Students Debate of Coming Out Day at Swarthmore College

Interesting article from insidehighered.com about students chalking the campus (writing on the sidewalks) with gay-positive and heteronormative challenges for National Coming Out Day on Swarthmore's campus.

I know that a decade ago there were some controversies at my undergrad institution (which is pretty liberal and was recently ranked by the Princeton Review as one of the most accepting campuses in the US for GLBT students) over chalking during coming out day.  The problems there, though, were with the administration that didn't like that coming out day tended to fall right around one of the recruitment days for new students. They were concerned that it would send parents and students the wrong message, that it would make the campus seem "too gay".  

The fact that they were willing to talk about the GLBT group on the tour of campus, however, was one of the reasons that I went there. I visited over 40 schools in my college search. Of them only 3 talked about GLBT students on their tours (Brown (it was gay pride week there), Haverford (right down the road from Swarthmore) and Drew (where I ended up going)). I wanted to apply to all three, but my parents were freaked out by the "super-gay" Brown and forbade me to apply (later my mom shared that they were afraid it would make me gay to go there). So Drew's concerns were right and wrong, although a slew of gay supportive messages in chalk would have bouyed me during my search as a closeted young man, it may have freaked my parents out.

My other experience with chalking was at an institution I worked at, where I founded a GLB group on campus. Actually I was commanded to start a group on campus by the VP, who told me he wanted me to do this right after he told me I was almost too gay to be hired by the school. Anyway, the first coming out day, we chalked the campus to announce our presence on campus. It was immediately washed off once faculty and staff arrived and I was called to task. Our chalking consisted mostly of "gay is good", "Some of your classmates are gay", and "1 in 10 pharmacists are gay".  It was the last one that the adminstration found most offensive (it was a pharmacy school). 

None of my chalking experiences were as graphic as the ones described on the Swarthmore campus. But, 10 years ago, just announcing a gay presence on campus was just as shocking.  Although it seems like the groups on campus were able to resolve the situation well and through discussion, I think that the increasingly graphic nature of the chalkings are a result of the increasingly blase attitude of individuals: simply put, it takes more to shock today than in it did 10 years ago.  

PS: The beginning of the article is below and is PG, the link has some material of a slightly more graphic nature including language and description of sex acts.  

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by — Elizabeth Redden

At Swarthmore College, the first day of Coming Out Week each fall dawns reliably, the first light falling on sexually explicit messages chalked on campus sidewalks by gay student groups the night before. It is a tradition, organizers say, meant to facilitate free expression among gay students and encourage all students to question the reigning "heteronormative" culture. 

The chalkings typically attract some degree of controversy, but this year, the debate reached a fever pitch, with about 150 students filling the pews of the Swarthmore Friends Meetinghouse Thursday to debate the merits of the chalkings. The messages and images scrawled around the sidewalks have inspired "counter-chalkings," passionate dialogue in the pages of the student newspaper and even a Facebook group, "I Have an Opinion About the Coming-Out Week Chalkings," with 43 members and 123 postings as of Monday afternoon. More ominously to some, they've also inspired some localized showers — the administration believes that a couple of the drawings were washed out by students, said Myrt Westphal, associate dean for student life at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania.

A number of particularly explicit and prominent drawings that stand out from those of years past seem to have ignited the intense debate this year, Westphal said: "There was a feeling both in the queer community and outside the queer community that this had gone over the top and actually was hurting the cause of Coming Out Week."