Black gays fight for a voice on campus

updated 4:28 p.m. ET April 8, 2007

HAMPTON, Va. - So lured was April Maxwell by the promise of the black college experience, with its distinct traditions and tight-knit campus life, that she enrolled at Hampton University in 2001 without even visiting the waterfront campus.

A lesbian who is open about her sexual orientation, she arrived eager to join the extended Hampton family.

Instead, “I felt like I was the only gay person on campus — it seemed like nobody was really out,” said the now 24-year-old Maxwell.

She channeled her isolation into organizing a gay support group, but a panel of students and faculty denied it a charter. The panel recently denied a second attempt at chartering Students Promoting Equal Action and Knowledge, or SPEAK, headed by underclassmen after Maxwell graduated.

It’s a tug-of-war that’s emerging at other black schools, where students say outdated rules and homophobia block them from forming the gay campus voice common at majority white institutions.

At Hampton, where rules govern everything from overnight guests to student dress, officials insist they don’t discriminate against gays. They say they’re simply enforcing the regulations on student groups, and there just isn’t space for another one.

HBCUs and tradition
But some students here see more than a conservative approach to the regulations. They, and many others at the nation’s more than 100 historically black colleges and universities, say that a broader suspicion of homosexuality keeps gays in the shadows at these tradition-heavy schools.

“You’ve got to recognize the history of HBCUs,” said Larry Curtis, vice president for student affairs at Norfolk State University, where students recently formed a gay-straight alliance. “Most of them were founded by religious organizations.”

Church leaders are often cited as setting the tone regarding homosexuality across the black community.

Nationwide, black pastors have opposed gay marriage and shot down comparisons between the struggles for civil rights and gay rights; others have attacked “down low” bisexual men for contributing to the rising AIDS rates among black women, though the topic is a matter of debate in the public health community.

Bruising tensions
On historically black campuses, those tensions make life uncomfortable for gay students.

“It’s kind of hard to be out on campus and still be successful,” said Vincent Allen Jr., head of Safe Space at Atlanta’s Morehouse College. “As an out gay man, if I wanted to pledge, that door is pretty much shut to me. That’s just the way it is.”

But just as gay students can rightfully request campus inclusion, so too can black college administrators deny it, argued the Rev. William Owens, an HBCU graduate and head of the Coalition of African-American Pastors in Memphis, Tenn.

Those administrators may cite the Bible, or simply personal beliefs — and they don’t have to be politically correct, Owens said.

“They can say ‘no’ and I don’t think they have to give a lot of reasons,” said Owens, who joined other black pastors worried that, along with dismal marriage rates, socially accepted homosexuality “is a threat to the black family.”

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