Excellent observations. You and I you went to college at roughly the same time, and my experiences at Iowa State were quite similar to yours. LGBTQ people were not completely unknown on campus, but they were revolutionary and outside the mainstream. I was not nearly so courageous as the handful of out queer people I knew about.

Young friends of mine today tell me about campus experiences that are so open and accepting that I almost feel like they live in a different world than I lived in.

On the other hand, private universities can be quite a different story. For example, my latest article about Brigham Young University highlights a disturbing problem in the United States. Even though federal civil rights laws protect LGBTQ people from discrimination, private religious universities received routine exemptions from the law. In the 50-year history of Title IX, the federal government has never denied a request for an exemption.

This allows institutions like BYU to treat LGBTQ youth despicably. BYU isn’t alone of course, nor are they the worst example.

Young people from religious families often have little effective choice as to where they go to school, and suicide rates remain high for queer youth from conservative religious families. The federal government refuses take effective action to stomp on practices that hurt queer youth at private religious universities.

Gone are the days, apparently, when even the Republican Nixon administration sent signals to Bob Jones University that they would either stop discriminating against Black students, or the government would use every tool at its disposal to destroy the university.

We queer people have never enjoyed that kind of support from the leaders of our nation, but we deserve to.

The next frontier in the fight for true freedom lies on the campuses of private universities that still dare to discriminate against and mistreat queer students.

These evil practices must end or we as a nation must destroy those universities.