Homophobia at Morehouse

By Charles Stephens, WireTap. Posted July 7, 2003.

I have been asked several times over the past month what my opinion is of the verdict that sentenced Aaron Price, a former Morehouse student, to ten years in prison for beating a gay dormmate with a baseball bat for looking at him in the showers. I imagine part of it has to do with the fact that I am a young black gay male, part of it has to do with me being a college student, and part of it is because I went to Morehouse and left because of the homophobia.

Unlike many students I met at Morehouse, I wanted to be at that school. I did not go because my father went there. I did not go because I did not get into Harvard and Morehouse was the "black Harvard." I did not go because they gave me a full scholarship.

I went because many of the men that I admired in my community had graduated from Morehouse. I went because I wanted to be a part of a tradition of great African American men. I went because I was looking for something -- a sense of brotherhood, a sense of community, a sense of something larger and greater than myself.

My first mentor went to Morehouse College. When I met him I was a junior in high school and he was a junior in college. He was everything that I thought I wanted to be. He stood up for himself. He was brilliant. He was ambitious. He did not take shit for being gay. I thought Morehouse had done that for him. Later I learned that was who he was already. He took me under his wing. I think he was flattered by my teenage hero worship. He was a little skeptical of me. He thought I was too young to be thinking about being gay. But he took me on anyway. I wanted to be like him, I wanted to go to Morehouse.

By the time I started Morehouse my dreams were as fragile as glass, and I wore my anxieties on my shoulders like any insecure freshman. Although I had made strides in coming to terms with my sexuality, it was not long before I ran back into the closet at Morehouse. It was not just frowned upon to be gay, but to be different altogether.

I am not sure when I first began to crack. Perhaps it was hearing my psychology teacher say that homosexuality was caused by a lack of testosterone in men. Or maybe it was at a panel discussion where another faculty member voiced his frustration at the number of effeminate men he saw running around campus. Maybe it was sitting in a room with other gay students (and mind you we were all gay) and speaking in code language -- switching "he" to "she" -- when talking about lovers and sexual encounters and speaking cryptically about gay club culture and so forth. I am not certain when I broke exactly, but it was in my third semester that I had to choose. It was either survive and leave, or stay and die.

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