A tough week for the LGBTQ+ community on campus

Last week was tough.

It's Pride month so, naturally, announcements for Pride events are filling our email inboxes. Last Tuesday, one of those announcements was for a fundraising event for The Trevor Project, a crisis hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.

This proved to be the final straw for one staff member in our college, a fundamentalist Christian who, apparently, has a side gig as a local pastor.  Feeling that Pride events represent the downfall of American society, he chose to respond to the original announcement with a diatribe about LGBTQ+ individuals being perverts and, curiously enough, about abortion, which, as far as I can tell, had absolutely nothing to do with anything but was just thrown in for good measure.

I'm no stranger to the clobber passages of the Bible or to fundamentalists spouting nonsense about perverts. Indeed, as part of my dissertation work, I read every published sermon by Fred Phelps, of Westboro Baptist infamy.  By comparison, this staff member's rant barely registered.  If he really wanted to insult the LGBTQ+ community, I could give him some pointers!

The pretense for his attack was that he wanted to be removed from the listserv.  This was the springboard for his tirade.  Now, the student has no control over the listserv.  Even if he did, there was no need for the tirade.  What upset me, then, was not the tirade itself so much as the fact that this individual went out of his way to deliberately attack a vulnerable member of our college.  Believe what you want, but that's a line you do not cross.

Oh, did I mention that his rant made it out to the entire listserv?

Now, some background.  I didn't come out of the closet until I was 48 years old.

Pathetic, I know, but I had my excuses.  I was born into far more homophobic times.  Positive queer representation wasn't a thing in the world I grew up in.  Quite the opposite.  Being part of the LGBTQ+ community was dangerous, at first socially, though that could become deadly enough, but then came the AIDS epidemic.  Just as I was coming of age.

And, of course, that epidemic was still raging when I first stepped foot on the campus of my alma mater, where I now work, in 1989, a mere five years after Gay Student Services v. Texas A&M University had been settled by the Supreme Court, though I knew nothing of those events at the time. It wouldn't have mattered if I did. Institutions are slow to change. The university may have lost its fight to exclude LGBTQ+ student organizations from campus, but that didn't mean that rainbows were exactly springing from campus grounds.

There was, however, one rainbow I remember. A small flag hung in a window of the YMCA building. I'll never know who flew that banner, just as I'm sure they'll never know how it unsettled my sense of my own sexuality each time I walked by, or the kernel of hope it planted that someday I might understand myself, that someday it might be safe to be authentically me.

Banal now, of course, but deeply subversive at the time.  Unsafe.  Don't stare as you walk by that flag. Don't smile. Someone might see.  Someone might notice.  Such was most of my experience of how the world treated LGBTQ+ people.

Fast forward, then to 2016.  A homecoming after eight years of graduate school to get my Ph.D.  Still in the closet, but surrounded by offices all proudly proclaiming allyship with the LGBTQ+ community, with plenty of those same offices sporting rainbows.  

It's impossible to put into words just what that meant, but the ground shifted and it was finally safe to come out, first to myself, then to the world.

Last week, it felt like the ground was shifting again, sliding back to the days when I first came to this university.  But not on my watch.  Not without a fight.