Compartmentalizing Communities or Creating Continuity: How Students Navigate LGBQ+ Identity Within and Beyond College

ABSTRACT

Sociologists are working to expand knowledge about the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ+) college students. Yet there is little research on how these students come to navigate their identities over the course of higher education. Analyzing in-depth interviews with 20 LGBQ+ college seniors, this study finds evidence of two ways of making meaning of LGBQ+ identity that correspond with two strategies for managing identity disclosure. One group of participants described being LGBQ+ as a painful or peripheral identity; they compartmentalized communities, revealing their identity in some settings but not others. Meanwhile, a second group of participants perceived LGBQ+ identities as a source of pride and core to their sense of self. They created continuity by disclosing their sexual orientation across settings. These strategies extended to students’ plans for after college as they anticipated how they would navigate their identities following graduation. Our findings have implications for students’ experiences in higher education and opportunities in the transition to post-baccalaureate life.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Tharuna Kalaivanan, Fanni Farago, and Matthew Boero for their valuable research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ We refer to LGBQ+ students rather than LGBTQ+ students because our project focuses on identity as it relates to sexual orientation, rather than gender identity. Cisgender, transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid individuals were included in the study.

² We borrow the term “compartmentalized” from McCabe’s (2016) description of college students’ social networks. While her work is not focused on LGBQ+ students specifically, McCabe shows that in contrast to those who form tight-knit communities or focus on individual friendships, some students “compartmentalize” their social lives in multiple clustered groups with little overlap in membership.

³ These questions primarily inquired about groups or settings such as “family,” “clubs,” “classes,” or “university offices,” eliciting descriptions of how students navigated identity in relation to communities, rather than individual relationships. While some students used specific relationships (referring to “my classmate,” “my sister,” etc.) as examples, most of our data speaks to the impact of broader communities. Given the findings of research on the importance of friendships and mentors for college students and LGBQ+ individuals (McCabe 2016; Rumens 2010), future studies could explore how specific relationships inform the navigation of LGBQ+ identities in college and after graduation.

⁴ We also examined interview transcripts for contrasting cases (Glaser 1965). Specifically, we looked for students whose identities were usually affirmed but who described their sexual orientation as less central to their sense of self or students who primarily encountered prejudice but saw LGBQ+ identity as core to their sense of self. Our data revealed one such case from Harriet, who typically had affirming experiences on campus but described her bisexual identity as peripheral to her sense of self. This may have been due to Harriet’s experience living off campus with her family, where she was not out to her mother and her father did not acknowledge her sexual orientation. While it is difficult to draw insights from this single case, future research should remain open to other patterns of experience and meaning making.

⁵ These general patterns suggest that encountering affirmation or marginalization guided students’ meaning making about LGBQ+ identities, but this was not a simple, one-way causal relationship. For instance, students who came to see their identities as a source of pride were not fully insulated from homophobia or heteronormativity and sometimes had to reconfigure their community involvement to address these forms of marginalization. In other words, while experience informed meaning making, the strategies described below also fed back into the ways students understood LGBQ+ identity.

⁶ Alex identified as gender fluid, noting that “I use she/her and he/him pronouns depending on the day.” On the day of our interview, Alex was using she/her pronouns, so we use these pronouns when referring to Alex throughout this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Paul P. Fidler Research Grant from the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.

Notes on contributors

Blake R. Silver

Blake R. Silver is assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University, where he also serves as director of data analytics and assessment in the Honors College. His research focuses on higher education, culture, and social stratification. He is the author of The Cost of Inclusion: How Student Conformity Leads to Inequality on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2020). His other recent publications appear in Sociological Forum, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Qualitative Sociology, and Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education.

Lily Krietzberg

Lily Krietzberg worked on this project as a lead research assistant in the Social Science Research Lab at George Mason University, where she has studied educational transitions with a focus on the transition from the senior year of college into postbaccalaureate life. She has also studied postgenocidal intergenerational trauma and completed a bachelor’s degree in conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University.