The best years of your life? Not if
you went to school when gay students gathered in the shadows. But
with more options than ever for the homosexualy inclined, your alma
mater (or your future school choice) never looked so good.
Hottest Gay
Students
The guys at the University of
California. Berkeley, aren't hot. Or cold. They're perfectly warm in
the sunny East Bay 24/7, all year round. This means that there's
always a healthy dose of men lingering around the campus shirtless,
tanned, and shirtless (yeah, we said it twice, but seriously, it
deserves to be said twice). "From March to November you see a lot of
guys in skimpy clothes, sleeveless shirts, and-hmm, what was 1
saying? ' muses Sun Tang, a junior and head facilitator of Cal Q&A
(queer and Asian). ''Within the gay community there's so much
diversity too. Punks, goths, activists, homebodies, guys looking for
relationships at the ripe age of 21 to last their whole lives.
There's something for every kind of hot."
Campus with
the most Future Fashion Dictators
Tim Gunn was recently having a
beachsicie brunch with his mother when he asked his 20-something
waitress, "Do you know who Marc Jacobs is?" She didn't. Gunn. the
chair of the fashion design department at
New York City's Parsons School of
Design, feit humbled.
Yes, Marc Jacobs is a Parsons alum
(so are Donna Karan and ex-Gucci guru Tom Ford), and. yes,
Manhattan's Saks Fifth Avenue featured outfits designed by Parsons
students in its storefront windows last year. But no, Parsons does
not encourage living in a bubble.
"We're not designing clothes for
life on the moon or parade floats or clowns the way they do in
Paris," says Gunn. "You need to be able to get into a taxi with your
clothes."
The school, the first of its kind
in the country (established in 1906), features rigorous critiques,
industry internships, hefty history lessons, and a grueling runway
show each year. "The students aren't fsshion^stas or brand-label
whores, but they have style." says Gunn. "You can spin like a top
responding to every trend. We don't do that. We try to set trends."
It's not easy. "No one sleeps. It's
like med school," says Ian Heath, an '04 grad. "The truly cool
fashion kids are wearing last night's clothes, where the wrinkles
have become part of your body and you have that
not-such-fresh-breath look." Between apple martinis after an
afternoon of interviewing with the Gap and John Varvatos. he adds,
"Everyone's very dedicated. They know what they want"
"I have to say." adds Gunn. "for the gay male students, it's an
incredibly brave thing to come out as a gay fashion designer,
because it's so stereotypical, it's much more acceptable to come out
to your parents as a gay lawyer, i really respect these kids."
Most Divine
College
Despite all the kneeling and
serving going on at religious colleges, they tend not to be too
gay-friendly. So it was quite a surprise when the Baptist buddies of
Baylor University in Waco, Tex.,
really got behind their gay brethren. Amid the gay marriage hoopla
in San Francisco, the student newspaper. The Baylor Lariet, ran a
staff editorial that read, "Gay couples should be granted the same
equal rights to legal marriage as heterosexual couples" because,
"like many heterosexual couples, many gay couples share deep bonds
of love" and "just as it isnt fair to discriminate against someone
for their skin color, heritage or religious beliefs, it isn't fair
to discriminate against someone for their sexual orientation."
A few weeks later, after the
Reverend Matt Bass, a 25-year-old theology student, had his
school-sponsored scholarship revoked when it became known that he's
gay, student and alumni pro-gay rallies stormed the campus. "Baylor,
like any religious college, isn't great for gays. But it's a place,
unlike other religious colleges, where gay students are sick of
being shit upon," says Bass, who transferred to Emory University
with the help of "knock-your-socks-off recommendations" from
professors. Speaking out was natural, says Bass. "The Bible has
taught that when the cause is just, you have to stand up for it. Or
you lose all respect-including self-respect."
And he's not alone. In April one of
the few Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays national
community centers opened in Waco and was named after Eddie Dwyer, a
professor who taught religion at Baylor for 37 years. Dwyer
accepted gay Christians when his son came out13 years go.
Praise Jesus! And Marys.
Most
Stylish Dorms
Designed by famed architect Helmut
Jahn, the State Street Village, a new dorm at the
Illinois Institute of Technology,
offers students sweeping views of the Chicago skyline through the
rooms' all-glass facades (somewhere out there, Thorn Filicia just
got a very good feeling). The dorm was built around an existing el
track, and trains continue to plow through; laundry machines inform
students their clothes are finished by sending an e-mail or making a
phone call. Beyond the 52-inch-plasma-TV-with-DVD in the lobbies,
every room-including bathrooms—comes with wireless Internet access
as well as phone and TV jacks. Although it's unclear why a student
would need to surf the Web in the bathroom.
Best
Campus for Rich and Powerful Gays
Whether you're into ego-stroking
your ivory tower or cockily hobnobbing with WASPs in dominant
positions, look no further than the Ivy League's
Yale University. Famous for its "naked parties" (as in, yes,
parties where everyone's buck nekkid), the alma mater of both
presidents Bush, Jodie Foster, John Ashcroft, and
screenwriter-playwright Paul Rudnick couldn't be gayer if its
hallowed gothic buildings were dipped in body glitter.
An online gay history of Yale (www.andrewsloat.com/lki)
from 1642 to 2004 includes entries on such topics as Puritan
sodomites, Oscar Wilde's visit to the campus, gay Skull and Bones
alumni, a gay Cheney (not him), and a 1930s gay "fucking party." A
particularly poignant excerpt from Cheney's boyfriend in the 1920s
reads. "That there have been other unions like ours is obvious, but
we ^re unable to draw on their experience. We must create everything
far ourselves."
Gay students today may not be as
eloquent in their missives ("Sup? Stats? Pic? Meet?"), but they're
still plenty creative. Take Andrew Hamilton, a senior who received
$2,200 from Yale to put on a fashion show his sophomore year that
involved lots of fur and a leather tuxedo of his own design. (And
this was all before a summer job at Vogue.) Uh, gay much? But, says
Hamilton, an art history major, "There's not a gay community at
Yale. There's not a straight community either. It's so intertwined.
It's one community."
"I'm not flamboyant, but I would never think I have to tone down."
says Henry Harding, a junior. "There's no battle to win here. You
don't need to cram it in people's faces. Yale is not a place where
you can say 'faggot.'"
Best
Big Public University for State Supported Gays
It's one thing to find a gaytopia
on a campus with a long history of queer studies departments and gay
student centers. It's another thing for a hateful campus to do a 180
into acceptance. That's what happened at Arizona State University.
"So I was in my room receiving oral
sex when my roommate walked in." That's how sophomore Max Hazell had
his closeted life, well, blown. "My roommate freezes, then leaves.
And this guy I'm with chases him down and says, 'Hey, aren't you in
my math Class? We can work on problems together if you want.' So I
go to the bathroom and come back, and my trick is going over math
with my very uncomfortable-looking roommate.''
But it was Hazell, freshly booted
from the Army for being gay, who would soon get uncomfortable. In
the following weeks during the fall of 2003, which also surrounded
National Coming Out Day, phrases like queer lives here were drawn on
his door, suck my dick, faggot was keyed across the hood of his
Volvo. "I never got that one." he muses. "Why would antigay bigots
want me to suck them?"
Amid this and other gay bashings, Sam Holdren, then a senior, was
heading up the school's gay student movement. "We were new and
confused and, I mean, the nickname of ASU is 'Apathetic State
University,' " says Holdren. "But we didn't give a wish list to the
administration; we gave them expectations."
Those expectations were surpassed
when, in March, university president Michael Crow signed into
immediate effect a campuswide protection of "gender identity," which
"refers to an individual's personal sense of masculinity or
femininity, including external characteristics and behaviors such as
dress. mannerisms, speech patterns, and social interactions." ASU
became only the fourth public university in the country to make such
a comprehensive inclusion.
"I feel 10 times safer now," says Hazell. "Now I hold hands. I
kiss."
Best
College for Gay Athletic Support
When the crew team for the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill headed to a regatta m
California last school year, Nate Young, an out '04 grad, made sure
the team made a special stop. In San Francisco. In the Castro. In a
leather shop. Everyone loved it.
"Lots of things that are viewed as intolerance in athletics aren't
intolerance at all." he says. "It's just getting used to gay life.
It's just clumsiness."
That clumsiness can sometimes look
like what Young calls "paranoia"—like a minor flap that hit the
campus when an openly gay assistant athletics director posed with
the men's swim team for a Speedo-filied Christmas card with the
message hope your
XMAS PACKAGES ARE AS FESTIVE AS MINE!
Young explains why so few athletes
come out: "Athletes don't want to rock the boat. Sports is [about]
conforming. You don't want to individualize on a team, and that's
exactly what corning out does. You've heard it: There's no I in
team.'"
This spring about four members of
Carolina's novice crew team (the JV squad) were out. None of them
are returning this fall. But don't blame homophobia. "'I haven't had
a Cad experience yet," says Bill Myers, a senior who was one of
those four out rowers- "I couldn't believe it here. It was SiKe too
good to be true." So why quit the team? "1 felt like I was missing
out on gay fife," he explains. "The commitment of crew—it was like a
step back for me. I had to withdraw from the gay world."
"Student athletes are so busy,"
adds Young, who practiced 11 times a week for a total of 30 hours,
before then spending the summer training with rowers in Moscow. "So
of course there's political apathy, because they don't want to come
out and have more stress when they're already so swamped with all of
the commitment that any sport requires. But honestly, gay athletes
can be cowardly. Being out in sports is only an issue because it's
so rare. Most gays are so chicken that [even when they're] dating,
at clubs, all of that, [they're still] not out. It's so cowardly."
