Yasmin Vince investigates why so many people realise they’re LGBTQIA+ at university
Everyone knows someone like this: they roll up to university, fresh-faced and “straight”. When they come back for their second year, they’re bleeding rainbows. Somewhere amid the parties, hungover lectures and late nights in the library, they’ve had their big gay awakening. As a whole set of university freshers disperse across the country this September, it begs the question: why do so many people realise they are queer at university?
A study from last year, published by The Times Higher Education, found that 11.8% of university students identify as LGBTQIA+, compared to just 9.4% of non-university students aged 16 to 24. This could mean one of two things. The first is that being at university has a direct impact on queer people realising their identity and/or makes them feel safe enough to be open about that. The second is that the queer community are more likely to go to university. But, if that were the case, then surely the percentage of UCAS applicants that identify as queer would be similar? Instead, only one in 13 applicants identify as LGBTQIA+ on the forms, which is less than 8%.
“I grew up in a really small village,” says Olivia (she/her), a current undergraduate student. Now she identifies as asexual, but when she was at school, in a year group of just 20, she never even considered that she was anything other than straight. “I’d known most people in my village since I was a baby. So when I never felt a crush, I assumed it was because it’s pretty hard to like a boy when you remember the way he used to pick up worms and swallow them whole.”
No one in Olivia’s North Yorkshire village was asexual. “A lesbian couple run the post office, but I definitely didn’t fancy girls, and I just didn’t realise not fancying boys either was an option. If I wasn’t a lesbian like them, I must have been straight like everyone else.” But when she moved to university and met her flatmates, classmates and a whole host of people embodying every sexuality under the queer umbrella, everything changed. “As soon as I heard the word ‘asexual’ and what it meant, something clicked. That was me, I just didn’t know there was a word for it.”
Olivia’s current flatmate, Jenna (she/they), also realised they were queer at university, despite growing up in a huge metropolis. “I knew what a lesbian was when I was a kid, and I probably met several and just didn’t know it, because nobody really talks in London.” Jenna thinks they grew up knowing and talking to fewer people than Olivia, because they only talked to the people in her class at school and her family. “And then I had the same problem – they either weren’t queer or were a child like me.”
Of course, a lot of people realise they are queer before university but only decide to come out when they get to university. It can be easier to be out at uni, not just because other people are, but because you aren’t as close to people there as you might be to your family and friends at home. There’s less fear of rejection. This was what it was like for Georgie (she/her), who is now a PhD student and first started at university in 2016.
“Each new university I’ve been to is a blank slate. There’s a certain freedom in that, one that made me feel brave.” With an ocean between her and her parents, Georgie, in her own words, became an “experimenter”. When she arrived at NYU for her first degree, hooking up with other women seemed like something a cool girl would do. “I thought, ‘Yeah I’m straight, but kissing girls could be fun, and it will make me look interesting’.”
What happened the first time she kissed a girl? “Fireworks.” Georgie felt the Earth move. “It was like I woke up from a really boring, boy-filled dream.” And she never looked back, even when she moved home to Reading with her diploma. Having discovered the joys of being a girl-kisser, Georgie never wanted to be anything else.
“Somewhere in my subconscious, I probably knew I was a lesbian, since I thought kissing girls was the hot and sexy thing to do, but if I wasn’t so far from home and forced to interact with new people, I may never have realised that. I’m engaged now to a wonderful woman but I don’t know if we would’ve happened if I hadn’t gone so far away.” Her fiancee, Pia, only had one thing to say, “Thank God for girls who experiment at uni!”
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