Surely, I exaggerate. Colgate guarantees housing to its students; in fact, they go out of their way to make it hard to live off campus for all but a select few. Plus, my housemate is going to be a senior, so she should have her pick of the dorms. What could possibly be the problem?

My housemate and several of her friends from Advocates and LGBTQ applied for a special interest house, with the theme "Avenue Q." The idea was to create a safe living space for LGBTQ students as well as foster a community. The house they chose to apply for was centrally located along Broad Street but private enough that no stigma need be attached to those who lived or visited there by some less tolerant students on campus.

They drafted a well thought out proposal. They would be contributing to the campus by hosting parties and events. They would be strengthening the community by giving the LGBTQ students a place to congregate in an accepting environment, which they hoped would also stem the flow of LGBTQ transfers out of Colgate. There would be open spaces in the house, in case LGBTQ students had problems with their roommates and needed to move out quickly in order to avoid violence-- an experience that a few of the prospective members of the house had endured.

What was the answer from Residential Life? A firm no.

Two other groups had applied for the same house: the Colgate Christian Fellowship and a group of women's hockey and basketball players. If we make exceptions for you, ResLife said, the Christians will get angry. The Christians being a) an angry group of people and b) a marginalized group on campus (we do have a large Jewish population though I don't believe they've persecuted the Christians in the last 2000 years or so).

In the end, the house went to the athletes.

Don't worry, you can have a townhouse, ResLife said to the Avenue Q proponents by way of consolation.

The problem with the townhouses is that they are giant fishbowls; there is no privacy, and everything on the first floor is visible from the outside. It's not a safe environment, as evidenced by the fact that the LGBTQ townhouse last year was broken into twice in the first two months of school, and the issue didn't get serious coverage or investigation until after an editorial appeared in the campus newspaper, The Colgate Maroon-News. With that as the only option, people started pulling out of the proposal until there weren't enough to fill a townhouse, which requires 12-16 students. Suddenly, my housemate had nowhere to live and no housing organization that gave a damn.

We like to think that the situation with gay rights has improved, and that colleges are forward thinking institutions where intolerance and discrimination don't exist. The truth is very different.

Gay bashing is the last socially acceptable form of discrimination. Racism, sexism, ageism, and all the other -isms have been banished. That's not to say they don't exist, but it's taboo to be, say, openly racist. Not so with homophobia; the government endorses it, and you can still find it in colleges from the highest administrators, like the president at Missouri State whose intolerance towards homosexuals created a hostile working and learning environment for over a decade, to the basics of dorm life, where slurs might show up on white boards hung outside one's door. These are the kinds of things that are happening in colleges, universities, and med schools all over.  

However, college students can move political and social change forward. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) is bringing 40 college students to Washington, D.C. this summer to train them to be activists on campus with an emphasis on LGBTQ rights. And recently, in Pennsylvania, four gay student couples, who can join in neither marriage nor civil unions but can be fired from their jobs for being gay, publicly proclaimed their commitments at State College, partially in an effort to push for equal rights.

Bigotry in people is often hard to change, but bigotry in an administration shouldn't be. New York University has been rated "most accepting of the gay community" by the Princeton Review for two years running. Their Office of LGBT Student Services is one reason for this. Their job is to create a safe and welcoming environment for LGBTQ students by taking needs and concerns specific to the community into account whereas others might overlook their importance. In fact, NYU is one of the colleges where gender-neutral housing is available.

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