Music senior Jeff Quinto came out when he was a senior in an all-male Catholic high school – and he says it’s one of the best things that could have happened to him.He looks around Northwestern now and is embarrassed to see people who came out in college and are still adjusting to their new lifestyle on a campus with a very visible gay community. “They just go ape shit,” Quinto says. “They say, ‘Woohoo, I’m gay! And there are other gay men here!'”

Although Quinto rolls his eyes at his less experienced peers’ behavior, he says it’s important to develop a strong gay community to make it easier for students to explore their sexual identity.

And the fact that NU’s two largest gay groups — the theater community and the Bisexual Gay and Lesbian Alliance — have a history of not working together has weakened the community and the support network it provides.

“One thing that’s sad is that (the gay population) is very disjointed — BGALA just doesn’t hang out with theater. We’re family, a little community support would be nice,” Quinto says. “Gay is the last thing that’s okay to make fun of. If you call someone a faggot, that’s okay, people will laugh. That’s why the need for community is still there, because we are so vulnerable to attacks still.”

Community leaders have begun trying to narrow the divide between BGALA and student theater, and in the process promote gay issues across campus.

a Community divided

Speech senior Matt Amador, a theater major, used to work with BGALA, but a lack of time and problems with the group’s focus made him decide to step away from the group — a move he says almost all theater students make.

“I can’t think of a single theater major involved in BGALA,” he says.

Amador says the group’s focus was often too narrow to offer all the services to students he thought it should. “You should be able to get out what you want to get out of it,” he says. “Lots of people want it to be for one specific thing: Some need support, some need to be proactive. But sometimes the group gets sidetracked and its focus gets locked onto one thing.”

Amador’s perspective is slightly outdated — the two co-presidents are sophomores majoring in theater — but it stems from a rift that developed a few years ago between the groups over how political the group should be.

BGALA Co-President Conci Nelson says many gay students didn’t agree with the group’s activist reputation. “Some felt BGALA was too political, it alienated them from the group,” she says. “Some kinda stuck to theater, others stuck to BGALA. I definitely saw that rift last year.”

BGALA’s original incarnation — the Gay Liberation Front, founded 30 years ago — was an activist group, but when the group changed its name in 1991 to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, it coincided with a shift in focus toward the group’s current cultural and social issues.

Nelson says the the group still fluctuates from activist to cultural, depending on the leader and the atmosphere of acceptance on campus. Now, Nelson and fellow Co-President Laura Blacksher are trying to swing the group back to being a cultural group.

They believe the activist reputation BGALA sometimes garnered weakened the groups’ real reason for existing — providing support for gay, lesbian and transgendered students and enlightening others on campus about gay issues.

Need for support

Although many gay and lesbian students come out while they’re in college, not everyone agrees that Northwestern offers a gay-friendly climate. Weinberg Asst. Dean and history lecturer Lane Fenrich says his students often complain of a “casual homophobia on campus,” but they don’t have the benefit of seeing things from the perspective Fenrich had going to a religious college in the early 1980s.

“My students report quite a bit of discomfort, … but that’s just their perception,” he says. “It’s so much more tolerant now than 20 years ago that I hardly see it. There are visible groups, gay faculty members and classes. … People don’t have to fumble around to talk to somebody (about their sexual identity).”

Amador came out in high school, and he says the experiences of people who come out while still at home are completely different from those of people who wait until they’re away from their family because they lack family support.

He says most gay people on campus aren’t comfortable with their sexual identity and overcompensate by being outspoken about their preference. “People lie and say (they’re comfortable), but I don’t think (they are) at all. Some people pretend to be, lots of people are very outwardly flamboyant. They do so for shock value, to get attention, so they project a confidence with themselves hoping they may be that comfortable some day. It’s a whole psychology thing.”

Both BGALA leaders and members of the theater community say it’s important to have communities to act as built-in support networks, and for those communities to be visible.

“It allows a lot of people to know that there’s somebody out there that understands and will listen to whatever you’re going to say about your sexual identity,” Nelson says.

There are about 700 gay and lesbian students at Northwestern, based on a generally accepted formula that one in 10 college or high school students are gay, Nelson says, but not all of them look for support from BGALA or the theater community.

Although the theater community isn’t exclusive to theater students — many find their way in through a friend or roommate or affiliation with a theater-oriented student group like Arts Alliance — it still comprises mostly theater majors who spend much of their time together in similar classes or working together in plays.

And BGALA leaders say its membership is limited to about 300 because some feel alienated by the group’s history as an activist group, and others simply aren’t comfortable enough with their sexual identity to be associated with a gay student group.

Weinberg junior Joel Richlin, who’s a co-publicity chairman for BGALA and the Associated Student Government senator for Arts Alliance, says that although the two communities provide support, he doesn’t think gay and lesbian students would be lost without the support network. “I definitely think the gay population on campus would be fine without any help from anybody,” he says. “It might be easier if you’re in theater and a higher percent of people are gay, or you’re in BGALA and 90 percent of the people in the room are gay. But there are plenty of very popular — if not infamous — gay men on campus who aren’t involved in either.”

Acting out a role

The theater community provides a strong support base because of the extended periods of time students have to spend with each other in class and performing and producing plays, Amador says.

When they’re not on stage, theater students do the same things everybody else does, he says. “We hang out, party, study if you have a class that requires studying,” he says. “Partying in particular, because we have fundraiser parties to raise money to fund productions, and word of mouth gets out largely to student theater companies. So we see each other in classes, and we see each other at same parties, too.”

Quinto, who is involved with theater as a musician in some productions, says no matter where he is he always sees the same theater people. “It’s like the Tupac (Shakur) song, ‘Everywhere I go I see the same hoes,'” he says. “Hoes translates into both guys and girls, and I don’t mean it in a derogatory way, but every party I go to, I see the same hoes.”

Although there aren’t any numbers illustrating how many people in theater are gay, people in the community say the community is more visible than others on campus. Amador says that can be attributed to the vagaries of being a theater major.

“The major itself is about expression of self, it allows one to be more open than in a math class, where you’re doing something in a book,” he says.

Although the community’s tightness comes from the amount of time they spend together in class and on stage, it
‘s not an exclusive group. Non-majors who are involved in student theater groups — or just have friends or roommates who are majors — include themselves in the community, as well. Richlin, an economics major, says his work with Arts Alliance has made him “a pretty involved outsider.”

And Blacksher, who works on the technical aspects of plays, says the community is very broad. “It’s not like there’s an in-group of theater people that does everything,” she says.

Quinto sees it differently. He says that most theater students he knows are so caught up in their major they isolate themselves from the rest of campus. “They’re not really aware of anything else besides theater,” he says. “They shield themselves from a lot of things. The theater profession calls for them to be focused and dedicated, but some people I know don’t see the world outside of it.”

Focusing on culture

Despite the benefits it provides, BGALA soon could cease to exist. In its place might come … Mansplash?

The group is looking for a new name, and its Web site lists a number of different choices, including GLOW (Gay Lesbian or Whatever), Q&A (Queer and Alliance) and Rainbow Alliance. (Mansplash was the most popular choice on the list about two weeks ago but was removed, ostensibly because exec board members couldn’t fathom it being chosen.)

The name change is coming at the same time that Co-Presidents Nelson and Blacksher are trying to cement the group’s reputation as that of a cultural group.

“Whenever you’re happy, there’s more of a call for a social and cultural group than an activist group,” Nelson says. “We don’t want to alienate people who don’t want to be activists but want to be in a gay community.”

Fenrich says the faculty version of BGALA, the Gay and Lesbian University Union underwent the same transformation. GLUU also started off as an activist group that made many advancements, including adding gay partners to the university’s benefit package. But as less issues were left to fight over, the group transformed into more of a social club.

Nelson says the shift in BGALA’s focus hasn’t pacified the group. Like For Members Only, Alianza or any other cultural group on campus, BGALA members will become political when an issue arises that affects them.

“There are things we want to stand up for, rights we want, things we want pointed out,” she says.

The group also is trying to raise visibility of gay issues on campus and point out how gay issues can affect people involved in other campus communities, Blacksher says. The group worked with College Republicans during Spring Quarter to bring former Congressman Steve Gunderson, to speak on campus. And BGALA also brought Mandy Carter, a black lesbian activist, in May to talk about how issues of sexuality, gender and race are interrelated.

Part of the reason for bringing a diverse array of speakers is that members want to improve diversity within the group. “A lot of people feel pushed aside because historically BGALA has been a gay white group, and that alienates people of other ethnicities who want to get involved,” Nelson says.

In addition to ethnic diversity, the group also is looking to add to the academic diversity within the group. Leaders say its important that students with a variety of majors join, so a lot of different ideas can enter the discussions they have.

“Without diversity, our group can’t really spread out over campus at all,” Blacksher says. “The more diverse our membership is, the more diverse perspectives we get, the more we know what the student body wants, so we can make our programs apply to more of campus.”

That includes bringing the theater majors back into the mix. Although Nelson says she’s wary of BGALA becoming a “quasi-student theater group,” having more theater majors in the group can only improve attendance at both theater and BGALA events, which means more money for both groups.

Increased funding is important to BGALA leaders because it means better programming, which would help them reach out to a broader section of campus and make people who aren’t involved with the gay community aware of gay issues.

Fenrich says one of the more interesting things he’s noticed in teaching a gay and lesbian history course has been watching straight students take the class. “It’s one of the most interesting, intellectually exciting areas of historical study,” he says.

Discussing gay issues can be therapeutic for straight students as well, Nelson says.

“Talking about sexual identity can be the same if you’re talking about heterosexuality (or homosexuality),” Nelson says. “Talking about a person loving another person then breaking up, the feelings are the same and the emotions are the same whether it’s a man and a woman or two men. It’s empowering to understand that, but you don’t believe it until you start listening.” nyou