The Christian closet: at religious colleges, gay men and lesbians hide to avoid harassment and expulsion.

At religious colleges, gay men and lesbians hide to avoid harassment and expulsion

One morning last fall Dave was listening to a lecture in his humanities class when a classmate caught his attention by waving a piece of paper at him. It read, FAGGOT: YOU'RE GOING TO HELL. Understandably upset, he told his professor after class. His response, Dave says, was, "Well, Dave, if you are a faggot, then you deserve that treatment." Dave recalls, "The next day I went to the dean and dropped out. That was enough."

Now living near Boston, Dave is struggling to get out, of debt so he can return to school, preferably one not as repressive as the Nazarene college he had been attending. "I went to a Christian college because I knew that I was gay and I had heard so many people say that, God could change me," he says. "When I got there I found out that wasn't going to happen."

Sadly, stones like Dave's aren't rare, say Marc Adams and Todd Tuttle, a Seattle couple who surreptitiously counsel gay and lesbian students at conservative religious colleges. "Over the year and three months that we have been doing our outreach work, we have worked with almost 240 of these students," says Adams. While most colleges and universities in the United States are moving toward more inclusive and progressive policies for their gay students, Christian schools are digging in their heels.

"If you're caught with gay literature or you tell someone you're gay, it's a bus ticket home," says Tim, who recently graduated from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. "They're going to get you off campus one way or the other." The paranoia among gay students is justified. Tim recalls one instance in which a graduate student was caught in a gay bar in Richmond, Va., and was expelled the following day.

Christian colleges prefer to deny that gay students even exist on their campuses. "These schools hate the fact that people who were once part of their camp are now on the outside talking about everything," says Adams, who met Tuttle when they both were attending Liberty University. "We get enormous amounts of mail and threatening phone messages from them. We view our work as a rescue mission."