Scott Bonnell is a 21-year-old University senior majoring in political science with a business minor. He wears an unassuming, stylish haircut, is dressed like a regular college student and carries a dark beige Banana Republic messenger bag.
All of which may sound average and ordinary.
But Bonnell is gay.
For many young people who are gay, college is the first place they can acknowledge their homosexuality openly. Self-discovery is said to be one of the purposes of higher education, and college towns often provide a sense of freedom and a more liberal community than students have experienced before.
But for Bonnell, who recently came out to the entire country in The Advocate, the nation’s longest-running gay news magazine, a sense of freedom was only half the battle. In order to express fully his gay identity, he needed to find a place where no one knew him and he could begin with a clean slate. That happened earlier this year, when he was an intern for Disney in Orlando, Fla.
“That was the major turning point,” he said, “where I decided basically — here it is; I’m laying it out on the table, and if no one likes it, then…”
He trails off, politely not finishing the sentence. For his national coming out, however, he did finish the thought.
“If you don’t like it, then fuck you,” he wrote on The Advocate’s Web site.
That emotion, that uncompromising sense of self, likely came from the stress he carried while living an “average” life — or at least, an average heterosexual life.
“All my friends, before I told them, thought I was straight,” he said. “So they’d always come up to me and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about that girl? She’s kind of cute.’ (They would) fix me up on a date. And I just got sick of it.”
The tension eventually built to where Bonnell felt he had no other choice but to come out.
“I was afraid to check out a guy,” he said. “I just couldn’t be myself. I mean, it pissed me off after a while. It got to the point where I was just like, this isn’t even worth it.”
Even then, the decision was difficult because Bonnell wasn’t sure how his ordinary friends in Beaverton — which he describes as “conservative, yuppie, judgmental” — would react.
“What are they going to think?” he asked. “Are they still going to be my friends? You know, everyone says that if they’re not your friends after telling them, that they weren’t your true friends to begin with.
“But it’s a different feeling when you’re actually going to do something like that — like tell them.”
Since living in Florida, Bonnell has come out to most of his friends, but not all of them.
“I’ve got two friends up in Portland who I love very much and I would do anything for, but I know that they’re extremely conservative and completely anti-homosexual,” he said. “They’re the only two that I’m really, truly afraid to come out to because I think I actually would lose them.”
Bonnell is in a similar situation with his parents, whom he has not told about his sexuality.
“I feel like we’re probably not as close as we could be if they were understanding of it,” he said. “It really sucks when I go home for a weekend, and they’re asking me, ‘So what have you been doing with yourself?’”
Here, Bonnell’s voice sounds almost plaintive.
“And I want to tell them, you know, I threw a great dinner party on Saturday night with 20 of my friends, and they’re all gay,” he said. “We just had a couple of bottles of wine and barbecued.
“Instead, I’m like, ‘I had a few friends over. And you don’t know them.’”
It’s his friends, here on campus, that Bonnell said is the best part of being honest about his sexuality.
“Once I came out, I opened up to all these different people. I started going to Monday night group, and meeting all the different guys over there. And we’re like one big, happy family now.”
In general, Bonnell said the University is a positive place to express and discuss homosexuality.
“It’s come up in classes before, and I’ve never been offended by anything a professor has ever said,” he said. “Classmates are a different story. And it’s not been directed toward me; it’s just been the topic in general — the way that they speak of it, or think of it. They have an uneducated opinion.”
Uneducated opinions may be an average part of the college experience, but for some gay students, violence can also be a fact of life. Bonnell said he has never felt threatened on campus, and in fact, it was at the University that he felt motivated to reveal his sexuality to a female friend.
“The thought just popped into my head that I would tell her because I was at a party she threw, and there were two gay guys at the party,” he said. “They were boyfriends, and they were really comfortable in the environment, holding hands and hugging.
“I saw that my friend was perfectly fine with it. None of my friends had ever been OK with it in that way — that I had noticed. So I felt really comfortable telling her.
“The only awkward part was that she wanted to go on a date about a week before that. That was kind of tough, to talk to her and be, like, ‘Oh, by the way, that date’s not going to work, because…’”
Bonnell trails off again, laughing as he recounts the incident. Ultimately, his first moment of self-discovery is a story about dating awkwardness between and a young man and a young woman.
How ordinary.
Related Links:
Coming out in The Advocate: A new tradition
National Coming Out Project Homepage
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Educational and Support Services Program
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