Content warning: Discussions of racism and homophobia
I met Communication second-year Kalan Hauser on the bright purple couches lining the third floor of Norris. We were supposed to meet the day prior, but his flight back from attending Coachella had been delayed. Sitting on those couches, he talked to me about dance, about his experiences being a first-year and queer on dating apps like Grindr and about anti-Blackness at Northwestern.
“The assumption is that there’s colorblindness in queerness, and that’s not the reality,” Hauser told me.
Hauser talked about the stereotypes he’s faced as a Black queer student interacting with white queer students on campus. He described the microaggressions and coded commentary about his body. But he also taught me about self-love and his determination to not allow others to shut him down.
This article contains five perspectives of queer people of color at Northwestern, including Hauser’s. Two of these stories use pseudonyms names to protect the identities of the students. Understood individually, these are snapshots of the multifaceted experiences each student has faced on campus. Understood collectively, they speak to a wide range of queer POC experiences in proximity to whiteness, but no individual story can or should speak for the entire community.
Ismael Perez
As Bienen first-year Ismael Perez lugged his bags to Chapin Hall after landing at O’Hare mere hours before, he was ecstatic to enter a space where he didn’t need to hide his queer identity.
He imagined college as a “dream world of social acceptance.” But his dream world soon came crashing down, and reality took its place.
In Perez’s home in Miami, Florida, the attitude surrounding his queer identity was “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He loves his family, but their conservative Colombian roots meant being out at home wasn’t possible.
He believed Northwestern would be different. During Wildcat Welcome, interacting with his white queer peers through his PA group or programming activities, he noticed the racial diversity within the dating pool at Northwestern was smaller than he had hoped.
Staring at his phone, Perez saw the messages he’d sent asking guys out for coffee or just conversation during their first week on campus. He had been rejected or left on read more times than he could count.
As he looked around campus, he saw the common denominator. His queer friends were white and going out with other queer white students. Perez is Afro-Latino...
