By Jen WiecznerThe Daily Northwestern

Kristin Maun watched the rumors spread. She saw one person turn to the next and the next in a game of telephone, and she knew they were talking about her.

Ever since she realized in sixth grade in her Catholic school’s locker room in Tulsa, Okla., that she had a crush on another girl, she noticed the way people looked at her. She was wary of disapproval.

But she didn’t expect disapproval years later from a room full of people who also were gay. As part of Rainbow Alliance, they were supposed to be a support network for Northwestern’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students.

After a bad breakup and a fight that ended her friendship with her lesbian roommate, Maun needed support. But the roommate was in Rainbow Alliance, so the rumors swirled.

“It became a situation of me or her,” said Maun, a Medill junior. “It wasn’t a safe space. I realized there were more people there who would hurt me than there were those willing to help me.”

Maun found herself distanced from a community where she hoped to find support, an experience many NU lesbians said they share. NU’s open nature allows many gay students to be themselves, they said. But the abysmally small number of women who date women makes the lesbian social scene cloistered. Some said their options for dating, friendship, support and activism are so dramatically reduced that they have to leave campus to find them.

The number of LGBT students is hard to quantify. Doris Dirks, Rainbow Alliance adviser and coordinator for the LGBT resource center, said there is no survey on the topic because many people aren’t comfortable identifying themselves as gay.

Leaders in the lesbian community estimate they know about 30 other “girls that like girls,” including bisexuals, lesbians and others. On Facebook.com, there are 64 NU undergraduate women who identify themselves as interested in women, compared with 134 men interested in men.

And among even these small ranks there are cliques, much like the ones that fragment most student groups and the campus at large. The same separation that divides North and South campuses and athletes from theatre majors also divides a group that, many of its members said, should be supporting each other.

“There are different groups of lesbians that are friends that don’t interact that much with other groups of lesbians who are friends,” said Rainbow Alliance co-president Leslie Gittings, a McCormick senior. “If you have a group of theatre lesbians, they might never meet a group of journalism lesbians.”

‘we’re very different’

By some standards, NU is a pretty good place to be gay. It ranked in the top 100 gay-friendly campuses in The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, published by the Advocate national gay and lesbian newsmagazine in August. On a 20-point scale, NU scored 17, losing points for not training campus police to be LGBT sensitive and for not offering LGBT-themed housing or student scholarships.

Many lesbians said they couldn’t remember hearing homophobic slurs from anyone here who was sober. Maun, who didn’t know other lesbians growing up, has found a place here to celebrate her sexuality.

“I think sometimes I’m too ‘out’ for my own good,” Maun said. “When people ask, ‘Where did you go last night?’ I say ‘the gay bar’ when I could have just said, ‘the bar.'”

Despite their general acceptance on campus, some lesbians said they can’t find a base of others who share their sexual preference to provide solidarity and support.

“I know lesbians who are friends with each other, but I don’t know if there is some sort of group or anything,” said Weinberg junior Shannon Elkins, who said she has been a “lone ranger lesbo” since age 15. “I don’t know a lot of lesbians. I can probably count them on both my hands.”

According to the Advocate guide, the three academic departments most supportive of LGBT are gender studies, communication studies and theatre. The best “place to check out guys” on campus, the guide says, is musical theater. The best “place to check out ladies” is at “Rainbow bar nights.”

Theatre and music majors might attract a greater number of gay men, but there is no such “lesbian major,” some students said.

“(Gay men) have their communities built into their majors,” said Kelsey Pacha, a SESP junior and co-president of Rainbow Alliance. “With women it’s more spread out – we’re in all different majors.”

Some lesbians said they haven’t found that community in Rainbow Alliance. The group, which is supposed to create a “safe space” where people can share details of their personal lives, is too small and faction-ridden to achieve its mission.

Rainbow Alliance membership is defined by its confidential e-mail list, so even the officers don’t know how many gays and lesbians are in it. The Advocate guide quotes its membership at more than 350, but the group’s leaders said the organization has only about 20 to 30 regular members, more female than male. Within the lesbians in Rainbow Alliance, there are smaller subgroups, Gittings said.

Coming to meetings can be awkward at first, Pacha said.

“Cliques arise out of that sort of discomfort,” she said. “We all have our sexuality in comMonday, but we’re very different.”

Dirks worked as a coordinator for LGBT Student Services at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Mich., where she attended graduate school before coming to NU. She said she also heard complaints of cliques and drama at her alma mater and that it was a “universal thing.”

Students like Maun found the alliance’s divided landscape isolating. When she left, Maun was surprised to find how many lesbian students were not involved with Rainbow Alliance.

“There is very much the cliquey, insular, ‘We are the Rainbow gay,’ and then there’s the rest of us,” she said. “We don’t really have a group.”

But they aren’t bitter about not being involved. She and others haven’t stayed away completely, Maun said. If it weren’t for the alliance’s welcoming leaders, she might still be in the closet, she said.

“We adore it. We think it’s this great wonderful thing, but we’re sad about it because we think it’s capable of so much more.”

LINKED THROUGH ‘THE WEB’

But there is one place at NU where lesbians inside and outside of Rainbow Alliance are grouped together: a map called “the web.” The poster, which looks like a spider web with lines drawn between names of women to signify hookups, is in Maun’s apartment.

Lesbians gossip about it, and the same names of 20 to 30 women everyone claims to know come up repeatedly.

“You could basically connect any lesbian at Northwestern sexually to another lesbian through six or seven steps,” said Maun, who updates the web occasionally. “I won’t date anyone at Northwestern anymore. I realized there was no way, no matter how much I liked a girl, I could date someone whom my friend hadn’t dated.”

Dating limits are even more pronounced within the alliance, where the one common interest is an attraction to the same sex.

“When you have a small number of women who only know those other small number of women, you end up dating your best friend’s ex-girlfriend all the time, it seems,” Gittings said.

And with the dating comes a load of drama. Group leaders said they are resilient to conflict, but some students said members of Rainbow Alliance can no longer be in the same room together.

To avoid this situation, some students joined Spectrum, the equivalent of Rainbow Alliance at DePaul University, about a dozen stops away on the Red Line.

Bethany Minor, a Weinberg junior and former Rainbow Alliance senator, wanted to explore gay nightlife downtown after turning 21, but she also wanted to be a part of an LGBT community. She started going to Spectrum meetings with a friend who didn’t feel comfortable being out at NU and after the meetings went out with group members for dollar-drink night at a Boystown bar.

She said she f
ound a comfort in Spectrum that she didn’t at NU.

“They don’t necessarily try to label you,” Minor said. “When you first go to a Northwestern thing, the first thing they ask you is, ‘Are you gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender?’ If you say that you’re not a lesbian and you’re not gay, then the whole night they’re trying to figure out what you are. At DePaul, they won’t badger you about it after you’ve said, ‘By the way, I’m not really any of those.’ “

IN SEARCH OF A VOICE

NU’s lesbians said they also lack an outlet to advocate.

Getting people to show up to support gay causes is hard, Minor said, especially when the people who support them don’t always want others to know they are gay.

Rainbow Alliance engages in activism, depending on what issues its members care about, Gittings said. Generally, the group aims to increase the visibility of gay students.

That was what about 15 members of Rainbow Alliance were doing at the women’s basketball game against Penn State earlier this month, bearing rainbow flags and signs with pro-gay messages like “Love your lesbians.” Rainbow leaders organized the protest against the Penn State coach’s “no lesbian” policy on her team.

The crowd seemed to respect them. Cheerleaders tied rainbow ribbons in their sneakers, and no one yelled obscenities. But someone in the athletic department made them take down one sign for sportsmanship reasons. He also suggested they take down the lesbians sign after receiving family complaints. They refused.

Some students said they would like to see Rainbow Alliance take this activist approach more often. Elkins said she became “disillusioned” with the alliance when all it did was plan social events. She said she’d like to see more gay speakers, protests and activism for gay marriage rights.

But group leaders said they have other priorities in order to best serve their community.

“I realized that what’s almost more important is the making people feel welcome and that they can be themselves regardless of personal differences,” Pacha said. “There are safe people who will support them on the executive board.”

Minor has gone off campus to make a difference. She interned for the Lesbian Community Cancer Project in Chicago, an organization that educates doctors on equality of care for patients of all sexualities, and she now volunteers there regularly.

FINDING THEIR PLACE

Pacha and other NU women accomplished a feat impossible according to Panhellenic Association rules: They pledged two sororities. Delta Psi Kappa Epsilon does not have a recognized chapter on campus, but some of the 28 members on its Facebook group had sweatshirts and paddles bearing its Greek initials, DYKE.

DYKE existed mostly through get-togethers to watch Showtime’s “The L Word.” The group wanted the same visibility gay men had on campus at a time that Rainbow Alliance was male-dominated, Pacha said.

Some of DYKE’s leaders also were instrumental in Alpha Delta Pi, which some lesbian members referred to as “GayDPi” among each other, said former ADPi member and Weinberg junior Sarah Burgess. The sorority closed its NU chapter at the end of the 2006 school year because of financial and operational difficulties from low membership.

As its senior members graduated, DYKE also shrank. But some lesbians said they have found networks within the mainstream NU community.

Elkins, as far as she knows, is the only lesbian in Kappa Delta. She said her sexuality has never been a problem for selecting roommates or bringing female dates to formal. But being both a self-described “total sorority girl” and gay isn’t easy.

“It’s a really funny double standard,” Elkins said. “I’m feeling more marginalized from the lesbians for being in a house than I am for being a lesbian in a house.”

Though other lesbians call NU a “very segregated campus,” the school provides ways to build networks for all students.

“Northwestern has gay Greek presidents and gay dorm presidents,” Gittings said. “You can be involved with anything and still be out as a gay person. It doesn’t have to be Rainbow, which is awesome.”

Despite her reservations, Maun hasn’t stayed away from Rainbow Alliance completely. And she has formed her own bond with those who have left the group for one reason or another.

“I was lucky to find a lot of lesbians who were either briefly involved or who aren’t,” she said. “They’ve become my community.”

Reach Jen Wieczner at [email protected].