hum, too, except all five are connected to a place where the mere fact of their sexualities causes enough of a stir to make said scene not only unusual, but controversial.
All five are students and alums of Wheaton College, one of the most prominent evangelical schools in the country—and therefore routinely named one of the least LGBT-friendly colleges in the U.S. by Princeton Review. This is a place that hosts lectures by “converted” straight people, a place that proudly boasts the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism, named for the famous evangelical Christian and Wheaton alum who was passionately anti-gay.
The room is a clash of pride and internal conflict, out-loud activism and secrecy. This weekly gathering, hosted in the house of an alum named Lora Wiens, is not exactly clandestine, but it’s not advertised, either; most people find out about it through friends of friends. Wiens, who owns this house with her partner, tells me the kids gathered there that night face more risk than they realize by being openly gay on campus. Wiens’ wife won’t let me use her name in this story out of fear she’d be fired from her job. Most of the college students want pseudonyms, too.
Yet these kids also appear prouder, more confident, and more willing to talk about their sexuality than than most gay people I know in New York City. They definitely seem surer of themselves than I was at their age, and I went to Hampshire College, one of the most queer-friendly, hippy-dippy places in the nation. Maybe that’s what happens when you’ve been forced to question yourself year after year. You come to a decision: You either hide, or you boldly proclaim who you are and project confidence, even if you don’t always feel it.
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