I am incredibly lucky.

I am lucky because I am a gay man, and I attend a forward-thinking, accepting, small liberal arts college. I’m trying to think of a safer place in America for an LGBTQ person and I honestly can’t. Come to my school, and you’ll find all kinds of queerfolk happily living their lives without fear of being tormented or physically harmed for their sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s seems like a gay paradise.

Except, for some reason, college hasn’t really been a “gay paradise” for me.

Yes, many colleges are marketed as being “LGBT-friendly." But LGBT-friendly does not directly translate to “LGBT-active." As much as it’s easier to be gay in college than in high school, one thing I have come to realize is that college is literally the most heterosexual environment one could possibly imagine. Take thousands of people in their sexual prime, more than 90% of whom are cisgender and at least somewhat attracted to the opposite sex, and you have a straight person’s dream! Even at a small college like mine, straight people have tons of potential partners.

For me, as a gay man, it’s very different. Sure, it’s a fine place to be gay...if you’re interested in curious straight men who would never talk to you again after boldly stating that hooking up with you “doesn’t make him a homo." It’s also a wonderful place to meet closet gays who don’t let you put their contact in your phone, in fear that someone might see their name in your texts and suspect something. But if you’re looking for something more than a hookup or a secret relationship that makes you feel like absolute sh*t, it’s very hard. To put things in perspective, college guys aren’t known for wanting something or someone to tie them down. Even so, statistically, given the fact that there are thousands of straight men on most college campuses, there are still a fair number of straight guys looking for relationships with women, so girls are not entirely out of luck. However, if there are only 40-50 openly gay/bi men on my campus, and most guys aren’t looking for a relationship, that reduces the number of potential partners to roughly a dozen. If that doesn’t make you feel like crawling into bed and never coming out, I don’t know what would. It’s a lonely world for a college gay dude, and the 50 year old men on Grindr who message you incessantly are NOT making it any better.

Another less discussed aspect of the gay experience that really presents itself in college is the sense of isolation that comes with being a minority demographic. Being gay is usually not a problem if I’m in an environment where the central focus isn’t on sex and relationships. In high school, people generally weren’t all that focused on relationships and hookups; rather, they were focused on being accepted by their peers. That was never hard for me as a gay man. Most high-school-aged girls are obsessed with the idea of a Gay Best Friend (as hideous as that is).

In college, the focus shifts from “how many friends do I have” to “how many people can I f*ck in a week." Here’s where the isolation really sets in. In the first couple weeks of first semester, I really began to notice how acutely separate I was from heterosexual college culture. It was hard to go to parties and have fun when I knew that the entire point of college parties was for straight boys to get straight girls drunk and have sex with them, and that I was simply an outsider. It was scary to be thrown into a living situation in which I had no idea whether or not my roommates would be OK with my status as a gay man (thankfully, they were). It was difficult to watch the ONLY queer-oriented party of the semester be overrun by drunk straight people looking for free condoms. Heterosexual hookup culture and heteronormativity present themselves in every single facet of the college experience, and it’s extremely tiring to go about my everyday life knowing that I am excluded from this experience; that I am separate.

Unfortunately, this article only scratches the surface of the problems that LGBT people face in college. I could go into depth about the rampant depression and loneliness that many queer people face in college, but I don't want to be too depressing. I could talk about how trans* people face innumerable problems due to their gender identities, but I am not personally qualified to address those problems, out of lack of experience. Furthermore, queer people at less accepting universities face all sorts of problems that I don’t, so therefore I have not addressed some of their issues (some colleges and universities in America actively condemn LGBT people!!!!) Nonetheless, being a gay college student is difficult, no matter where you attend, and unless more 18-22 year olds magically become gay, I can’t see it getting any better.