First in a two-part series.

Few people could have guessed that Monica Escobar (COL ’07) was struggling with an internal crisis during her freshman year.

The energetic, bright-eyed daughter of Guatemalan immigrants was a self-professed “perfectionist” who threw herself into the thick of Georgetown leadership activities: Young Leaders in Education about Diversity (YLEAD), Leaders in Education about Diversity (LEAD, the upperclassman version of YLEAD), and the Ritmo y Sabor Latin Dance Group.

When she first joined GU Pride, the campus group for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning students, it was “under the guise of an ally,” she says – a person who participated in the club, but was straight.

Except she wasn’t.

Midway through high school, Escobar began to realize that she was attracted to women, not men. But she panicked.

“I’m `perfect,'” she thought. “This can’t happen to me.”

She didn’t tell anyone during the last years of high school and the first part of college. But then she got more involved in Pride, even taking up leadership roles, and it became harder and harder to keep her sexuality a secret. She finally realized she had to begin accepting her real identity.

LGBTQ at GU

Some students come to Georgetown fully emerged from the proverbial “closet.”

Their friends and family already know – and have usually accepted – their sexual orientation, and the students don’t mind acknowledging the fact in public. Others, like Escobar, struggle with their sexual identity, but come to terms with it in college.

Still others comprise the “Q” part of LGBTQ. They may suspect they are homosexual, but do not want to recognize it for a host of reasons, often related to religion, family or career.

There are just over 20 members of GU Pride, but there are many more LGBTQ students on campus. And the “out” community at Georgetown has been particularly active in the past few years, staging visibility campaigns and sponsoring events such as sexual health information sessions.

Yet although many students find a comfort zone with LGBTQ organizations, there are still subsets of the community that struggle with being minorities within a minority. Blacks, Hispanics, women and other groups report that they often don’t feel entirely at home within either the LGBTQ community or their own ethnic group.

Others don’t even feel comfortable with their own sexual orientation. All of the students interviewed for this article were openly gay or lesbian but also said that they knew at least one person who was still struggling to accept his or her own homosexuality.

Many students say that the challenge of coming out is especially daunting at a Catholic institution, where many – LGBTQ kids included – have imbibed the Biblical dogma that homosexuality is a sin.

Though most students say they feel relatively comfortable at Georgetown, almost all agree that the university and its students need to make a number of important strides before LGBTQ students feel entirely welcome on campus.

Stepping Out of the Closet

Escobar began the coming out process slowly.

“I started testing the ground with some friends,” she says. “Some took it really well. Others, to this day, still don’t speak to me.”

Her voice isn’t bitter. She just sounds slightly stunned, as if they had stopped speaking to her only yesterday.

Like many LGBTQ students, Escobar remembers being especially apprehensive about attending Georgetown because of its Catholic affiliation. And when she walked into her freshman year dorm room, she almost felt like turning right back around.

“I freaked out when I saw my roommate had like five different versions of the Bible and a crucifix [in the room],” she says.

But over the course of the year, her roommate began to realize on her own that Escobar was a lesbian – all the GU Pride meetings were a good hint – and she “took it really well” when Escobar finally told her at the end of the year.

The “coming out” experiences of LGBTQ students at Georgetown run the gamut, from traumatic to tranquil.

Steve Snyder (SFS ’07), who is co-president of GU Pride this semester along with Escobar, says, “I haven’t had a bad reaction yet.”

Snyder, a reserved and eloquent Security Studies major, admits he had a few “hang-ups” about coming to Georgetown. Having come out as a homosexual at the end of high school, “I thought [Georgetown] probably wouldn’t be quite as accepting.”

But he was pleasantly surprised. Initially nervous about living in a forced triple his freshman year – especially after seeing that one of his roommates was from the conservative bastion of Oklahoma – Snyder says that the issue of his sexuality was broached quickly.

The first day, one of his roommates asked flat out: “I just want to know if either of you are gay.”

After swallowing his shock, Snyder told them that he was. They took the news very well, he says. And though he’s had generally positive experiences since then, he acknowledges, “You have to be aware of certain situations, where you have to be careful what you say.”

Kevin Miniter (COL `05) didn’t so much say it as sing it when he came out to his roommate freshman year.

The native of a small town in Maine had broken the news to his parents in high school, and was received with sobs, forced therapy sessions and pamphlets for seminary school slipped under his door.

He figured the reaction of his roommate couldn’t be much worse, and so he sat him down one day in October.

“I like big butts, and I cannot lie,” Miniter began, doing his best Sir Mix-A-Lot impression. “That when a guy walks in with an itty bitty waist . Deep in the jeans he’s wearing, I’m hooked and I can’t stop staring .” He had replaced all the references to women with those to men.

“Wait, what are you trying to say?” His roommate stopped him.

“I’m gay,” Miniter replied.

“Oh,” said the roommate. “Okay.”

But those first steps towards coming out in college did not go as smoothly for others.

Aja Davis was a nervous freshman living in New South when her secret got out. She had revealed her sexual orientation to a close friend, who had a positive reaction, and then she decided to tell her roommate.

“My roommate’s reaction was not so nice,” says Davis, wincing slightly. “She freaked out, and was crying and wouldn’t talk to me. Then she outed me to the whole floor.”

The roommate told several of her friends, and the news quickly spread around the dorm. One day, one of Davis’ friends admitted to her that she was now known as “the lesbian on the floor.”

“And this was before I was comfortable with anyone else knowing,” Davis says.

In her eyes is the same look that was in Escobar’s. Not bitterness exactly, just leftover pain.

Speed Bumps on the Road

Coming out is a process, say LGBTQ students. First, you come out to yourself. Then, you tell close friends and family. And then, when you’re ready, you come out to the world.

But in a society where words like “faggot” and “gay” still resound from the walls of frat parties or the banter of casual conversation, and where the U.S. president himself speaks out against gay marriage, the process almost never ends.

“Once you decide to want to be openly gay, you are constantly coming out,” explains Kyle Holsinger-Johnson (COL ’06).

Holsinger-Johnson was a freshman on the women’s soccer team when a negative incident prompted her to reveal her sexual orientation to the entire team. Paradoxically, it was the group from which she had initially tried hardest to hide it.

“We did everything together,” she says of her teammates, from changing in the locker room to traveling on the road to away games. In the close dynamic that resulted, many conversations turned to love lives – and men.

“I made up a name for my boyfriend,” Holsinger-Johnson laughs, speaking over the phone from Dublin, where she is studying abroad. She kept up the charade of being straight for a long time, though she says the people closest to her eventually guessed that she wasn’t who she pretended to be.

But the situation came to a head one day when the team was standing around before a game “doing this clapping thing” to boost team spirit, Holsinger-Johnson recalls. Just then, the coach came into the huddle, and barked, “Stop this queer bull–.”

Holsinger-Johnson was stunned. She marched over to the bench and sat out part of the game, too upset to play. Finally, after about 20 minutes, she called the whole team together.

“I said that language [the coach had used] was unacceptable,” Holsinger-Johnson recounts. “I said, `You’re degrading me and my friends and who I am and what I stand for.’ I felt very alienated from the team and very different.”

After that, the coach made Holsinger-Johnson go to therapy sessions with her, in which she stated that Holsinger-Johnson “made her not want to coach soccer anymore,” and said that she should have brought up her concerns privately.

For Holsinger-Johnson, who only wanted an apology, that was the last straw. “She wished I would have been quiet and silenced . Well, I’d had 19 years of feeling crazy and silenced and not like everyone else.”

Her anger fueled a breakout performance on the soccer field the spring of her sophomore year. But it was ultimately too exhausting.

“It became a personal vendetta, me proving myself,” she says. “I felt really comfortable around [my teammates], some of whom where really strong allies.”

But the experience with her coach “sucked all the love of the game out of me,” she says. “[The atmosphere] felt very sour and poisoned, and I needed to be away from all that.”

In addition to openly derogatory incidents, many LGBTQ students struggle with strains on their friendships that arise from issues with their sexuality. They’ve seen best friends become distant strangers, all because the friends proved unable to handle homosexuality “up close.”

Escobar had a best friend her freshman year, a friend who had seemed accepting of her sexual orientation. Then Escobar began seeing a woman.

“As long as it was just a theory and I wasn’t practicing [my homosexuality],” the friend could handle it, says Escobar. “But it just changed when I started dating.”

In the summer, she and her friend had a “massive falling-out,” and decided not to be roommates the next year, as they had planned. “Now we don’t even talk,” she says numbly.

Davis can relate. Her sophomore year, she was living with friends who knew she was a lesbian, when she began dating a woman. And she found that the same people who had assured her they were comfortable with her sexuality now became unfriendly and stand-offish.

“You think you know your friends, and you think they’re okay with it,” she says. “But they just kind of turned on me . and we weren’t really talking for a while.”

Her voice tinged with frustration, she says, “People are all pro-gay, pro-everything – until it’s in your space.”