Is It Cool to Be Queer on Campus?

with John McWhorter

In my most recent subscriber-only Q&A session with John McWhorter, a reader wrote in with some numbers that shocked me. Nearly 40% of Brown undergrads identify as LGBTQ and 50% of Columbia undergrads identify as “queer.” To me, those numbers sound sky-high, though they didn’t seem to surprise John. If they’re accurate, they represent a staggering shift in the way that young people regard their sexual identity, one that was unthinkable even fifteen years ago.

Granted, the numbers our correspondent cites come from two of the most selective schools in the country. They’re not exactly representative samples of the total population. It may well be that Brown and Columbia are particularly appealing to LGBTQ-identifying students, and so they’re more likely to apply there. Given how high the numbers are, it’s easy to imagine why these schools would be attractive. We already know the lengths to which universities will go to “diversify” themselves, so it could be that the selection process favors LGBTQ applicants. I don’t have any evidence to that effect, but it’s certainly possible. In the absence of more data, one could dream up many other explanations.

Still, even though we should be careful not to draw broad conclusions from these numbers, it’s inarguable that far more people—and especially young people—openly identify as LGBTQ than ever before. Something is happening. We don’t yet know if that “something” is an actual shift in the sexual orientation of the population, the destigmatization of minority sexual orientations, fashion, or another phenomenon entirely.

No matter the cause (and there’s probably more than one at work), it seems noteworthy that this way of measuring individuals’ sexual activities, desires, and self-presentation are all discussed under the auspices of “identity.” In this understanding, sex is not what you do, it is what you are. Would things appear differently if identity politics did not have such a stranglehold on our way of thinking about who we are and how we behave? There’s nothing new about experimentation—sexual or otherwise—in college. But there is something new about the idea that young people must commit to a fully formed political “identity” in order to understand themselves. That, more than what consenting adults do in the bedroom, ought to worry us.

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This clip is taken from a subscriber-only Q&A session. For access to Q&As, comments, early episodes, and a host of other benefits, click below and subscribe.

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GLENN LOURY: Here's another question.

A recent New York Post article reported that almost 40% of Brown University students identify as LGBTQ, a number that has more than doubled in the past ten years.

As an aside, I find that hard to believe. But wow.

JOHN MCWHORTER: I don't.

As far as I can tell, as recently as 2018, in a sample of almost a thousand Columbia University undergraduate students, more than 50% identified as queer, and more than 10% identified as “trans.” What's going on with the students at our Ivy League universities?

There can be no doubt that, in our time, presenting yourself, announcing yourself as queer or trans, to an extent, there is a fashion. Without a doubt. It's considered cool. However, that certainly doesn't mean that we aren't seeing something that's based on reality. And I think, talking about old, I'm getting there. It's interesting, things that stop existing in some settings, where you don't realize that it has stopped existing. “Interracial couple.” That's no longer really a viable expression. Remember you used to say that people were interracial? You might say it now, but you probably don't, because it's so ordinary.

When I was in college, there were plenty of gay people. That was ordinary, especially in educated circles. But for every person who you knew was gay, there was another one who was in the closet. There was somebody where you kind of suspected, but they would deny it. You learned ten years later that they finally “came out.” They talked about how they came out to their friend sophomore year.

In many circles—and I'm not saying that there aren't places where it's very hard to be gay—but in terms of the equivalent of those circles, that whole thing is different. I don't hang around with Columbia's undergraduates, [but] I'm sure that there are some guys who run around in denial and are in the closet and then “come out” senior year. I know that was still going on in the 1990s.

But today that's an obsolete model of things. And so for example, I'm not sure why, but linguistics tilts gay among men. A disproportionate number of men who major in linguistics are gay. And so I get a sense that [there are] a great many comfortably gay 19- and 20-year-olds to an extent that was not true when I was in college, despite [the fact that] gayness was hardly completely under-board.

So I think some of what we're seeing is, yes, that there are people who are more comfortable identifying. You have to remember that everybody who says they're queer is not somebody who exclusively is attracted to people of their own sex. A lot of people who say they're queer are people who every now and then jump the fence, and that was quite common when I was in college. You didn't call it anything, but nowadays many of the people who are calling themselves that, it might be a woman who usually dates men, but she's not open to dating a woman. She might call herself queer. You might process her as a straight woman.

I think it's that. There's a fashion. Yes, human beings are fashionable. I mean, especially tweens and teens, from what I'm seeing, are experimenting with labels. But no, those figures don't surprise me in terms of where I work. That sounds about right, especially if you realize how flexible those terms have gotten.

Yeah, well, I'm older than you, John. I'm probably in the same ballpark with our questioner here,

You knew a time that was different than I knew.

Yeah. It occurs to me, though, that there's an interesting aspect to this social contagion. I mean, it could mean one of two things. It could mean people feel free to come out now because they anticipate less social opprobrium from doing so. And the more who come out, the more that anyone who has yet to come out will anticipate even less social opprobrium from coming out. And so in that way, a snowball builds of people coming out and declaring themselves queer because they feel safe to do so. That's one meaning of it.

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But another meaning of it is that their queerness or non-queerness has a certain fashion aspect to it, just like their style of clothing or how they wear their hair or what music they listen to or whatever. And that the changing times are accompanied by changes in tastes, of which one illustration or instance is an increasing embrace of same sex intimacy. That latter interpretation is very different from the former in the sense that, whereas the former could be understood to be I am what I am, and I simply do or do not declare that thing. I am gay or I'm not gay, and the question is whether or not I let the world know what I am, but I am that thing.

Whereas the latter interpretation of the fashion observation suggests that there's some element of choice that is triggered by the social climate. So I can choose to be or not queer. I'm not that thing given in nature. I am that thing determined by society. And I gather that that latter position would be very controversial in many quarters. Where people argue that you're born that way and it's not a matter of choice at all.

You have to remember the Kinsey Scale. It's just that I think we're putting labels at a different point on that scale than we used to. It's less a matter of choice. I think it's a matter of what you choose to act upon or what you choose to label yourself on the basis of, given what you do. I think those things have changed, and it happens so gradually.

One, I'm not surprised. And two, I don't see anything to be alarmed about. The trans issue, it's happening. It's right now, and it's happening so quickly that it confuses me a little bit. I think it's a matter of language and reality and the eternal slippage between those things. And then also, yes, fashion. There is fashion to an extent.

I'll give a quick example, and this is actually from 25 years ago. I knew a woman who called herself gay. She's gay. You would have thought that she was a lesbian. She only dated men, except for one woman. She was with one woman for about two seconds. And otherwise, what you could see was that it was men she was interested in, and she's married to a man today. I think she was using gay in a rather athletic way. I think that she called herself gay because, even then, back in the '90s, among certain circles, it was a selling point. It made her interesting. There was a certain commitment she had to taking on the gay community's issues, partly because of what her politics were, but she was pushing it. I think my classification of her was that she was straight, and I'm pretty sure that's what she would say today. But she was flexible.

There are more hers today, and I think most of the hers have a little bit more basis for the label that they're using than she did. Most hers back then would have called themselves straight and would have kind of winked and said, “I was with a woman once.” That person now would be more likely to call herself queer, and that queer person could very easily marry a man. The idea is that the labels aren't what they used to be. That's my sense of it.

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