The recent homophobic and misogynistic vandalism of the gender neutral floor has left me, as well as many people on this campus, very troubled. At a school that recently received a five-star rating from Campus Pride, things like this shouldn't be happening. And though the gender neutral floor is not an LGBTQ-oriented program, these words were clearly targeting gay people at Dartmouth, on and off the gender neutral floor. I believe, however, that this event is a symptom of a greater problem that LGBTQ students at Dartmouth face we have no coherent community, and even worse, no desire to foster one.
Throughout my three years of varying levels of activity in LGBTQ organizations at Dartmouth, I have tried and tried and tried again to get gay students on this campus to care and to be involved in creating a larger community. In the spring of my junior year, after seeing the community become even less visible than it was when I got here, I gave up, resigning myself to a fragmented, apathetic LGBTQ population. The status quo remained, and incoming LGBTQ freshman were left to navigate their identities alone, with no upperclassmen to mentor them. The creation of OUTreach Peer Mentors has ameliorated this to some extent, but apathy on the part of upperclassmen still prevents it from being as successful as it could be.
Most gay students justify their inactivity by arguing that being gay isn't a big part of their lives, that they are just "somebody who happens to be gay." While there is nothing wrong with not wanting your sexuality to be your defining identity we are all so much more than that there is something wrong in using that as an excuse for a lack of community. Nothing reinforced this sentiment more blatantly than a recent article in The Dartmouth Mirror by Mackenzie Bohannon, in which LGBTQ students are characterized as "a population of individuals with entirely diverse experiences, who all just happen to be gay" ("Dartmouth from a different orientation," Oct. 28). While this statement is very true, the article leaves the reader thinking that maybe it's better that way, that LGBTQ people at Dartmouth don't need a community. This is the same sentiment that Roger Lott espoused in a column last month, arguing that we shouldn't have an LGBTQ affinity house, or give any money to LGBTQ programming because doing so will cause "sexual minorities" to isolate themselves ("Learning to Live Together," Oct. 10). This couldn't be further from the truth. We are already isolated, but instead of isolating ourselves from Dartmouth, we isolate ourselves from each other. This isolation feeds the status quo, allowing people to feel comfortable scrawling hatred on windows.
If anything tells me that we need a community, it's the homophobia and bigotry scrawled over the windows of the Fahey-McLane ground floor common room. It's true that in some parts of our society, LGBTQ people are fortunate enough to have not experienced much direct discrimination or homophobia, but they are the very lucky few. For the rest of us, not having a gay community leaves you feeling alone and helpless. If we had a cohesive gay community at Dartmouth, we would have more visibility for all gay people, not just for the "omnipresent, facetimey flamboyant men in Collis after 12s" described in Bohannon's article. The word "fag" scrawled on a window is directed just as much at people who have the privilege to be seen as "much more than just gay" as well as at the rest of the LGBTQ population.We are all united by our differences and we all experience being gay at Dartmouth differently, but why should we be forced to live that experience alone? Why can't we celebrate our diversity instead of letting it keep us apart?
The more visible we are as a diverse community, the better our experiences being gay will be, and the better it will be for those who come after us. The stronger our community is, the easier it will be for incoming freshmen to come out, and the less likely it will be that an incident like this occurs again. I think the LGBTQ affinity house is the first step that we can take to really build a gay community, but in order for it to be a supportive and positive environment, we all have to take part. Every gay person has something to contribute, whether they identify as part of a "community" or not.
