Disclaimer: Piece contains offensive language
What does it feel like to have your personhood reduced to a single word or label? I think it is a feeling that everyone has experienced. Whether the term is positive like “smart,” or negative like “soft,” something is always lost in the attempt to boil down the complexities of a person to such simple epithets. Even further, by lessening someone to something innate, personhood is diminished. Waking up on February 29 to find homophobic slurs graffitied across my fraternity house, I felt the anguish of being reduced to a word or phrase more acutely than ever before.
Growing up I was afraid if people knew me as gay, that label would become my foremost defining characteristic. People might no longer think of me as “that guy who plays tennis,” but rather “that gay guy who plays tennis.” Giving a Chapel Talk last semester was really the first time I had confronted this fear head on. Coming out to my fraternity brothers and teammates, I took solace in the fact that those guys knew who I was before they knew my sexuality. But speaking on the Chapel stage, I was painstakingly aware of the people in attendance I had never met before. Confronting that fear, I found the freedom to openly be who I am — the freedom to be judged by our actions and characters, not a singular aspect of our identities.
I believe that freedom is what the person, or people, who vandalized my house sought to threaten. Maybe they have yet to find that freedom for themselves. Maybe it upset them to see my fraternity embrace my queer brothers and me so openly. Unfortunately, at Wabash, I think all too often minoritized students are not seen as whole people. In turn, some of us do not feel free to be who we are.
Regardless of the perpetrators motives, this act is far from the first time I have watched peers diminish one another with hate. From blatant uses of “faggot” to more subtle exchanges like “suck my dick” followed by “you’d let a dude do that wouldn’t you,” comments that might seem facetious are often sending the clear message that being gay is bad. When that intolerance is given room to fester and permeate on our campus, the result is what I woke up to on Thursday before spring break. No one just rolls out of bed someday never having spoken ill of minoritized groups and commits such egregious acts.
Seeing the photo of “fags” and “queers” spray painted across our window in my house group chat, it was not the words themselves that hurt. Instead, it was thinking about the individual or group that took the time to execute a plan to try and tear down my fraternity with such labels. The thought that my existence, and my house’s support of that existence, might be the basis for such disdain brought about a feeling I would wish on no other. Feeling hated for something I cannot change, seeing my identity weaponized to disparage my fraternity: I felt ashamed. Yet, despite the vandalism, my fraternity is not ashamed to call me their brother. They know who I am. They accept the part of me that the vandals highlighted, but more importantly, they see and embrace all of me. Knowing that, it was just a matter of scrubbing the hate from our house.
But while those wounding words might be gone, their reverberations and impact remain. They are felt by our queer brothers most acutely. Those who are not ready to share their sexuality may now feel more intimidated, and thus more isolated. Those of us who openly identify as queer are left checking over our shoulders in fear of this hate existing on our campus.
The outpouring of support and outrage spurred by such blatant hate is certainly reassuring, but there needs to be a more conscious effort to push homophobia off our campus before this happens again. Our institution should no longer be relying on student leaders in vulnerable positions to quell the hate directed at them; there ought to be real support from experienced, institutionally-recognized leaders. We can do better. We can be better.