Let’s talk about sex, baby. Let’s talk about you and me—and let’s talk about her, too.
You know her.
She swings by your dorm room every Thursday night at eight o’clock for an hour or so, spouting her teen angst in a sultry deep voice that belies her young age. She’s long and lean, her tan and unblemished skin spread over yoga-toned muscles like caramel frosting on a birthday cake. It’s been a rough year for her, what with her family problems and dealing with Ryan’s new uptight lab-partner-turned-squeeze. But ooh, did you see that hair flip, that wink, that seductive and deliberate planting of pearly front teeth into a plush, pink pillow of lower lip? She sooooo wants you.
Yeah, you. Marissa Cooper from The OC wants you, America, to join her in what is on its way to becoming a generational phenomenon: toying and experimenting with your sexual orientation. Teasers about Marissa’s foray into homosexuality with the statuesque bartender Alex—a cheap ratings ploy at best for the melodramatic Fox series—have been overplayed now for weeks on end.
But the greater trend really does exist, and such experimentation often begins on college campuses. It is more than clumsy girl-on-girl hookups at fraternity parties, photographic evidence of which are preserved for eternity in the annals of Community Webshots; it is more than the occasional jocular guy-to-guy butt-slap in the locker room after practice. It is the scientific method in sexuality—questioning, hypothesizing and acting on an inclination to try something entirely different. It is defying parentally supervised socialization that has marked your to-date development; it is determining the chemistry of attraction. Sure, the rhetoric goes, you might think you’re straight. But have you really ever tried anything else?
Junior Colin Crowe has, for one. Huddled up in a Duke women’s rugby sweatshirt, strands of her blonde hair brush the pages of The Riverside Shakespeare as she pores over King Lear. The aging monarch himself had his own views about the inferiority of female sexuality—a notion that, exactly 400 years later, women still struggle with.
For Crowe, delving into sexual experimentation was more Thoreauan than fodder for a Fox show: She began her self-discovery in the woods of North Carolina.
“I came to college not really knowing much of myself. The only part of my identity that I knew was the part I had defined between high school graduation and August 16,” she says. “We had this 50-hour solo during PWILD. I was just sort of sitting there under a tarp, strung up my boot strings, you know, chilling out. And I started thinking.…”
And so she took the plunge. Though Crowe had stifled the urge to experiment throughout her hectic high school days, college seemed like the ideal time. “It wasn’t like, I have to find a girl right now!” she says, laughing. “When the opportunity presented itself, and when I was unbelievably attracted to another woman, I was like, well, what’s stopping me?”
But defying convention is rarely painless. Unlike The OC, where “the hotness factor” is numero uno in the date selection process, personalities are what pique Crowe’s romantic interest: “For me to find someone who makes me laugh, and then find out, well, they don’t have the right anatomy, I guess I just have to sit here—that made no sense.”
The nature of her sexuality aside, Crowe is a lesson in Duke contradiction. She is in a sorority; regardless of whether or not it is based in truth, the image of what anti-greeks call “sorostitutes” resembles June Cleaver more than it does Ellen DeGeneres. The rugby team, on the other hand, is perceived as antithetical to the sorority scene. Amid peers so willing to systematically define people based on their organization—the phrase “She’s so a [insert Greek letters here]” is often used as a way to sum up a girl’s personality—Crowe makes for murkily indefinable water.
Duke is not NYU or Smith, and “National Coming Out Day” is not penciled in on most students’ school-issued calendar posters (it’s October 11, for the record). As far as being accepting of alternative or divergent lifestyles, we’re still a little wet behind the ears. And it’s not just about coming to identify yourself as gay, straight or bisexual—labels that Crowe calls “haunting.” Timidly dipping a toe into the deep end of questioning your sexual orientation is quite different from diving straight in, it seems. It may come as no surprise that kinky exploration is often kept on the proverbial down-low—especially with men—and is retained within subcultures that veer away from mainstream social life.
Maggie Kennedy, a senior who asked that her real name be withheld, feels the sequestered nature of experimenting culture is particularly exaggerated at Duke. She went through high school thinking she was a lesbian with occasional straight tendencies; she had a sex-based relationship with another girl in her late teens, but it was “very closeted.” Coming to college, then, only made things more confusing.
As is the predisposition for those consumed with identity crises—racial, sexual or otherwise—Kennedy kept a socially-compliant façade. “My freshman year I started dating a guy, but I hooked up with two girls—I was still sort of straight on the outside,” she says. The atmosphere at Duke is not conducive to identity-seeking, she explains, especially when compared to that of UNC, where she spent a semester for the Robertson Scholars program. There, it was much easier for her to surround herself with others in the same sexual limbo.
“It’s pretty repressive here. The problem is that the lesbian community here seems to be very, very exclusive—if you’re not already committed to the identity, then it is a stretch to want to go to the club meetings,” she says. It can be tough enough to admit to yourself and others that you’re questioning an integral part of your identity—even tougher to act on those same feelings of uncertainty. But to immediately align yourself with a lifestyle or activist group, both Kennedy and Crowe say, is extremely difficult.
“Within that group there seemed to be a lot of cattiness that I was always uncomfortable with because I wasn’t yet sure about where I was,” Kennedy says. “You have the sorority girl who drunkenly makes out with another girl at a frat party; you have the catty lesbians. But anyone in between those two feels uncomfortable. I always felt that if I kissed a girl on campus at a party with guys, I would be taken as one of those sorority girls. At Carolina, I found that it was easier to surround yourself with people that were a little more openly in-between.”
Crowe’s sorority has never pressured her to cease her sexual exploration, she says, and adds that her “big sister” encouraged her to bring a girl to semiformal. But like Kennedy, she has never aligned herself with LGBT groups or even committed to a particular brand of sexuality. “I don’t see the rush to figure it all out,” she says. “I wish that there weren’t labels, and I wish undergrads like me—kids who are just hanging out—didn’t feel that kind of pressure.”
But what does it mean to just be “hanging out?” It doesn’t usually mean two guys going out for a nice steak dinner at Chamas, getting to know each other intimately over a bottle of Pinot Noir—au contraire. In the same way that the heterosexual lifestyle has degenerated from sock hops to casual sex, testing your orientation seems to similarly rely on direct sexual encounters.
Roxy Brown, another senior who wished to remain anonymous, is that case in point. She is petite and looks even more so under the high ceilings of her spectacular apple-green dining room. Her lithe frame is bent over her laptop; an English major, she is correcting high school essays as part of an SAT tutoring program. “It’s so sad,” she says. “Some of these kids, they write these great essays and I have to tell them, ‘No, they don’t fit the mold.’”
Defying the mold, perhaps more so than College Board criteria, is something that Brown knows her fair share about. Though her demure manner makes her a lady in the street, Brown is, without hesitation, an admitted freak in the bed. “I’ve experimented with women, I’ve experimented with men, I’ve experimented with more than one person,” she says. “I’ve also experimented with assuming different gender roles via strap-ons and such.”
If only her SAT-prep pupils knew.
In contrast to Crowe, whose own wrestling with sexuality began with self-evaluation, Brown is a hands-on learner. Aside from trying various acts, she has also manipulated the psychologies and cognitive aspects of sex. Role-playing is something she has tried often; she once dated an actor, an experience she recounted with visible pleasure. “Once you’ve started experimenting, it makes dating people who don’t experiment really boring,” she says. “I went out with this kind of conservative, religious guy a few days ago, and he wouldn’t even take off his clothes.”
Brown is still not entirely certain where she asserts herself sexuality-wise, though she says she is probably bisexual. And among experimenters like Brown, such confusion is commonplace.
From a purely biological aspect, submission to another in a sexual act can facilitate pleasure, regardless of participants’ genders. Imagine that you are in a restaurant that serves gay sex and straight sex. Unsure of what to order, you opt for the tasting menu and try everything. You emerge at night’s end having had a great sexual experience with a person of the same gender; the straight encounter was lackluster. Does this mean that you are gay, or was it just a mechanical victory on the part of your gay pleasurer? If it is just about achieving orgasm, then there might not be an easy way to tell; good sex is different than a fitting sexuality. Lasting feelings of fondness—love, actually—is perhaps a more precise determinant.
Duke as an institution is neither very conservative nor very religious; the Chapel made national headlines when it agreed to recognize and perform gay civil unions in 2000. Yet people like Brown and Kennedy are turning elsewhere—to Chapel Hill or even New York, where Brown had a fling with a female law student over winter break and where Kennedy met her current significant other—as venues for self-discovery.
But the right-leaning and religious do have a campus voice. Russell Miller, a junior, identifies himself somewhat along those lines. He is heterosexual and an active member in the Wesley Fellowship, a Methodist student group; he professes to be “very open-minded” to varying sexual behavior. He feels that experimentation, however, is more an attempt to shrug off the day-to-day blahs.
“I think boredom is a big reason,” Miller says. He describes experimenting college students as suffering from a “middle school complex” where anything goes. “In middle school, people are immature—they like to experiment because they’re growing up. They have some restrictions on them because their parents are in their lives…but [college] is a time that I view as middle school without the restraint. You have money, booze, cars, drugs, whatever you want—the financial and other means to make any decision you want, good or bad.”
And while Crowe attributes the lack of open behavior to the somewhat closet-happy, repressive nature of the bisexual scene—“I don’t think the lack of open experimentation is because Duke doesn’t admit any gay people,” she says—Miller believes the absence is simply inherent.
“It’s not like the vast majority of Duke students are either gay, bisexual or confused. If 90 percent or more of the people on campus are straight and know they’re straight, then you’re not going to see a lot of experimentation,” he says. “If I look at a man, if I were to try and think about being romantic—it’s just disgusting to me.... I can’t imagine being with a man without feeling sick to my stomach. It’s not like all straight people necessarily feel that way, but I bet a lot do.”
But Crowe, Brown and Kennedy shy away from strict dichotomy, from sexuality as a crisply sacrosanct notion of straight-or-bust. To them it is a continuum, a gray zone, a numbered scale from one to 10. The three seem to identify themselves as somewhere in the nebulous middle. “I think it was Gore Vidal who said that his sexuality was more a series of inclinations than anything else,” Crowe says. “A spectrum is more fair. It’s more fluid and it corresponds to change, like a change in weather. A bunch of my gay friends are like, ‘Where are you today on the spectrum, honey?!’”
Even traditional heterosexual relationships can fall into the same fuzzy gray area, resisting easy categorization. Kennedy, for example, has been with the same guy for a year, though the relationship is “much more queer” than her relationships and sexual experiences with females. “We have the least straight sex that I’ve ever had in my life. In terms of the dynamics, in terms of things that we’re open to trying, we really fuck with gender roles,” she says, thumping the table.
Though experimenting females are oftentimes relegated to the fringes of Duke’s social scene, experimenting males are much more isolated to very distinct and separate social realms of campus. Instead, they seem more concerned with evading discovery than with actually acting on the urge to experiment.
“I’ve heard a lot of stories about guys experimenting within some fraternity section—you know, crazy all-male foursomes in the bathrooms of a selective house,” Brown recalls. “But people aren’t willing to talk about it.” And as she prepares to graduate and leave university life behind, she expresses concern for the Marissa Coopers of the future. “I think it’s changing a little bit, but it has not changed a lot at all since I’ve been here.”
Tough luck. Up against the drowsy and languid nature of a Southern campus’ sexual evolution, it’s a hard knock coming-out process. But the role of sex for the gay, straight and bisexual is becoming more similar; regardless of orientation, it can be a serious endeavor, a casual weekend routine or some combination of the two. The few (and the brave) openly admit that they’re still testing the waters.
Crowe, at least, is having fun while trying. As part of a bet with a male friend in her selective living house, she is on a quest to hook up with at least one person from all 50 states. And by not limiting herself to either males or females, Crowe already has the advantage.
“I got an Alaska and a Hawaii in one night,” she says, laughing irreverently. “It is a great way to learn your state capitals.”
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