Founding OUT: Creating an Activist LGBT Group
By Ben Kaplan, former Youth & Campus Outreach Program Intern
Watch Ben’s story about why he founded OUT and the impact it has had
Read Ben’s full story
Freshman Year
When people find out where I go to school, the first question out of their mouths is usually a pretty close variation of “how did you end up in Iowa?” Even Iowans – who are usually more surprised than anyone else – don’t understand why I ended up at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The short answer is that both of my parents are from the Midwest. Regardless of my reasoning, however, I soon discovered that Coe was much smaller than my high school and a large percentage of students were from towns smaller than my high school. Suddenly, I knew people with bumper stickers on their pickups that said, “My Other Car is a Tractor” – and they were serious.
I suffered a great deal of culture shock.
I was “out” in high school and even helped to found a Gay-Straight Alliance. But when I came to Coe, I went back into the closet. There were many reasons for this, though in the end none of them turned out to be very good. I was worried about what my roommate would think, what my track and cross country teammates would think, what all these people from towns smaller than my high school would think. Coe has never really had a gay community; there were only a handful of openly LGBT students there during my first semester. To me, the gay people at Coe seemed invisible.
Trying to keep a secret at a small school is claustrophobic, and as my first semester went on I withdrew into myself. I only made a few friends. I spent most of the time in my room not doing much of anything. By the end of that first semester, I had decided to leave Coe.
I didn’t leave Coe just because I was in the closet, although that was ultimately the biggest reason. I left after my first semester for the University of New Mexico to pursue Architecture (the other big reason I left). UNM could not have been more different than Coe. UNM was thirty times larger than Coe and felt impersonal compared to a small school. Whereas at Coe every professor knew my name, at UNM I was in lecture halls with four hundred people. I felt disconnected from the University. I found my architecture classes frustrating. I was out of the closet though; I spent most of my time with friends from high school who had known I was gay for years. When I met new people it was easy to come out because I had that support base. I learned two things my second semester: I didn’t want to be an architect and it was a lot easier to be out of the closet. Since I no longer planned to study architecture, I decided not to continue at UNM; I went back to Coe.
Back at Coe
I started my second year of college at Coe. In many ways it felt more like my first year than my actual freshman year. I came out of the closet, joined more clubs, spent a lot more time outside of my room and I became really close with my cross country teammates. That year was one of the most enjoyable times in my life. A number of people at Coe, all seniors, had come out. There were still only a handful of out people at Coe, but we weren’t as invisible as before. Not only that, but there was a boy who I had my eyes on and who had his eyes on me. We started dating and until the following September, my third year of college, he was my world. Then we broke up
Fall semester of my third year was awful. All the other out gay men on campus had graduated. The freshmen on the cross country team were unenlightened, to say the least, and they outnumbered the returning runners. The team that had felt like my home now felt hostile. Not a day went by when I wasn’t reminded that I was an “other.” At school, I felt completely alone, strange and different. Before, I had at least known that there were other gay people around, even if they were just acquaintances. Now, I was the only one. I was twenty years old and suddenly felt like a high school student again. I had done the reverse of what most gay kids do; I went from an open, welcoming and very gay high school to a place without a gay community. I was the only gay man and there were only a few openly lesbian women. More than anything, I felt like gay people were invisible at Coe.
Getting Fed Up
To understand what it’s like being gay at Coe you have to understand a little bit about Iowa. Iowa is one of the least diverse states in the entire nation. And when you’re someone who’s not “normal” by Iowa standards – that is white, heterosexual and Christian – what makes you different seems like a heavy weight on your shoulders. Being a minority in Iowa means you are surrounded by well meaning, but clueless people. Just imagine a lot of ignorant, hurtful things to be said straight to your face, a lot of strange looks and a lot of awkward moments. These people aren’t James Dobson, they just don’t know any better.
In addition to feeling like an outsider in a heterosexual world, I was becoming more and more dissatisfied with Coe Alliance, the only LGBT group on campus. Meetings were unfocused and more about socializing than dealing with myriad problems faced by gay students. The fact that some dorms were simply unlivable for gay students was never discussed. The recurring situation where gay students transferred after their first semester (I wasn’t the only one) was something nobody thought we could remedy. The marginalization you experienced as a minority on campus was something you just lived with. Oftentimes I would be the only LGBT person at meetings, along with a handful of allies.
The more dissatisfied I became with Alliance, the more I started joking with my friends about starting another group, something like the “homosexual liberation front.” They kept telling me, “Yeah, you should!” Slowly, what started off as a joke began to morph into something serious. More and more I could see that a new organization was needed. I started thinking about what exactly the goals of this new organization would be, what it would look like and how it would be organized.
As I started planning, certain things started to come into focus. The more involved on campus you were as an LGBT student, the more you felt marginalized. This struck me as strange when I first noticed it, but I soon figured out what was happening. The people who were less involved had carved out gay-friendly niches for themselves, and didn’t socialize outside of those niches. The more involved gay students knew more people and were more likely to socialize with people who weren’t gay-friendly. Many of these students lived half closeted lives.
The more I noticed these things, the more determined I became to do something unorthodox with my new group, which eventually became known as OUT. I decided from very early on that OUT should be LGBT-only. In retrospect, it was absolutely the right decision.
Building a Rocket
The problems I saw facing LGBT students at Coe could all be traced back to one root cause – ignorance. OUT was about creating a visible queer presence at a school that didn’t have one. I wanted OUT to be just LGBT people in order to make it clear, especially to the school administration, that even at Coe there was a variety of gay people and their needs weren’t being met. There were other reasons as well. I believe that queer people are our own best advocates because we’re the people for whom dorm safety and hate speech isn’t abstract, but personal. To change the campus climate, gay students had to be willing to stand up publicly and talk about their experiences. We had to be the ones to do the work needed to change Coe.
Eventually I would like OUT to be inclusive of allies, or even become obsolete entirely. My hope is that OUT is the first step to forming institutions and a community that is LGBT friendly. It’s like launching a satellite; first you need a lot of energy to get off the ground, then you need to position yourself into orbit, and then you settle into an orbit where the only thing needed to keep going is gravity. OUT was the first step, the boost. As we get closer to achieving our goals, we’ll reflect on what has and has not been working and streamline things until eventually we’re in orbit – we’re institutionalized. We will have created a place where LGBT students are considered when school policy is made, feel safe in all the dorms and have a vibrant, visible community on campus.
The first step in forming OUT was trying to get the LGBT people I knew at Coe involved. It wasn’t that hard to find women willing to join; one of my good friends, Heather, was there from the beginning. With Heather came her friend Kelly. Another woman, Bailey, was also very interested. These women were integral to shaping OUT and getting it off the ground. Finding men was more difficult, seeing as I was the only one who was completely out. I knew of some gay and bisexual men on campus and I started trying to convince them to join OUT. It took until the beginning of spring semester 2008 to find men interested in joining OUT – Dan was a senior fresh out of the closet and Forrest was a first-year who had gone from out, to in, to out again at various points in his life.
At the same time as I was building OUT’s foundation, I was encouraging straight people to join Alliance. A lot of my straight liberal friends felt slighted that they could not be involved with OUT. After explaining the importance of queer empowerment and visibility, I used the pushback I received for making OUT LGBT-only as an opportunity to get more and more people interested and actively involved in LGBT rights at Coe. Keeping OUT queer made my straight friends look around and ask, “Why do they need their own group? What’s the problem?” Pointing them to Alliance fueled its growth and meetings started to become more productive.
We Have Liftoff
OUT started meeting in February 2008. In those early meetings we talked more about our stories and our experiences than campus policy. There were only six consistent members and none of us had ever really had a substantial number of gay friends. How could we? Except for Forrest and me, everyone else had come out after they came to Coe – where the few out gay people existed in separate enclaves. This was the first opportunity to talk to a group who shared some of their experiences.
I was particularly proud of Dan. He hadn’t come out until the very end of the last school year, and only then to a few friends. We had known each other for a long time, but it was through OUT that we became close. At twenty-one years old, Dan was just starting to get comfortable with his sexuality. It had taken him a long time to figure himself out and he was still very uncertain of where he fit in the world and what being gay meant for his future. After OUT started meeting, his confidence grew and he became more comfortable with himself. By the end of the school year, he had become comfortable talking to school administrators, faculty and soccer teammates about his sexuality. He also went to an LGBT conference for the first time. Finally, Dan stopped worrying about his sexuality and started living his life. I watched Dan grow and become noticeably happier, in large part thanks to his involvement with OUT.
By early March, OUT was beginning to focus on school policies that we wanted changed. Our agenda was ambitious: we wanted new RA trainings that specifically included LGBT issues, the addition of an LGBT speaker at new student orientation, changes made to Coe’s non-discrimination policy to make it more effective at curbing hate speech, and a “No Stupid Questions” event where a panel of LGBT students would answer audience questions. OUT members also wanted to act as counselors to LGBT students who needed advice or support and to make all of our dorm rooms official safe zones.
The first two items on that list were, and still are, the most difficult to achieve. They are also the most important; they would reach the entire campus and make each and every dorm safer for LGBT students. At a school where the gay population feels invisible, making a point to discuss LGBT issues with students as soon as they arrive on campus would have a tremendous impact. Currently, only one dorm is LGBT friendly but first-year students are placed in all dorms. Inclusive RA training is necessary to ensure that LGBT issues and students are treated with respect in places where they have not been treated well historically.
Most of the six main members of OUT were heavily involved in a variety of activities at Coe. Coe is also really small, which meant we knew a lot of people in the school administration and the leaders in the Student Senate. Katie Flores, the Student Body President, was on cross country and track and a good friend of mine. I always kept her up–to-date on what was developing in OUT and she would bring up our issues in the Senate meetings. Heather was Editor in Chief of the Cosmos, the school newspaper, and I was photo editor, so we were able to include coverage of the Day of Silence and the Drag Show and also made sure OUT members were interviewed for a story on OUT written by a staff writer.
At this point, OUT was firmly established. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be funded through the Student Senate because we limited membership to LGBT students. The Diversity Committee could provide us with funding, but we would lose a great deal of autonomy. Instead, after a number of OUT members became elected officers in Alliance the decision was made to make OUT a part of Alliance with separate officers, duties and a different constitution.
Improving the situation on campus was the most pressing issue for OUT. We set up a meeting with DeLayne Duval, Director of Residence Life, for early April 2008 to discuss the atmosphere of life in the dorms, RA training, and discrimination and harassment. Three of us from OUT sat in his office and talked about our experiences in the dorms. I had the impression that he had never considered the issues we brought up; Duval had no idea how bad the atmosphere in the dorms was. We discussed including LGBT issues in RA training, but neither ResLife nor OUT knew where to go to get that type of training in Cedar Rapids. We had more success talking about Coe’s harassment policy.
Coe was modifying its harassment policy and we were able to provide a lot of input. There had been a series of racial incidents on campus that semester and the school was drafting a new harassment policy to make the school feel safer for minority students. The major difference in the new harassment policy is in how it regulates hate speech. Previously, hate speech had to be directed at a specific student in order to violate school policy and trigger the involvement of the school and the judiciary board. The new policy is broader; hate speech in general is now banned. Under the old policy, vandalizing a dorm bathroom with antigay or racial epithets would constitute a simple vandalism charge since the hate speech wasn’t directed at a specific student. Now, the student who vandalized the bathroom could be charged with violating the school’s harassment policy and face harsher punishment.
The Sky is the Limit
The school year was almost over. Although OUT had only been able to tackle a few things on our ambitious agenda, I was more confident than ever that we could achieve everything we set out to do in those first meetings. Coe was already becoming more accepting because we were able to bring up LGBT inclusion in the Student Senate and the newspaper – LGBT issues had become a big topic on campus. A large number of the students and the full weight of the administration wanted to make Coe a safer, friendlier place for all minorities. Today, OUT continues working towards making Coe a safe and welcoming place for LGBT students.