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Somewhere in between

Samantha Edmondson

Daily Egyptian

Patrick Dilley is aware of the "boxes" society has classified for sexual identities.

He has seen them change over time, change his own experiences, the lives of non-heterosexual friends and other men on college campuses.

But he has found some non-heterosexual men lie within those boxes and some lie outside. He thinks of himself "somewhere in between."

As gathered and written in his book released last week, "Queer Men on Campus," Dilley, an assistant professor in higher education and qualitative research at SIUC, told the shared experiences from 57 men during the last 60 years about finding their identities, behaviors and meaning within classifying which box they did or did not fit in to.

Fitting Inside a Box

Dilley remembers going to his Student Union at Oklahoma State University his freshman year and making the trek up to the tiny room on the fourth floor where the gay student organization meetings were held.

He took a series of escalators to the long hallway where the room resided and would walk slowly to the door. But many times he would pass the door, not entering.

"I remember going up on the escalators on a Thursday night, skipping my Intro to Psych class and walking past and walking all the way down to the end and walking back; I did that two or three weeks in a row before I finally went in," Dilley said. "We were all so afraid, afraid of a lot of stuff."

He said this was in stark contrast of his residence hall life. Dilley explained the advisers pushed him into moving into Parker Hall, the "gay" hall at the time.

"There was a group of people I would socialize with, study with there and I liked it," he said. "But most of my life was taking place in the city."

He moved back home to Clay City after one year, giving up his scholarship. But he said his behaviors did not fit neatly into a "box."

"I wasn't leading a parallel life, but I was leading two lives that were different," Dilley said. "I was passionate about both."

Developing an extensive background through his master's program at University of Kansas, he decided to focus on non-heterosexual identity of gay men on college campuses for his dissertation.

He started to compile information, using a traditional development model study, by gathering information in groups and finding out what identities fit into which areas.

But, Dilley realized after hours of work that this is how the study should be conducted.

"I came away from that thinking that the format and the theories that they were shaping were telling me I could only come up with that kind of answer," he said. "The data I was finding, the stories and lived experiences of people I was talking too was telling me something else: they were not fitting into those boxes."

Discovering True Meaning (subhead)

Dilley realized there has been a monolithic theme of what a gay college student was and the concept has changed during time.

"I wanted it to be academically sound, but it is really important to take scholarship beyond campus, beyond the circles of whatever discipline we are in, and let civilians, people not of academia to understand the concepts, the knowledge and share their thoughts," he said.

It was hard for the young graduate student to propose this new dissertation idea. And they asked him, "What are you going to find?"

"I had to say, 'I don't know,'" Dilley said. "We work in these boxes in education. If we go outside of what we have done before, there is always the risk we are going to fail."

For Dilley, failure was not in his future. Success, understanding and discovery is what was found.

He interviewed 57 men from 22 states who attended college at some time between 1945 and 2000. Dilley found out very interesting stories, experiences and concepts of these men.

After doing archival research along with the interviews, Dilley made some new discoveries.

In the 1940s, there were three dominant identities ˘ "homosexual," "denying," and "closeted."

"There was homosexual, who was slightly public, there was closeted, which was not public at all, and then there was denying, who weren't considering their identity at all," he said. "All of these terms were compared to the concept of 'straight.'"

In the '60s there were new identities that were coming along, and men were not closeted, but they were not hiding either. These men were classified as gay.

"Those that we gay said, 'we are not wanting to be just tolerated and left alone,' they wanted to be active and they wanted a place at the table," he said.

Yet another voice comes through, but not as clear or as loud until the 1980s: "queer."

"Gay students wanted a place at the table, to be a part of making the rules, but queer students wanted to kick the table over and say 'To hell with the rules, which gets to set the rules anyway,'" he said.

Dilley discovered even more identities, which were more specific in the 1990s, parallel, students who shared the denying type on campus but had a gay identity off campus.

But Dilley discovered the essence of his book and discovering identity in the way the final subgroup of non-heterosexual men viewed themselves. This was the "normal" group.

"These students had a disjuncture between their sense of themselves, their actions and the meanings that they made of those," he said. "Those three points are what I eventually came up with to form identity, to really figure out what I was looking at.

"Identity is either this inner sense of who you are, or its your behavior, but what I think is missing there is not neither of those things alone, it is the meaning that you make of that."

Somewhere in Between (subhead)

One student who attended the University of Illinois of Champaign-Urbana was one "normal" male who realized the true meaning behind discovering his own sexual identity.

As described in "Queer Men on Campus," the student applied the same kind of standards for both his gay and straight counterparts.

Dilley displayed the story of a student who said he dated a woman from a higher ranked sorority, then that was a social coupe, but if he gave a oral sex to a member from a higher ranked fraternity, that was a coupe as well.

"That was a sub sub culture from fraternities who would do this, but not just fraternities, those were the people who him knew most, but the same kind of standards and things he applied," Dilley said. "He was just like everyone else, later that he came to a point that he made a different kind of meaning, he couldn't reconcile there was these two different things going on, but while he was in college he found that meaning."

After completing this research, book and now obtaining his doctorate in higher education, Dilley teaches courses involving the same theories he has learned during his study.

He has seen many students, not just homosexual students, attending the graduate classes he teaches and the special guest lecture seminars that touch on all aspects of college culture, as well as gay and lesbian studies.

Dilley does not see an immediate development of a full program dedicated to gay and lesbian studies at SIUC, but he would like to see more classes on the subject.

Paulette Curkin, adviser to the Saluki Rainbow Network, said the program is needed on this campus, and as a research institution, SIUC should develop serious research and studies on the topic.

But even though she has not completed the whole book of Dilley, she said it gives an unbiased academic look into the identity situation.

"One thing about Dr. Dilley is he is a serious scholar, putting this energy into gay studies," Curkin said. "He improves the area of gay studies and nobody has filled that void."

With his book, he opens the boxes that identities are labeled into and allows them to expand and find their true meaning and self-worth.

"We should use theory as a tool to dig deeper and not as a shovel to hit you over the head with and that is what we often times do in trying to use the theories that we have that confine our boxes, that made our boxes in the services that we could provide students," Dilley said.

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