Andreas Jeninga/The Hoya Patrick Metz (COL `04) reflects on his four years on the path next to Reiss. Metz has been active in supporting rights for gay Georgetown students.

It may be the most abhorred building on campus, but it has a certain appeal for Patrick Metz (COL ’04).

“Lauinger is so ugly at first,” he admits. But after many weeks spent inside the library’s bleak, uninviting walls writing his thesis and working as a Writing Center tutor, he’s grown to appreciate it. “On the outside it really looks nice if you have the right perspective.”

Metz has made changing perspective a fundamental part of his Georgetown experience. A former co-president of GUPride, he has been a leader in the increasingly visible efforts of gay students at a school sometimes noted for its conservative Catholic reputation – a reputation, he says, he wasn’t truly aware of when he sent in his application to Georgetown.

For him, Georgetown was a place to find stability – a good school in a mid-sized city on the East Coast. Growing up as a military brat, Metz defines “home” with a stream of states and countries so long it is a surprise he can remember them all. Metz’s father, currently stationed in Iraq, is a career military man who took his family wherever the Army beckoned.

After a childhood that instilled in him a deep patriotism that he retains today, Patrick arrived at Georgetown as an Army ROTC cadet. “And not because my father made me,” he adds emphatically.

He had noticed how much his father loved his career. “I’m a lot like my dad, so I really thought I would enjoy it,” Metz says. “I wanted to see what it was about the military that had made him so happy.” His friends in high school, to whom he had revealed his homosexuality months before, thought he was crazy.

But he brushed it off. “I guess I was a little naive about what `Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ really meant,” he says, referring to the military’s policy that prohibits known homosexuals from participating in its ranks. “But it wasn’t really my thing to go around talking to people I didn’t know about my sexuality, and I was considering a career in the Army at the time, so I assumed I could get by.”

He soon found that the experience was more difficult than he had imagined. He says that the program wore him down. While his Village C East classmates partied until 3 a.m., he was getting up before dawn for combat exercises. Combined with the pressures of `Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ which he soon found to be more restrictive than he had originally realized, Metz found the lifestyle unbearable and quit the program after freshman year.

Out of ROTC and the figurative closet, he soon gravitated toward GUPride, which at the time was beginning its push for an on-campus LGBTQ resource center. Looking to establish a visible, accessible means of support for gay and lesbian students and to centralize other university services, such as the SafeZones program, the resource center became a rallying point for GUPride.

Along the way, Metz was tapped to succeed the outgoing president. Though he never saw himself as a leader for the cause, he soon found himself taking on the role. “I kind of felt a call to duty,” he says now. “It sounds corny to say, but you never start dedicating that much of your life to a project unless you truly feel something needs to be done or needs to change.”

At the same time, GUPride took one of its most vocal and visible stances in recent memory during the GAAP weekends of Metz’s sophomore year. The group’s members chalked Red Square at night and covered campus in flyers with slogans like “There are gay Hoyas, too.”

The memory resonates still with Metz. “There was such a feeling of community amongst the people in GUPride at that time, we were having such a great time working toward a common goal, even with all the ugliness around us,” he says. That “ugliness” included expressions of shock and anger that surprised Metz, who considered their message innocuous. He does admit that the portrayal of the message was somewhat aggressive, but “we felt we had to do something to get people’s attention.”

GUPride never got its resource center, and the project moved to the back burner. The organization did get the administration’s support on an LGBTQ coordinator and on what etz calls a general commitment from the university to address the issues.

He interrupted his activism with a semester in Senegal last spring, applying for the program almost on a whim, shirking his intentions to go to the more traditional French-language program in Strasbourg, France.

Instead, he ended up living with a mother and her eight children in Dakar. “It was such a warm, communal atmosphere, day in and day out . I would go back in a second,” he says nostalgically. Someday he would like to join the Peace Corps and serve in Africa, or maybe go back to school and join the ranks of academia or continue in the gay rights movement through government or nonprofit work. “Well to be honest, I’m not the most organized of seniors right now,” Metz admits.

For now he plans to stay in the District, working with Human Rights Watch. After four years here, it is Washington, D.C., that feels most like home to him. “I can give people directions now,” he says with a hint of pride in his voice. “That’s when you really know you are `from’ somewhere.”

This weekend he will leave the Hilltop with a double major in English and French, an African Studies certificate, friends he says will stay with him forever and experiences that have made him a fundamentally different person than the one who arrived here four years ago. He says he will miss being at a place so steeped in tradition, he regrets having to give up his three-year stint as a WGTB show host and laments the fact that he didn’t get more involved with campus publications.

But many of the parts of Georgetown he likes best are the ones he also finds troublesome, from the university’s insular nature to the diverse opinions it attracts – and the conflict that the two things inherently create.

“Georgetown’s strengths are also its weaknesses,” he says. “I feel like they are one and the same and it’s all in how you consider them, how you react to them.”

And for someone who can even find something remarkable in Lauinger’s oft-lamented architecture, that perception has made all the difference.