Going Dutch: several U.S. colleges offer gay studies, but only one sends its students to Amsterdam for the course work. (Education).

As millions of students head back to colleges across the country this month, officials at some of their schools will be debating the merits of adding gay studies programs to their curriculums. Administrators at the University of North Carolina, for example, announced at the end of July that they were considering the addition of a sexuality studies program at the Chapel Hill school. Advocates of the program say its institution would help foster better understanding and acceptance of gay people on the Southern campus.

And while the proposed program at UNC and those already in place at schools such as Duke University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley, are certainly groundbreaking, there is a gay studies program at a comparatively small Vermont school that should really have officials at these bigger colleges taking notice.

Based in Brattleboro, Vt., the School for International Training has been offering Sexuality, Gender, and Identity to students for close to a decade. For the semester-long study-abroad program, students are sent to Amsterdam, where they are introduced to the city's vibrant gay and lesbian communities and, in some cases, live with gay host families. The program costs about $13,700 per student, and students receive 16 undergraduate credits that are accepted at most U.S. universities, says Rebecca Hovey, dean of SIT's study-abroad program.

For the first several years, attendance hovered around 6-8 students a semester, but in 1998 participation suddenly doubled, Hovey says. Seventeen students are participating in the fall 2002 semester. "I think part of the reason for [the program's jump in popularity] is because more American undergraduate colleges are addressing GLBT concerns," she says. "Gay and lesbian studies is emerging as an academic field of study the way women's studies and ethnic studies did in the 1970s."

Though a graduate school domestically, SIT offers a number of study-abroad programs for undergraduates, including Modernization and Social Change in Jordan and Women and Democratization in the Balkans, but the sexuality program is among the school's most popular.

It's also among the school's most academically challenging programs. In addition to an independent study project (topics include male prostitution, domestic-partnership laws, and how religious and sexual identities relate to each other), students also must complete a field-study seminar in addition to the program's main seminar, which includes trips to London and Berlin to compare other European attitudes toward gender and sexuality with the Dutch perspective. Trips to a sex-reassignment clinic and to the Sachsenhausen or Ravensbruck concentration camps to learn about the Nazi persecution of gays and lesbians are some of the other excursions.

When the program was first conceptualized, the Netherlands seemed like the natural choice. "The Netherlands is in such a unique situation," says Peg Alden, who is the founding academic director of Sexuality, Gender, and Identity. "It is so tolerant but is also unique in academics." Alden notes that no other country has such extensive gay and lesbian studies archives and resources, and students are thrilled with the academic opportunities available to them that they can't find in the United States.

"I felt like Charlie finding the golden ticket in a Wonka bar when I found this program," says Alex McCown, an alumnus of the program and of St. Paul, Minn.'s Macalester College. A women's and gender studies major at the time, McCown knew as soon as he learned about the SIT program that it was right for him. "It was great because it was so radical," he says. "Sessions ranged from Judith Butler to two women who came in to teach us about intensive S/M."

While students experience Dutch society's acceptance of varying sexualities, they also find out that the Netherlands is not always the tolerant utopia it is perceived by many to be. "It is very difficult to be a person of color there," says Nile Park, an Asian-American senior at New York's Vassar College who attended the Netherlands program in fall 2001. "I would be riding my bike and people would shout racist remarks at me. It was very disturbing."

In fact, the students found that the issues of racism and homophobia are still so prevalent in the Netherlands that many of them chose it to be the focus of their independent study project. Park, a women's studies and political science major, researched ideologies of black women's sexuality, particularly that of women from the former Dutch colony of Suriname.

Still, almost all the students agree that actual importance placed on sexual orientation is significantly less in the Netherlands than it is in the United States. "More [Dutch] youth prefer to go without labels," says Nick Sakurai, a sociology major from the University of Illinois who went to Amsterdam in spring 2001 to study the lives of local young gay men of color.

Sakurai says the program was perfect for him because it complemented both his academic agenda as a sociology major and his personal goals as a gay activist. He feels the experience will help him as an activist by giving him a broader perspective on issues of gender and sexual identity.

It's that kind of versatility that academia needs, says Glenn Grossman, a University of North Carolina graduate student associated with the campus task force that recommended and won approval for that school's proposed sexuality studies program. "Most colleges categorize gay-related study programs under student affairs, and the problem with that is that subjects are taken much more seriously when they're categorized under academic affairs," Grossman says. "Acknowledging gender and sexuality studies as an academic pursuit encourages respect for all people. Regardless of what someone believes, if a student hasn't critically examined these issues, they can't consider themselves an educated member of society."

Desroches also writes for The Village Voice.