QUEER LIFE ON CAMPUS: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS STUDENTS SHARE THEIR EXPERIENCE OF BEING OUT

The University of Texas at Austin hosts almost 51,000 students within its forty acres, and chief among them are the various LGBTQ+ groups and people on campus. With a student population so large, it can be easy for voices and experiences to be drowned out.

What has been their experience being out on campus? What has been the good and the bad? Some responses have been condensed and edited.

KATHLYN HO, 3rd Year MBA Student

“My experience with UT has been very warm and welcoming. Prior to my time in Texas I was living in NYC in an extremely queer bubble. Though my professional life was particularly business formal, I was out and welcomed. In my personal life I volunteered my time to an LGBTQ+ music non-profit which essentially is the fancy way of saying a huge gay marching band. Most of my inner circle was queer, and more often than not we would throw drag parties and social events aimed towards improving awareness in the community. Deciding to move away from my safety net was both a conscious decision to grow as a person and also very difficult. While evaluating schools, I attended an MBA insider event to learn more about the student experience. I knew that any top tier program was going to give me a wonderful education, so I only had one question for each attendee: would I as a visibly queer person of color be welcomed and safe in your community? Some schools were taken aback, and some had slightly negative answers, but UT’s admissions officer Stacey Batas glowed at the question and was thrilled to tell me more about the community in Austin. That moment truly cemented my attendance to McCombs. Overall my peers have also been welcoming of my diversity. A huge array of 260 students, many of us come from non-Texas or even non-American backgrounds. Recently the McCombs MBA program won an award for the “best community” of any MBA program. This is amplified by the high levels of emotional intelligence the students here have. The community here wants to listen and learn. Though the holistic experience has been lovely, there have been setbacks. In the previous year there was only 1 queer woman, and in my year there are about 10 of us. At times less accepting students have avoided me, and at worst I have been fully disregarded. Though the lows have been difficult, I am proud to see these outliers diminishing over time as they get to truly know us and see how human we are. Much of my life experience has been a tale of resilience and determination in the face of unexpected challenges and I expect that will continue as I move forward in my career. As more LGBTQ+ people become visible I believe those outlier tensions will continue to ease. A lot of what I want in my career is so that others can do better after me.”

MATT MASON, 1st Year MBA Student

“I’ve only been living here a couple of months, I moved here in August, but for the most part, it has been really positive. So, I would say my experience with the staff has been really good, student body has been mostly really good and then from an extracurricular perspective it’s been okay but small … the student body has been mostly good, like everyone I’ve talked to is really supportive. People don’t care at all, not in an apathy way, just that it more accepting and respectful. I have had one instance where someone who was really wasted said the word ‘faggot’ in front of me and when I corrected him, he just did it again. It was one of the first weeks and I just felt really weird about it. I didn’t say anything to him, but some other people heard about it and got on him about it. It was nice to have people there to stand up for me and just being really good allies. So, I would say my experience has been really, really good overall aside from that one weird instance, but I also just feel we have a really small community at the business school. There’s only like eight or nine gay people in the first years out of 260 students, and there’s only five or six in the second years. So in total, it’s like less than 20 people who identify as LGBTQ. I just wish there were more people in that group, but we are trying to do more things as an organization like outreach programs to try to grow our community within the school.”

LUCY VILLEGAS, 2nd Year RTF Major

“For my experience, the obvious gripe with UT is the resources available, not enough resources, and that they hide the resources that are available to students unless you go searching for it. For example, there’s the whole name change on your ID program, you’re not taught about that at all unless you go to the JSC and talk to them about it. I didn’t find out about that until my second semester of freshman year … Besides that, in terms of people, I’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the sense that I’ve never met anyone at UT that is transphobic or homophobic. I’ve met friends here, they’re all amazing and understanding. So, in terms of my friends, it’s been great being here at UT, meeting people that are very understanding and do just small things to help me feel better as a trans person. But the university as a system needs to do more for the LGBTQ community, because when you have students who don’t even know resources exist, or who want resources that should exist, then you’re doing something wrong, and they should be upfront and change that. Don’t get me wrong, UT does try very much to work with students on issues like this. When I changed rooms last year when I used to live on campus, they were very helpful with that, with me changing and being trans, and not being comfortable with my past roommate. They worked really hard to find a dorm that I could stay at. Even though I feel like I said all that bad stuff, UT does try to help, but I just think they need to do more.”

CLAIRE AUSTIN, 2nd Year MBA Student

“So I came in to the MBA program at a time of great personal transformation for me. I actually came out over the summer in between my first and second year in the program. It’s been interesting here specifically at UT, I had a warm welcome, I’m lucky I already had a set of friends. It’s been great to see some queer women in the first-year class coming in, and it’s been good to form those new friendships and have kind of a strong bond with them. I’ve found it to be an incredibly welcoming community and I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’m sure that other people do not have necessarily my exact same experience, they can’t see through my eyes, but for me it’s been so far so good.”

MAYURI RAJA, 4th Year Computer Science Student and Co-President of EmbrACE

“The first thing I can think of with relation to my queer identity is the associated stress and fear that comes from being part of a marginalized group in a country that very clearly does not support me. Even in Austin and at UT, a city and campus that purportedly support LGBTQ+ people, I don’t feel safe because much of that support is performative allyship rather than actual actions that improve my quality of life and make my existence easier. The stress of being at the intersection of three marginalized groups: queer, woman, and person of color, accompanies me every single day. Then, you add on the pressure of being out and open about my identity. Everyone in my life knows that I am queer, and that marks me as someone to be avoided. As a queer woman of color, my existence is political, so all political discussion stops when I enter a room. People are worried of having the "wrong" opinion, as if their silence around me doesn't already speak volumes. Their unwillingness to discuss queer issues around me signals to me that their opinions are likely to invalidate my existence. As a computer science major, I am often in contact with people who have not interrogated their own sexuality, and so I find it hard to make friends with these people. The second common phenomenon I experience is being tokenized for my identity. Because I am out, I have to do a lot more emotional labor to protect the spaces that exist for queer folks on campus. I do lots of interviews, outreach to new members, and general administration to keep queer spaces protected and running. I am also "the queer friend" for all of my close friends, and they turn to me for advice and discussion about queer issues. As a result, I am constantly performing emotional labor to explain things to them-- things that they could learn on their own through a simple Google search. My openness about my queer identity therefore gives me a greater workload, which when combined with the stress of being marginalized, creates an unsavory situation for me. I am constantly tired and overworked, and I think you'll find that the same thing is true for most queer people of color on campus.”

JESSICA REESE-WHITE, 3rd Year MBA Student

“My first connection with the UT community was with my wife actually, she goes to the medical school and they are very queer over there. The queer representation is insane for such a small program, but they were also very accepting and conscious of different things that impact the LGBT community … We’re all pretty close knit at McCombs, like we all get along and we have our get-togethers and stuff like that. It’s been a great experience. I feel like for McCombs specifically, if I were to say anything bad about it, I would say that there are very small numbers of us and it feels like we don’t have as much representation within the school.”

ANN MORRIS, 4th Year Anthropology and Journalism Student

“For context, I’m a bisexual woman, and I was actually closeted before I came to college. It’s funny, in high school, I actually went to my first pride parade in Houston as a yearbook person, and everyone in the car thought that I was the token straight person. When I came to college, I remember the first group of friends I made, we were in a car and we were driving down Guadalupe and I don’t know how it came up, but one of them told me they were pansexual and the other said they were a lesbian. Then they were just looking at me and I was just like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m bisexual, we’re in a car of gays, yay!’ Everyone, for me at least, I can’t speak for everyone else in that car, but it was the first time I was with a group of people that I didn’t hesitate to reveal that part of my identity. Ever since then, I was fairly up at UT, because I just feel here, whether it’s true or not, there is this sort of connotative culture of being accepting, like it’s okay to be LGBT and it’s okay to be open about it. Really college has been the place where I’ve learned a lot about gender and sexuality; the scope of it and the spectrum that all these categories fall in. Like the previous things I thought were binary or fell into these very distinct categories are actually much more flowing and on a wide spectrum. And that helped me interact with people who either have different ideologies as me or come from different identities themselves, because it’s helped me realize that my current ideology may not be the ideology I always have and that it is not the only ideology … So, I came out to both my parents separately, they’re divorced so I had to tell them at different times. My dad was chill about it, and he’s really nice about it now … When I came out to my mom, my mom is very, super Christian, and she kind of knew already, but she wasn’t happy about it. Fortunately, I haven’t really had any experience like that with a student. But I also know that when I leave this environment, I might go to other environments where it’s very much not a cool thing to be gay. I’m prepping for that, but a part of me is bracing myself for that eventually.”

If you'd like to get into contact with any LGBTQ+ organizations and persons on the UT campus, please follow the link:

https://diversity.utexas.edu/genderandsexuality/student-groups/