Young voters come out: partisan gay political groups are reaching out to GLBT students on the nation's college campuses.

Like most college students, gay men and lesbians attending Michigan State University in East Lansing have a lot on their minds: a soccer game at Walter Adams Field, a social at the student union, a math test to study for, or a term paper to write. So it's no surprise to openly gay sophomore Jon Hoadley that many gay students at MSU don't know there's a campaign underway to amend the Michigan state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Or that Michigan's Democratic caucuses are coming up in February and the youth vote is expected to be pivotal.

"It is so easy to disconnect what we are doing here with what is going on in the rest of the world, even the rest of the city," Hoadley says.

In early November the 20-year-old Hoadley, along with other gay and lesbian student activists around the country, joined with the Washington D.C.--based National Stonewall Democrats to launch the Stonewall Student Network. Their goal: to have networked with gay voters on 100 college campuses before the general election in November 2004.

Stonewall chapters already exist at MSU; the university of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and the University of Georgia, Athens. kind those groups are working with other campus-based gay student groups as well as partisan organizations such as College Democrats and nonpartisan youth campaigns such as Rock the Vote. "We need to engage mid develop new leaders in our civil fights movement," says Stonewall executive director Dave Noble. "We need to connect students. And we need to motivate and mobilize young voters."

The nation's largest gay GOP group, the log Cabin Republicans, also hopes to mobilize gay and lesbian students for 2004 and beyond through a leadership forum and a series of campus talks. Log Cabin, like Stonewall, is working with partisan campus groups, such as the Young Republicans. "We're talking about reaching a new generation, about trying to focus them on how decisions being made in Washington, D.C., affect their lives, about how they can help transform the Republican Party," says Log Cabin executive director Patrick Guerriero, adding that youth outreach should go beyond gay and lesbian students. "Younger Americans are there for us on our issues," he said.

Indeed, a 2000 Kaiser Family Foundation/MTV random-sample survey of adults age 18 to 24 found that 77% support hate-crimes reform and 61% support marriage rights for gay men and lesbians. A poll conducted earlier this year by Harvard's institute of Politics found that college students age 18 to 24, now 9.5 million strong, could be as influential in the 2004 elections as soccer moms were in elections recently past. Eighty-six percent of the pollees said they plan to vote in next year's presidential election.

But there's reason to be skeptical of that number. Historically far fewer young adults, gay and straight, have gone to the polls. According to the United States Census Bureau, voter turnout among adults age 18 to 24 has declined consistently for years--from 50% in 1972 to 33% in 1996.

"It's awful, young people not voting," says Ken Nadolski, the 22-year-old openly gay chairman of the Stonewall Democrats chapter at the University of Michigan. To motivate young voters, he says, the major parties and their candidates must address why they have stayed away from the polls. One overriding reason is a perception among many young people that politicians don't care about their issues, says Kyle Bailey, 20, chairman of a Stonewall Democrats chapter at the University of Georgia "I think, for a lot of my generation, there's frustration and resentment," he says. "So I think to motivate people, we've got to let them know they can really make a difference."

Bailey and the other campus organizer plan to conduct voter registration drives and hold forums on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues.

Neff is managing editor of the Chicago Free Press.