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Don Johnson was on the cover. There on the cover was also a the headline -
ON CAMPUS
AIDS IN COLLEGE
FEAR AND BACKLASH

AIDS ON
CAMPUS

What happens when a
killer disease goes to
college? Fear, backlash,
sexual counterrevolution.
By Lindsy Van Gelder
and Pam Brandt

In the late Sixties, when the Sexual Revolution was young and dewy-eyed and rebellion was a way of life, T-shirts, buttons and campus graffiti proclaimed the news: MAKE LOVE NOT WAR . . . IF IT FEELS GOOD, DO IT! Some of the scrawls seen today on college campuses tell quite a different story: GAY = GOT AIDS YET? Or the equally ubiquitous AIDS: AMERICA'S IDEAL DEATH SENTENCE.

     Acquired immune-deficiency syndrome has arrived on campus, and college life will never be the same again. Fear of the disease has unleashed a venomous outpouring of homophobia with a distinctly collegiate flavor. Some of Dartmouth's conservative students celebrated Rock Hudson's imminent demise with a sorority beer bash. A student entrepreneur at the University of Kansas in Lawrence sold all 400 of his FAGBUSTERS T-shirts in just a few days. But fear of AIDS has changed not only the way straight and gay students react to one another but the way all students think about sex. Monogamous relationships are back in vogue, and celibacy has become chic for the more career oriented of today's collegians. Sex on the first date is definitely out. A survey of 2600 college students conducted by research psychologist Srully Blotnick

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found that only 19 percent now approve of an occasional one-night stand, as against 48.1 percent in 1966. The main reason students cited for abstaining? Fear of sexually transmitted disease.
    For decades, college has been the place where young people experience sexual freedom for the first time. AIDS is not the only sexually transmitted disease to put a damper on casual sex - herpes sparked a minor hysteria in the early Eighties - but it is certainly the most threatening. No one knows exactly how many college students have contracted AIDS. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta have recorded 23,307 cases in the general population since 1981, with less than one percent of those cases - 100 in all - reported among persons age thirteen to nineteen. At ROLLING STONE's request, the CDC computed figures for college-age people (eighteen-to-twenty-three-year-olds); as of August, 688 persons in this bracket were know to have AIDS. With 12.2 million students enrolled in college in 1986, this figure may seem minuscule. But these statistics may be misleading.
    "Any number we have is probably an understatement, because students choose not to stay in school if they contract the disease," says Dr. Richard Keeling, chairman of the American College Health Association's AIDS task force. "Many young people are not sexually active until their late teens, so you wouldn't expect to see the disease until after they've left school. Given the incubation period of two to six years, this fits with the science of the disease."
    Dr. Keeling believes that since college students are more likely to try out bisexuality or experiment with drugs than other people, "they are at a relatively higher risk." Students' sexual identities are still being formed during these years, he notes. "The whole concept of risk groups is wrong." Keeling says. "The behavior is the risk."
    And causal sex is risky business when there's a killer virus on the loose. By 1991, the number of diagnosed AIDS cases is expected to increase tenfold - to more than 270.000 - and 179,000 deaths are predicted to have occurred. There are now 1 million to 1.5 million people who have been exposed to the HTLV-III/LAV virus, which is known to lead to the immunological breakdown that characterizes AIDS. Although according to the CDC some twenty to thirty percent of these individuals will eventually suffer the disease, all of the infected are "assumed to be capable of transmitting the virus to others" - for the rest of their lives.
    Gay men of college age have been forced to come to terms with the risk of infection, and thought they've made adjustments, the paranoia can be debilitating. Steven Vroom, a twenty-year-old senior at New York University, puts  it this way: "Being gay is so hard in so many ways. And then the only thing that at least sometimes makes it worthwhile - suddenly it can kill you. To get through all I've gotten through in my life and then be faced with this is like, 'What a cruel joke.'"
    It's not only gays who should be worried. The transmission of the disease from males to females has been verified, and the virus itself seems to be widespread among young people. The Department of Defense recently tested 308,076 military recruits, largely men in their late teens and early twenties. The tests, which are designed to discover antibodies that are formed as a reaction to exposure to the HTLV-III/LAV virus, showed that 1.5 per 1000 tested individuals had been exposed to the AIDS virus. Military volunteers do not represent the general population; they are, however, a self selected group that would tend to exclude those thought to be in the highest risk groups - "hemophilia patients, actively homosexual men and current IV drug abusers," according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

LINDSY VAN GELDER is a contributing editor at 'Ms." magazine; PAM BRANDT is a New York-based freelance writer.

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    Cathy Kodama, a health educator at the University of California at Berkeley who runs the university's AIDS education program, has made her own projections for the 2 million students now enrolled in California's institutions of higher education. "Five thousand to twenty-five thousand of them might be expected to develop ARC (AIDS related complex)" she say, "and possibly that same number of students will contract AIDS during their lifetimes."
    Most university health departments are reluctant to discuss numbers. A few, however, have been forthcoming. Berkeley has had at least three cases and two deaths. At Stanford University, there have been three known cases among students and seven among faculty members and staff workers. New York University has had five cases. At the University of Virginia, one student has died from AIDS, and three are now suffering from ARC.
    Some universities and colleges, especially in or near urban areas, have undertaken excellent programs to educate the student body about the risks of contracting AIDS. The general prescription is universally known as safe sex - which means avoiding the exchange of bodily fluids, using condoms, having sex with fewer partners.

TO FIND OUT HOW AIDS HAS CHANGED CAMPUS LIFE, WE interviewed more then sixty students - male and female, gay and lesbian, bisexual and straight - as well as health service administrators and counselors at schools in the East, the Midwest and on the West Coast. We also examined school newspapers from dozens of other campuses across the country. What we found is that the fear of AIDS has profoundly affected the sex lives of gay students and exacerbated tensions between gays and straights. Since they are at the highest risk, gay students have the strongest motivation for modifying their behavior. It appears that they have adapted well to safe-sex practices and feel at ease asking potential partners about their sexual and medical histories.
    Among straight students, however, we found that while many have limited their number of partners for fear of infection, they appear not to have changed their sexual habits. Questions about earlier sexual experiences are rarely asked of new partners, and straights appear relatively unconcerned about practicing safe sex. Gary MacDonald, executive director of the AIDS Action Council, a political-advocacy collective representing 180 community-based service organizations, attributes this to "idealism and optimism, qualities you associate with youth. The fact that a deadly virus

'Being gay is so hard in so many ways,' says one New York University senior.
'And suddenly it can kill you. It's like, "What a cruel joke."'

might be among them and that may be susceptible to it just doesn't occur to them."

The Gay Students:
'Maybe in Two Years I'll Be Dying'
TWENTY-ONE PERCENT OF ALL KNOWN AIDS VICTIMS ARE between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine, and forty-seven percent - the largest number of cases - are in their thirties. Those most at risk continue to be homosexual and bisexual men. Consequently, gay men of college age find themselves facing the fact that their sexual conduct my now be a matter of life and death.
    Ken Ruebush, 21, a senior at Stanford, dated girls through his teens, and he had a four-year relationship with a woman while growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He realized he was gay during his freshman year at Stanford but waited for more than a year before he had an affair. "The first time I had sex with a man was in August of '85," Ruebush says. "I waited because of AIDS. I was educating myself and didn't want to sleep with someone without really knowing him and trusting him." When he told his parents that he was gay, they began "Sending me every piece that was ever written about AIDS."
    Ruebush says he ahs only slept with four men, and he feels untouched by the disease. "This is a pretty sheltered community, even with San Francisco out there," he claims. "I still don't know anyone with AIDS or anyone who's even test HTLV positive. I imagine the first time someone I gets AIDS and dies, it'll change my world. But at the same time, I almost expect that will happen. I just don't know when."
    Ruebush's current boyfriend, Jeff Zimman, 30, a recent Stanford-business-school graduate, has already found out when. A close friend and fellow business-school student died of AIDS last December. (The man's name has never been released to the press. "He was very closeted," says Zimman.) At twenty-six, this young man was an avid sailor and an M.B.A. candidate; he was idealistic enough to have taken a year off to work with Latin American refugees. He He returned home with intestinal problems that he believed where related to his travels. His symptoms puzzled the doctors he consulted, and when night sweats and other symptoms of AIDS followed, he withdrew from Stanford and returned to his parents' home in Los Angeles.
    "Before, AIDS had been a newspaper story," Zimman says. "When he died, it was like 'This isn't happening far away, this isn't famine in Africa - this is someone I know. And there but for the God go I.' It made me realize that there were going to be other people I knew."
    Zimman's friend Michael Smith, who graduated from Stanford business school in June 1986, made frequent trips to Los Angeles to nurse the man. "The worst thing was watching his very slow physical and mental deterioration," Smith says. "It took him about a year to die. He got pneumocystitis a few times - that's finally what he died of - but in between he had spinal meningitis, Kaposi's sarcoma, couple of strokes. . . .
     "He was very aware of not being in control of his life. He was aware of the people around him knowing he had AIDS, and he thought it was important that people know and understand what it was like to around someone who had it," Smith recalls. "Toward the end, he was having a harder and harder time breathing because of the pneumonia. The nights were particularly difficult because of the seats. In the end, I think his heart just gave out because it was working so hard. . . . It was one of the most painful things I've ever been through, watching this friend who had been in such terrific shape - he was a marathon swimmer - deteriorate completely."
    This year three other men in Jeff Zimman and Michael Smith's circle of friends have been diagnosed as having AIDS-related complex, a syndrome that can lead to full-blown AIDS. "One of them got a paper cut

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that became so badly infected he had to have his finger amputated," Zimmer says. "He has shingles. He's in the worst shape."
    Fear of AIDS is pushing Stanford's gay students in tow directions, Zimman believes, "Into the closet or out of it. We have the largest number of self-identified gays in the business school ever this year, but I also know one guy who's engaged to a woman now who previously was only in tow long-term relationships with men. I know another guy who was going through coming out last year and got scared. He got himself a girlfriend and is going to try to be straight. It was just to heavy being gay, the homophobia, the impact on his career. The last straw, he said, was 'I can't even do anymore what I really want to do!'"
    But at Stanford, at least, panic and fear are being translated into action. The death of the business-school student - a man who was in the closet - was largely responsible for galvanizing students and administrators to establish what has become a model AIDS education program at Stanford. Here, as at most universities with education programs, the emphasis is on prevention, which translates as safe sex.
    Some men grouse about these restrictions, and others we spoke to acknowledge a longing for a sexual smorgasbord that they never got a chance to sample. "I'm sort of relieved I don't have a history like that and could get some disease from it," says Scott Smitherum of San Francisco State University. "On the other hand, it would have been sort of nice to try it." But David Strah, a nineteen-year-old NYU sophomore, is bitterly aware that even at his age, the damage my already be done. "I don't think sleeping with fifteen people in seven years is that many," Strah says, "but maybe it's already too many. . . . maybe in two years I'll be dying".
    In fact, few of the college men we spoke to express much regret for having missed the promiscuous Seventies. "For most gay people I know, safe sex is no big deal," says a graduate student at the University of Kansas. "We're young; we haven't been doing other stuff very long. for gay people, that part of our sexuality is really learned behavior. I mean, no one's parents sit them down for a talk about the gay birds and bees. So we can just learn a slightly different kind of behavior."
    Rick Lindley, a loquacious twenty-three-year-old who recently graduated from the University of Kansas, is old enough to have a definite before-and-after sex life. He came out during his senior year in high school and first had sex when he was eighteen. "I found out about AIDS a year and a half after I came out. I hadn't been doing safe sex," he acknowledges cheerfully. "In fact, I confess, I was a tramp, I was a scamp, I was a slut, I was a mall bunny. There's a pedestrian mall in Kansas City, near the Liberty Memorial, where after 10:00 p.m. it becomes a cruising site. And when I was first having sex, I admit, I did dent a couple of car hoods. But I only did it one summer. There where all these diseases. It finally downed on me that it was not safe, and it was kind of tacky."
    Lindley now practices safe sex and says, "I don't really feel we're denying ourselves sexual enjoyment. It's just we have a problem, a very serious, deadly problem. Se we have to alter our behavior - not much, just a little bit. It's not asking too much. There's a real home atmosphere in the Midwest. I like the idea of one partner, settling down, not worrying about the Look, being able to walk in the my hair all going kangaroo jumps and breath that would melt plastic - and still being loved."
    Steven vroom, the NYU senior, grew up in a small town in Maryland, where he was "beaten up by kids on a regular basis for being different." He realized he was gay at the age of thirteen and told his parents when he was a senior in high school. "My mom cried, and she suggested I see the priest, then a psychiatrist. The she suggested I had too many female hormones." He became aware of

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AIDS when he was bout eighteen, but "even after I knew about the danger, I had unsafe sex. Because it just happened. It used to be okay to just let things happen like that, but not with AIDS."

The Straight Students:
'People Are Having Less Sex'
"WE IN COLLEGE NOW HAVE THE HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES to learn from," says John McDermott, a heterosexual who ran for student office at Kansas last year on a platform that pledged to take funding away from the campus gay group. "We're seeing that what free love and free sex gave them was broken families and divorced single parents." McDermott says he as been celibate since becoming a charismatic Christian in his freshman year. His "beef" with the campus gay-and-lesbian group is that "they're leading people astray by making homosexuality look so beautiful and wonderful while it really pretty degrading. The acts they do are really pretty repulsive."
    Sexual liberation never took place in the so-called Sexual Revolution, says Sohel Rahman, a heterosexual sophomore from the University of San Francisco. "What came about was abuse. . . . It became just a big orgy. I don't believe in sex without love." Adds Adriana Estrada, a heterosexual senior at Stanford, "Disease is a concern of mine. But I don't sleep around a lot mainly because of the way I was brought up - a strict religious upbringing. I don't think I'd shun a guy if he'd had relationships with other men, but I'd be concerned about AIDS. I would look into taking precautions, but if he meant a lot to me, I would still have a sexual relationship with him. I bring it up. I sort of ask questions. 'What was your sex life before?' I wouldn't just assume someone would tell me he had herpes or something. I'd always ask."
    "Heterosexuals are not changing their behavior as far as safe sex is concerned." says Dr. William Wade of the Kansas AIDS Network, who is involved with most of the AIDS patients in the state. "We've had a real resurgence of herpes recently. The change that I see in heterosexuals is fewer sexual partners, fewer anonymous encounters - primarily their sexual partners are people they know. So there is some change, but not nearly to the extent of the homosexual and bisexual communities. Heterosexuals are also not talking to prospective partners about disease and past partners as much as homosexual now are. In fact, there seems to be a collusion to hide previous sexual encounters. I have several people with herpes who've been in relationships from two 

One counselor says women find it difficult to ask men about their pasts. 'Their attitude is "I'll sleep with him, but I'm not going to talk about that."'

to six months who have still not told their partners."
    According to statistics, the most common way for heterosexuals to contract AIDS is through intravenous drug use, and the transmission of AIDS to the female partners of male victims is still a matter of controversy. Some epidemiologists believe the reason females no predominate among heterosexual-contact cases is simply that these women where the partners of drug users, bisexuals and hemophiliacs - all male-dominated groups. But according to Berkeley health counselor Cathy Kodama, women still find it extremely difficult to ask men about their pasts or even to suggest practicing safe sex. "There attitude," she says, "Is 'Sure, I'm going to sleep with him, but I'm not going talk about that.' It's sort of a funny ethic."
    Carol Feigenbaum, a straight senior and sorority member at Berkeley, says, "I didn't worry until it was too late - well, not too late, but until I found out that one of my partners was bisexual, and since then I've worried, yeah. But I don't think to ask. I guess you don't worry about something until you get it. It just doesn't seem to affect me. It's too much of a pain. It's way too embarrassing."
    In Feigenbaum's circle, "people are having less sex. I think some of the conservatism is fueled by fear of disease, but also you can't go out every night. You have to study. Also there's this sense that sexual relationships are a hassle, because there's an emotional connection with having sex. People are more into having relationships, and you don't want to deal with all the emotional aspects of casual sex. You don't have time."
    A study by an Iowa State associate professor of psychology, Meg Gerrard, seems to confirm what Feigenbaum has noticed. Surveying women at the University of Texas at Austin and at the University of Kansas, she found that in 1978 to 1979, fifty-one percent of the women surveyed had sex at least once a month. Five years later, the figure had dropped to thirty-seven percent. "They seem more conservative," according to Gerrard. "They're more marriage minded. They're more serious about long-term relationships and tend not to think in free-love terms. They're choosier."
    Still another factor putting the big chill on casual sex is the push toward careerism. "They're putting the whole area of sex on hold because they're preoccupied," says a New York therapist, Dr. Shirley Zussman, former president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. "The programs college kids are opting for now require much more time."
    Stephen Jiang, 22, was an anthropology major at Berkeley who originally got involved in a local AIDS education project because of an interest in how disease affects society. When his best friend's uncle died of AIDS, he decided to volunteer. Since his work led to friendships with gays, Jiang's friends assumed that he must be gay, too. "One of my best fiends here recently asked me, 'Can I ask you a personal question?' Right off, I know what the question is. I said, 'No, I'm not.' He knows I've had girl-friends. He said, 'Then why do you support them?' My friends think of gays as a whole different animal almost. After they meet them, they realize they're regular people, but they usually refuse to meet them. AIDS gives them an excuse, too."
    Joel Bellenson is a straight Stanford student whose long-time roommate came out to him. "I wondered what it would do to our friendship. How should I act undressing? Well, obviously, he'd been doing okay before, no problems. Why not now" As Bellenson cautiously adjusted to his friend's new identity, "suddenly, I was not taking part in homophobic jokes. . . . When time passed, and I didn't move out of the room, people started looking at me strangely. I mean, being trapped into being a queer's roommate, okay. But why would you be a friend?" The rumors started flying that Bellenson was gay himself. "The label was disturbing because of the negative societal

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context - like communist used to be. I also wondered if it would prevent me from going out with women. They'd think, 'This guy's gay, why bother?'" Bellenson's reputation as a straight eventually emerged intact, and he says he now spends a lot time "educating" people about both AIDS and gayness itself. "A big thing I've learned from having gay friends is this: 'Heterosexuals, apply the same standards to yourselves. When you ask questions like "When did you become gay?" ask, "When did you become straight?"'"
    Some students even admit that their inactivity (or their discretion) is more a function of conformity than personal values. "If time where different, I might be different also," says a heterosexual student at Kansas. "I'd probably feel a lot more peer pressure if everyone was going out and doing things, and it was a real free-for-all, which is my impression of the Sixties. bit if anything now, there's peer pressure to abstain or to only develop serious relationships." The upshot - whether they recognize it or not - is that gay and straight students probably have more in common with each other in their sexual attitudes than they do with gay and straight baby-boomers.

AIDS Backlash:
Fear and Homophobia

IN A RATIONAL WORLD, THE PRIMARY RESPONSE OF HETEROSEXUALS who are concerned about AIDS would be to practice safe sex. Instead the most common response seems to be increased harassment and assaults against gay students - including lesbians. At Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, a poster announcing a lesbian-organization meeting was defaced with the message KILL THEM ALL. At the University of Kansas, where the FAGBUSTERS T-shirt was a big hit (it had the familiar Ghostbusters logo, except the ghost inside the red, barred circle had a single earring and a limp wrist), the DJ at a local disco found another way to add to the fun. Repeatedly playing Ray Parker Jr.'s them from Ghostbusters, he encouraged the crowd to yell "Fagbusters!" at the chorus.
    According to Kevin Berrill of the National Gay Task Force, violence, threats and harassment against gay students have been on the increase since 1984. But another development potentially more dangerous to gays is the movement to squelch gay rights.
    Victor Goodpasture, a conservative activist and student columnist at Kansas, along with his colleague John McDermott, has opposed the funding of gay student organizations. "On this campus," Goodpasture says, "they sort of expect that we, the student body, should give them money for an office. I don't think, one, that the majority of students want them to have money, and two, that they should have funds for a hot line on gay awareness.
    "If our society was not so open, so into saying, 'Yeah, gays have rights, gays should be able to do this and teach our children in school,' then I don't think you would have AIDS problem." says Goodpasture. "We have to set basic moral values, where we say, 'If you're homosexual, fine, be we don't have to accept you, and you don't have to go out in the streets screaming you can have rights'."
    "Talking about sex around here is spooky," says Father Christopher Cartwright, who is in charge of the AIDS education program at the University of San Francisco, which is a Roman catholic institution. "Every day there's something about AIDS on TV here. Watching TV with students in the dorms, I can see how much they blame gays - remarks like 'Why don't they just lock all those fags up?' or 'Don't use the bathroom on Rick's floor. You'll get AIDS.'"
    USF has no gay organizations for undergraduates, and Father Cartwright feels there would be opposition to setting one up because the Catholic church condemns homosexuality. "We're no more condoning possible after-meeting sexual activity by supporting a gay organization,"

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Cartwright argues, "than we are condoning premarital straight sexual activity by supporting, as we do, fraternity and dorm dances."
    But the belief persists that gay socializing and politicking leads inevitably to gay sex, as does the belief that straights' support for the gay movement leads somehow to special favors. When the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado recently rejected a proposal to ban anti-gay discrimination, one board member declared that gays were no more entitled to protection "than tall brunettes."
    What's especially irrational about discouraging gay campus groups, gay activists point out, is that they are probably the best source of information about AIDS prevention. Gay-student groups are also unquestionably the main organizers of activities - from bowling to square dances - that provide alternatives to the old gay lifestyle of anonymous sex.
    many campuses have risen admirably to the task of AIDS education. the American College Health Association has published an excellent, informative pamphlet, AIDS: What Everyone Should Know, and many campuses - including Stanford, Columbia University, the University of Virginia and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst - have AIDS education programs of their own.
    But despite what has now become a rather widespread media-education campaign about how one can - and can't - contract AIDS, panic on the subject is still not uncommon. One University of San Francisco man remembers coming down with a cold last semester, "and everyone on the floor thought I had AIDS." Bill Bull of San Francisco State reported going out to a restaurant frequented by gays with "a close woman friend who is educated about AIDS." Before they had finished eating, the woman suddenly announced that they had to leave - because she had to use the bathroom and couldn't bring herself to use the facilities at the restaurant. "I told her, 'You can't get it from a toilet seat.' She said, 'I know ... I know the facts. I just can't get past that point.'"
    Many gay student activists have concluded that the issue isn't straight people's fear of AIDS - but the way in which that fear brings other antigay feelings to the surface. Lesbians, a group with the statistically lowest odds of contracting AIDS, have somehow been caught up in the backlash. Carla Rosenberg and Karen Laveless, two gay women who attend San Francisco State, say that they and lesbians they know are experiencing more harassment than ever. "Every bathroom stall in this university has antilesbian stuff on the walls - I HATE DYKES

Some straight students want to believe that AIDS can be caught in dorm bathrooms. 
'It's an excuse to hate gay people,' says one activist.

... DYKES JUST NEED A GOOD PENIS," says Laveless.
    At some level, some straight students want to believe that AIDS can be caught in dorm bathrooms just as surely as medieval Europeans wanted to believe that the Black Plague was caused by Jews poison the town wells and rivers. "On this campus, AIDS has given people an excuse to hate gay people." said Ruth Lichtwardt of Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas. "It's very handy. People who used to argue against [the gay organization] on other grounds are now completely forgetting those grounds and using AIDS." Antigay harassment at Kansas has also increased, with "the sorts of people who's normally drive by and yell 'Faggot!' doing a lot more."
    On one occasion, Lichtwardt was riding in a car with a gay male activist who "was a guy who could be very threatening to a homophobe insecure about his own sexuality. He was ex-military - you could still mistake him for ROTC." Suddenly, a wheel of the car flew off, "and we skidded a block on the brake drum." When they stopped, they discovered that the lug nuts were loose on two of the other three tires. "Shortly after that incident, he left Lawrence. One of the last things he said before he left was, 'I'm just here trying to get an education. And they're trying to kill me.'"
    Gerard Koskovich, a graduate student at Stanford, remembers that his campus, pre-AIDS, had "very little in the way of homophobic incidents, antigay letters to the school paper, anything like that." He spent part of the school year in Europe in 1983 - "precisely when AIDS burst upon public consciousness. I was astonished to see when I got back what radical changes had occurred here - how instantaneously it had become socially permitted to be blatantly homophobic in this nice place, which has mainly upper-middle-class kids who think of themselves as bourgeois liberals."
    Koskovich believes that Stanford has contained much of that antigay sentiment because the administration realized "that if you didn't take care of homophobia at the same time that you where taking care of talking bout AIDS, you weren't going to be able to deal with the problem." In 1984, George Segal's Gay Liberation, a sculpture of two gay men and two lesbians, was smashed with a hammer by vandals. One symbol of the Stanford administration's support of gay students was the return of the repaired sculpture to the campus.
    The effect of homophobia on its targets was revealed last year at the traditionally liberal University of Massachusetts at Amherst when the administration commissioned a special survey following several incidents, including a Heterosexuals Fight Back march and a Hang a Homosexual demonstration. Some twenty-one percent of the gay students reported having been physically harassed while on campus, and forty-five percent had suffered verbal harassment. At least sixty percent anticipated harassment in the classroom, a fear borne out by the survey's interviews of straight students. In residence halls, over half the gays had been harassed by their own roommates.

AIDS Legacy: Odd-Couple Friendships
IF ON-CAMPUS HOMOPHOBIA IS THE MOST VISIBLE REACTION to the fear of AIDS, there is also a growing counter-weight of odd-couple friendships between gays and straights. Shelly fowler first encountered gays when her Christian student group picketed gay dances at the University of Kansas. "One night a guy walked up to me and said, 'How can you say this is wrong?'" she recalls. "I showed him what the Book of Romans said. He started crying. He told me, 'You're not dealing with saids; you're dealing with people.'"
    For Fowler, that statement was a revelation - and while she still "doesn't approve" of gay sex, she now counts gay people among her closest friends. One of her conservative friends has since "jumped all over my case [Cont. on 134]

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[cont. from 94] because [he thinks] I'm likely to pick up AIDS somewhere and bring it to his home, his wife and his kids through drinking glasses and toilet seats and magazines."
    Bill Bailey, an NYU man who hopes to become an Episcopal priest, is the only gay in his fraternity, a fact his brothers were not aware of when he first pledged. He too spends a lot of time breaking down stereotypes, and thus far his brothers have been willing to let him. "My roommates," he says, "ask questions all the time: 'If I share a joint, can I get AIDS?' We share pots and pans. 'If you have it, or are carrying it, can I get if from any of this stuff?' There's paranoia. But I can calm them down. Sometimes they can even laugh at the AIDS paranoia. Like, there's intramural competition between the fraternities in baseball, and they're fond of saying, 'We'll sic Bailey on you!' For Delta Phi, it was a revelation to find a gay person in their midst: 'What? He's normal. How can he be gay?'"
    Rick Lindley, the University of Kansas graduate, has even taken some straight friends to his friendly neighborhood gay bar. "They've had a good time. They'd thought they'd be dark,

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dank, seedy places with drugs all over the place and heavy cruising. But they found the dancing's better and the drinks are cheaper."
    "It's the best of times and the worst of times for gay students," according to Kevin Berrill, director of the Violence Project for the National Gay Task Force. "There are now more gay - and lesbian - support groups on college campuses than ever before. There are also more campuses prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But since 1984 I've observed that reports of harassment and assault from campuses are increasing. And there is increasingly a clash between gay students and more conservative students.
    "When efforts to drive gay students underground by legitimate means fail," Berrill continues, "castration threats and all sorts of other ugly business get resorted to. So in some ways, becoming more visible has made us more vulnerable to people who hate us and want to harm us. But I'm not aware of gay students en masse deciding to throw in the towel and returning to the closet. Most of us would agree that the price of visibility is worth it."          °

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