This past Saturday night I was walking down Home Avenue holding hands with my boyfriend after coming from a party at Earth House. At one of the houses we passed, several guys were outside and we heard condescendingly, “Look, two guys holding hands.” I turned around and charged up to the house and confronted them. I was angry and it turned into a shouting match. One of them mimicked me in an effeminate voice and I got up in his face. One of their friends came out of the house and told them to go inside. We left at that point too.
And surprise, we were really upset as we walked to my house. We felt threatened and vulnerable, I felt like a jerk and a loose cannon and was also a little astonished that I was so brazen. My bf told me that that never would have happened at his high school and he can’t believe it happened at Wesleyan. Me neither, really. Except there was that instance last year at DKE when I was kissing someone, and then all of a sudden he got punched in the face. In the past couple of weeks, several of my friends have been called fags or other epithets on the street. These things still happen at Wesleyan.
Drunk men standing on a stoop and calling out the two guys holding hands may not seem like the biggest deal. It’s probably not something you see everyday, even here, and they didn’t throw what to me is the f-bomb. But it was wrong if for no other reason than because it shattered our quiet blending in with the rest of the campus and made our intimate time together something to be gawked at. I know that being made to feel uncomfortable for being yourself is hardly a unique experience. But it’s reasonable to expect better from people in general and from people at Wesleyan in particular.
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