The Collegian
Thursday, March 28, 2024

GLBTQ students embrace alternate social scene

This article is the second in a series about issues facing the GLBTQ community at the University of Richmond.

On a recent Wednesday night, a handful of University of Richmond students went to a nondescript looking bar in downtown Richmond for "College Night."

Inside on the dance floor, lights flashed brilliantly as scantily dressed women moved in sync next to well-dressed men, hip-hop and techno thudding from giant speakers. At the bar in the next room over, people amiably mingled, some talking in small groups, others at the bar, nursing beers and sounding off to the bartender.

But the bar, Godfrey's, off Grace Street, isn't a conventional one. Men may have been grinding with women, but so too were men with men and women with women, in a place where traditional gender barriers blur, and fear for expressing sexual identity crumbles.

For many GLBTQ students at Richmond, Godfrey's is a refuge. Finding an uninhibited social venue on campus accepting of their differences is next to impossible, they say, and many don't feel comfortable within the established party scene at Fraternity Row and the apartments.

2008 graduate Carlos Siekavizza, who is openly gay and lives in the Fan District downtown, said he would not have brought a boyfriend to a lodge with him when he was a student.

"I would be thinking about when ... I was going to be humiliated and kicked out of the frat lodge," he said.

Social outlets such as Godfrey's are important to GLBTQ students because they can be themselves without enduring negative judgment from others, Siekavizza said.

And at 11 p.m. at Godfrey's that Wednesday -- like every Wednesday -- dancers cleared the floor and lined the mirrored walls, waiting for Ms. Tiffany Deveraux, a drag queen, to enter the room. Moments later, she strutted in to high-energy techno music before kicking off the bar's weekly drag show.

When her song began, she swaggered in circles around the room, plucking dollar bills from the fingers of her adoring audience, at times pulling the bill in with her teeth from lips of her donors, then rewarding them with a kiss on the cheek.

"At Godfrey's I don't have to pretend I'm something else or force myself to dance with women all night. I can be myself," said Pat, a closeted freshman at Richmond.

"There are certain lodges that you don't go to. I get dirty looks, and I don't know if it's because they suspect something."

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Common Ground director Glyn Hughes said that while Greek members were not the problem, the structure of Greek party culture was "heteronormative," meaning that people assumed everyone was heterosexual.

"The center of [the party] culture is Fraternity Row," Hughes said. "But those scenes are very heterosexually charged. So, when the centers of student culture are these very heterosexual environments, then it can create a hostile climate for those who don't fit in."

Juliette Landphair, dean of Westhampton College, agreed.

"I think that the predominance of the fraternity party culture and the lodges is a huge issue for us," she said. "I'm not blaming the fraternities for that. But those are environments that are very heteronormative."

But Greek leaders disagreed that fraternity party culture added to a homophobic atmosphere on campus.

"Any organization with 30 percent of the student body will have individuals who may be homophobic," said Chris Lucas, co-president of the Interfraternity Council. "But there might be some at the lodges who might have a problem with seeing something like two men dancing together. I can tell you directly that there are no fraternity presidents who would get upset about that or want to kick someone out of the lodges for that reason."

Although he did not want to speak for all fraternities, Lucas said members of his fraternity, Phi Gamma Delta, had been encouraged to be open-minded about including sexual minorities.

"We have a gay pledge, we knew about it beforehand and he was unanimously voted in," Lucas said. "He wasn't voted in because he was gay, and he wasn't rejected because of it. It really had nothing to do with it."

Pat, the closeted freshman, said that because he had been uncomfortable at lodges in the past, he and his roommate, whom he came out to a month into first semester, had invited friends over to their room and partied there.

"We have people buy us alcohol," Pat said. "I invite my friends, and he invites some of his friends. It's better than feeling uncomfortable at a lodge."

Jason Tseng, another gay 2008 graduate, moved to New York when he finished a degree in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies.

"It was very clear that the campus was a hostile climate for queer people," he said. "It was a kind of latent homophobia, in which you can tell people disapprove without showing actual violence. From my first month, my roommate and I were harassed. We would get threatening calls in the night."

During his freshman year, Siekavizza said he had received anonymous phone calls from people who had threatened to beat him and damage his property for being gay. Threats on campus are rare, but other stories of GLBTQ students being threatened were known within the community, Tseng and Siekavizza said.

Tseng said he thought the attitude toward GLBTQ students had been propagated by a housing policy that for years has separated students along distinct gender lines.

"I think it encourages a gender climate that is intensely polarized," he said. "In the guys' dorms, it becomes hypermasculinized." For the women, dorms become hyperfeminine, he said.

Administrators have struggled with issues of gender diversity in their housing policies, Landphair said.

"I recognize that the coordinate system has played into the idea of men and women on a spectrum, and there isn't much more than that," she said.

Tseng contends that when men and women are separated by gender by housing policies, it adds a level of sexual tension to every interaction between straight men and women, making GLBTQ students feel like outsiders.

The Greek-dominated party culture fuels sexual tension by adding alcohol, Hughes said.

"The row and the apartments are really the only place where men and women can interact unsupervised, so that amplifies the heterosexual imperative," Hughes said. "The fraternities have a relative monopoly on some key resources: unsupervised coed space, and alcohol in an unsupervised space."

In an e-mail to Richmond College students last week, dean Joseph Boehman referenced several recent Collegian opinion submissions that had been generating discussion, and said encouraging inclusive attitudes toward sexual minorities was a value he expected Richmond College men to uphold. Boehman also signaled that there would be programming directed at fostering a more open-minded atmosphere on campus.

But despite administrative efforts to create a more inclusive campus -- including the Strategic Plan's pledge to increase inclusiveness -- changes in campus attitudes would have to come from students, Hughes said.

"If the administration is seen as the force that's going to punish indiscretions and infractions along lines of difference, that doesn't change those 'minor indignities' from happening," he said. "But if students stand up and say, 'We're not going to take it anymore,' then those experiencing the minor indignities know they have allies -- that within the culture itself, it's not so homogeneous.

"But right now, if you're queer on campus, you don't know that. You don't have a sense that your peers are going to throw down for you when you feel threatened."

Landphair agreed that students needed to change the climate, but she said the university could push for having more GLBTQ people in visible positions, including faculty and staff ones.

"When you have faculty and staff who are uncomfortable coming out, then it's going to be hard for the students to do so," she said.

Andy Gurka, the area coordinator for the University Forest Apartments, is one such openly gay staff member. During his four years at Richmond, Gurka said he had seen little hostility on campus from being out, but he acknowledged that some students might feel alienated about his sexual orientation. Still, it's important for him to be a role model for other students, he said.

"I think that being out has been a benefit to the community," Gurka said. "I live on campus. I think that it's important that I'm out and that I'm modeling that behavior to show it's normal. It's not what defines me, but it is part of who I am.

"I'm not going to introduce myself by saying, 'Hi, I'm Andy, and I'm gay.' But if I'm in the dining hall eating lunch with my boyfriend, if people come up and talk to me, I'm going to introduce him as my boyfriend."

Expecting to purge the campus of people who insult the GLBTQ community is unrealistic, Hughes said, using the example of a T-shirt worn at a fraternity party several weeks ago. He imagined a campus where, in the future, people might respond more visibly, taking to more activist roles in which they explain why actions were offensive.

Siekavizza said that a majority of straight students on campus accepted queer students, but often don't realize they're offensive by using hetereosexist language.

"The only way we can be accepted is by being out," he said of the GLBTQ community. "And all that fear of rejection, I'll say this bluntly: Grow up. You're not in high school anymore."

Contact staff writers Dan Petty and David Larter at dan.petty@richmond.edu and david.larter@richmond.edu

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