On Life Among Queer Men at Amherst College

I have been thinking about writing something like this for a long time, and my hesitation has come from wanting to do it carefully. If anything, what has kept me from writing sooner is the knowledge that this is not a simple issue that begins or ends with Amherst. Nor is it one that can be reduced to a complaint about campus culture without losing sight of the much larger social world which sha.

Still, as my class moves toward graduation, I feel increasingly compelled to say something about the state of being a gay or bisexual man at Amherst College, because there is a quiet and deeply disheartening reality here that I do not think we take enough time to put into words. Over the course of my time on this campus, I have come to know and engage with other queer men — some openly, some privately, and some still unsure of their sexuality. I have also sat, more than once, very near that uncertainty with others just beginning to explore themselves. I know well how the fear of disclosure can rock a person’s world. I have seen the burden they bear and my heart breaks for them. Across those conversations, one truth has emerged with remarkable consistency: Amherst is not, at least not in the way many imagine, the haven for queer young men that we often assume it to be.

Amherst is a small college in politically deep-blue Massachusetts, once all-male, with a reputation for intellectual openness and social progressivism. To many people on the outside, especially parents and prospective students, those characteristics might suggest that queer life here must be easier than anywhere else and perhaps even more joyful. And I know that assumption well because I hear versions of it from my own family, especially my mom, who understandably associates a place like Amherst with the kind of openness that should make life better for queer students. There is a powerful tendency, especially in educated liberal spaces, to imagine that politically progressive environments naturally produce socially liberating ones. But those things are not the same, and the distance between them is painful. That distance feels even sharper now, at a moment in this country when queer people, and queer students in particular, are living under a level of political scrutiny and hostility that many had hoped was behind us.

What makes this especially difficult to name is that Amherst is not, in the most obvious sense, an anti-gay place. We are not a campus defined by explicit bigotry or institutional hostility, which is precisely why the issue can be so easy to miss. It is a problem of atmosphere, scale, social design, and the unspoken pressures that shape what people feel they are able to do with their lives and bodies when everyone seems to know everyone and rumors travel faster than trust. Amherst is a place of extraordinary social closeness, though that doesn’t necessarily translate to freedom. Very often, that closeness produces a culture in which the boundary between one’s private and public lives can feel alarmingly thin.

For queer young men, this intimacy matters because self-discovery is rarely a clean process. Experimentation often requires discretion before it can ever become confidence, but such attempts often don’t emerge from a campus culture that seeks exposure. They certainly do not unfold easily in a place where so much of student life is mediated through gossip, social overlap, dating/hookup apps, friend groups, team cultures, and the constant awareness that whatever happens in private may not remain there for long. We all know this to be true, in our own ways. The result is that Amherst can become, for many queer men, not a place of release but rather a place of suppression.

Some of the most painful but telling moments for me here have been sitting with younger queer students who arrive expecting a visible and vibrant community of gay and bisexual men and then slowly realizing that what they imagined is not what they have found. I remember once sitting with a good friend in my class and trying, as an exercise in curiosity, to count the openly gay and bisexual men on this campus. We could not get over 20. Whether this number was accurate or an underestimation is less important than the fact that the exercise itself was startling. At a college like Amherst, with all that the place suggests from the outside, one might expect openness to be ordinary, only to encounter scarcity and ambiguity.

That silence should not be mistaken for absence, because the issue is not that queer men do not exist here. Of course they do. The issue is that most of them (and it is more than likely the case that there are more “down-low” and “curious” men than those who are “out”) live in conditions that make openness difficult. Some remain closeted because of family. Some because of faith. Some because they are still trying to understand themselves. Some because they do not want the spectacle attached to queer disclosure and the frankly absurd burden of “coming out” in a world where straight people are never asked to explain themselves at all. Some do not reject the truth of their own desires, but know that this campus, in all its smallness and social intensity, does not feel like a place where those desires can be explored without consequence. 

That is one of the most important things I want to acknowledge here, because the closet is neither a personal failing nor entirely a matter of individual confidence. It is a social condition produced by uneven history through which heterosexuality has been treated as and expected to be the norm. Men do not invent these burdens for themselves. In addition to inheriting and internalizing them, they learn, often early on, that masculinity is policed and deviations from it are heavily scrutinized. Desire must be hidden if it crosses certain lines, and to be wanted by men or to want them in return may place one outside the protections offered to their heterosexual counterparts. Those lessons do not vanish simply because a student arrives at Amherst.

And so the culture that emerges around gay and bisexual men (and those who are just curious) at Amherst is often a volatile one, not because queer desire is inherently volatile, but because concealment distorts everything it touches. Hookups become anonymous, not always by preference but by necessity. Curiosity becomes evasive, and attraction becomes entangled with fear. People search for contact while trying to avoid recognition. Even those who are openly out find themselves caught in a social world shaped by the secrecy of others, navigating a romantic and sexual culture in which a significant portion of possible intimacy is constrained from the beginning by someone else’s need not to be seen. That is painful, not because anyone is malicious, but because it leaves so many people, on all sides of the equation, unable to experience connection fully and ordinarily.

It is important to acknowledge that this dynamic does not fall evenly across campus, even though it is widespread. I know of many in the athletic world here who struggle with the expectations of male team culture, where the idea of brotherhood can be beautiful but also suffocating when tethered to narrow assumptions. I know of students whose families simply make openness impossible, or at least unbearably complicated. Each of these experiences is different, but together they reveal that Amherst does not escape the wider politics of the closet merely because we hone the language of inclusion. Even moments that some straight students may have already forgotten, like the public attention and backlash around Amherst’s queer-friendly orientation performance last year, linger differently for queer students. They sharpen self-consciousness and remind people that living truthfully still invites scrutiny from well beyond this campus.

That point matters to me personally for reasons that extend beyond campus. I have a publication forthcoming on the relationship between sports and the closet, where I explore the central truth that institutions do not need to declare themselves hostile to reproduce silence. They need only sustain conditions under which people understand that visibility comes with cost; holding a lesson that goes beyond locker and living rooms. It holds here, too. All it takes is a culture where privacy is weak, gossip is common, social life is narrow enough to make disclosure feel amplified, and where masculinity remains tethered, however quietly, to rules that many people still do not feel free to violate. 

And yet, for all of this, I do not think the right conclusion is cynicism. I am not writing because I believe Amherst is incapable of better, or because I think queer life here is reducible to disappointment. There is joy here. There is friendship. There are moments of real tenderness, humor, solidarity, and courage. Some people have made this campus more livable for others simply by being honest about who they are. Some queer students have found community in ways that matter deeply. 

There is also a rich history here at Amherst of administrators supporting students through off-campus meetings, therapy, and the use of our resource centers. These things are true, though the existence of joy does not cancel out the structure of the problem, and we do ourselves a disservice when we confuse isolated pockets of acceptance for a broadly supportive culture.

Most of all, it matters to resist the quiet feeling that this is how things are and therefore how they must remain. I deeply understand that people carry fears they did not choose and bear burdens they did not choose. But nothing changes if all of us, individually and collectively, continue to let those inherited pressures define the outer limits of our lives. Our straight friends, too, should take more time to consider the perspectives and private burdens of their queer brothers and sisters, educate themselves, and try to be present with care even when they do not fully know what someone may be carrying.

If there is something tragic in the queer experience of Amherst, it is not just that so many people remain constrained by the world that makes them afraid. It is that constraints become normalized here, too, in a place that claims to offer freedom of thought and of becoming. If Amherst wants to understand itself honestly, it has to be willing to sit with that fact. And we students, queer or otherwise, need to be just as willing to sit with it too, and be more headstrong in violating the “rules,” especially when it would be the most difficult to. Then and only then will the rules start to change for those who will walk these halls after us.