GAY GUYS AND COLLEGE LIFE

[gayprojectforum]

For many guys, college is not only a place where you can get university degrees to spend in the job world, but it's also a very important opportunity for personal and human growth through contacts with many other guys, friendships and the birth of new love stories. It is not easy to tell in advance which of the two possibilities is the most important. The university institution is born for scientific and cultural education, but, in fact, bringing together many peers, leads them to a comparison of experiences that has an enormous potential.

This forum (gayprojectforum), although not popular because for many, the use of the internet is limited to social media, and because search engines insert, if not exclusively, mostly sites containing advertising or adherents to network promotion programs, is essentially visited by college students.

In the United States, university studies are regulated differently from what is generally the case in Europe. In the United States, the college expects the student to lodge with other students at the university campus. In Europe, universities are attended by students who continue to live in the homes of their parents, or, rarely, in flats, with other students, but outside the university structure. In summary one could say that a college student in the US lives in college, while an European university student, for example Italian, studies at the university but continues to live in his home, or rather at his parents' home.

In the US, going to college means full immersion in college life, for an European student generally going to university means going to university to attend lessons but continuing to live elsewhere. These are quite different organizational models that have followed different historical developments. In any case for a US student, entering college is also a decisive step towards adult life. I have to underline that, in Italy, the access to university comes at 19, after 13 years of schooling, that is, a year later than in the United States.

I have rarely been in contact with gay guys who attend or have attended college in the US and the evidences I have collected are strongly diversified, the most noticeable thing is that in general, students studying science or engineering disciplines are the most active on the net, in the search for serious gay sites, that is, sites that point to topics related to homosexuality without economic or ideological purposes. The most sought-after contents are not theoretical, almost always the most read posts contain stories of individual experiences (and this may seem strange) stories with too much technically sexual content are far less read than stories with strong emotional content. The impression I have also reported from some correspondence with guys attending college in the US is that for them there has been sexual education but not a real affective education. It is generally easy to study statistically the access to gay websites of US college students because they use their college servers, that have a fixed IP that shows the name of the college.

Italian university students rarely access gay sites by their university's servers because they do not reside within a university campus and it is therefore much more difficult to make a statistical study, but with a large number of Italian students, if there is no statistical identification at the level of use of the Internet, there is, however, the concrete chance of getting to know each other personally. However, face-to-face talks reveal a picture unmatched by the use of the Internet, in some ways richer and more articulate, but also more reticent. Overall, in Italy, university life is limited to technically didactic aspects, and practically it almost never permits the creation of truly important interpersonal relationships. In Italy, a gay student avoids the coming out in the university environment. The institution does only deal with strictly didactic aspects, and often the access to the university leads to a feeling of disorientation, which increases the nostalgia for high school times where much closer relationships with classmates were experienced. Somehow, in the Italian universities, the idea of growing together and of having a common life with colleagues is lacking, and university life ends up, at least sometimes, with a spirit of competition rather than emulation. I did not see very important emotional relationships between gay guys, that were born in college. 

For a gay guy who attends university in Italy, except for exceptions, one thing is university life, that doesn’t have and cannot have anything gay, and a very different and completely separate thing is the affective life: you have to live your private life outside the university, which is in this respect neutral and sterile. I would be really curious to read testimonials about the college life of students attending colleges in the US and it would also be very useful to make their testimonies known to their Italian colleagues and European in general. To start this exchange of experiences, I propose a story, which is a bit extraordinary for the Italian universities, but is a sign of the change in progress: "gay life is changing"