Henry Goldberg, a 2013 College graduate, was studying abroad in Belgium when he was almost outed. After slipping away from his friends one night and venturing out to a gay bar — a well-practiced routine at this point in the semester — he was approached by a mutual friend of his Penn friends who seemed to recognize him.

Goldberg froze and quickly feigned a Spanish accent to match his on-the-spot story that he was from Madrid.

While the anonymity of being in a foreign city had allowed him to develop a routine, Goldberg wasn’t ready to come out. “It would’ve exposed this part of me that I wasn’t ready to uncover to other people or especially to myself,” he said. He decided not to come out for the rest of his time at Penn.

Goldberg is not alone. While at Penn, many students deal with the new and unfamiliar terrain of coming out as LGBTQ — gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer. Whether it be the first time that they open up to others, or even the first time that they realize it for themselves, coming out as LGBTQ is an individual process that cannot be generalized across any two experiences.

But despite each person’s unique path to self-realization and acceptance, many students’ coming out stories share Penn as a common backdrop.

Discovering a new identity

Coming from an all-male Catholic high school in Washington, D.C., College and Wharton junior Aidan Pongrace was not sure of his sexual identity during the first months of freshman year.

“I guess you always kind of know, but even if you think it may be a possibility, you still think you must be attracted to girls in an environment where everyone else is,” Pongrace said.

Many bisexual students had even less exposure to nontraditional sexualities before coming to Penn. Engineering senior Maya Ebsworth said she had gay friends at her “very liberal” high school, but the possibility of being bisexual had never crossed her mind until freshman year at Penn.

“I had always liked guys and didn’t really know there was anything in between, so I didn’t even think to consider if I wasn’t straight,” Ebsworth said.

Coming to Penn provides a new stage for exploration and often students' first exposure to true independence — an unprecedented sense of freedom that tends to come with more opportunities to engage in sexual experiences.

“When you first get to college, it’s probably the most opportunity you’ve had up to that point to have sex with girls, but I began to find myself making up excuses why I wouldn’t bring a girl back and more and more instances like that,” Pongrace said.

For Casey*, Penn's open environment is a stark contrast with the one they are used to at home. Coming from an all-girl Christian school in Hong Kong, the College freshman — who is non-binary and prefers to be referred to using "they" pronouns — has long been self-aware of their sexual preference toward girls, as well as their sense of not aligning with either side of the gender binary. But even with this internal awareness, coming out at Penn has been a very new experience for Casey, largely due to different cultural norms surrounding LGBTQ issues.

During high school, Casey tried telling their parents on two separate occasions about their sexual orientation and gender identity, but despite those conversations appearing meaningful in the moment, their parents continue to disregard Casey’s identity.

“It wasn’t even denial. It was just ignored as their way of escaping the problem. They just pretended like nothing happened afterwards and continue to assume that I’ll eventually do ‘girl’ things, like find a boyfriend and wear dresses,” Casey said. “Penn has given me more room to breathe and be myself.”

The distinct cultural assumptions around LGBTQ people have also impacted Casey’s experience with coming out to people at Penn.

“In Hong Kong, I was basically out by assumption because by broad Asian standards, if you are a girl with short hair who wears masculine clothes, then people assume that you’re gay,” Casey said. “So it has been a new and surprising experience here realizing that I actually have to go out of my way to tell people.”

Internal acceptance

Many LGBTQ students do not come out based on many contextual factors, including a lack of exposure to unconventional sexual identities or an unwelcoming environment. But beyond external pressures, individuals have to come to terms with their sexualities internally before announcing it publicly — a moment of self-acceptance that takes each person different amounts of time and types of experiences.

“I wasn't ready to come out because I wasn't comfortable with myself yet,” College junior John* said. “And then once you start feeling more confident about yourself, you just want to throw it out there.”

While living in Paris the summer after freshman year, Pongrace said that the experience of living abroad provided the chance to “shed that element of yourself that makes you think that you must be straight or must fit into any specific category.”

For John, the experience of being away from Penn’s environment also pushed him to open up about his sexuality back at Penn.

“When you’re abroad, you’re more removed from the social scene at Penn, and I think that helped me realize why I felt out of place a bit,” John said. “When I came back, I just realized that I wanted to be happier — more myself.”

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But for Goldberg, coming to terms with being gay was a process that lasted beyond his four years at Penn. After never seriously considering the possibility of being gay before Penn, he continued to be unsure about his sexual orientation throughout his underclassman years.

“I wasn’t sure at all freshman year, and even when I experimented sophomore year, it didn’t feel right with girls or guys,” Goldberg said. “This confusion was always looming in the back of my mind, until a trigger switched when I found myself ending up with guys, especially when I was living abroad.”

Looking back at his time in Belgium, Goldberg is still amazed that his friends there never caught him when he slipped away to a gay bar for the night. Like Pongrace and John, living in a foreign culture allowed him to truly explore his sexuality for the first time.

“I was still so confused and sorting things out in my head. I just knew in that moment that it wasn’t an option to be open,” he said.

Back at Penn, Goldberg fell into an even deeper internal struggle during his senior year, which he characterized with two extremes: “either acting out in public or completely retreating and not talking to people at all.”

“I felt alone because I needed to figure things out for myself, and I was scared that I was going to unleash on my parents and friends, whether it be rudely or the possibility of crumbling into weakness.”

After witnessing an LGBTQ student be publicly outed in his social scene, Goldberg decided to wait until after graduation to come out.

“If that had been me, I don’t think I could ever take Locust Walk and have my sexuality be what people were talking about when they saw me,” Goldberg said. “I wasn’t in a place where I could handle that kind of attention because I was still grappling with it myself.”

Goldberg decided that his post-Penn move to Chicago would be his official transition into being openly gay. But the night before his departure, he found out that he had been indirectly outed in his hometown of Dallas.

“I was trying so hard to maintain this control and was so ready to let it go, and then suddenly I found out that random people from my town were talking about me,” Goldberg said. “It hurts to have people talking about something so personal without you there, but no matter how it happened, the band-aid just had to be ripped off at some point.”

But the initial moment of having your sexuality made public is never as conclusive as ripping off a band-aid. Instead, coming out is an ongoing process of meeting new people and entering new situations — experiences that become easier as people become more comfortable with each component of their identity.

“I spent my time hiding it, and it made sense for me at the time because I didn’t have the self-esteem to make it real for myself yet,” Goldberg said.  “But it really is true that the more people you tell, the easier it actually is. The more people you can confide in, the more real it’s going to be for you and the more you’re going to accept the fact that it’s a part of who you are.”

Spitting out the words

After internally accepting one’s sexual identity, the idea of actually coming out often feels intimidating due to the unknown and inevitable changes that it entails.

“Once you actually spit out the words, once you say it, you’ve turned the page, and even though you know it will be better, there’s also that unknown element about how your life will change,” Pongrace said.

Many LGBTQ students share a concern that others may begin to perceive them differently. But after coming out, students almost always realized that people did not react with the judgments that they may have anticipated.

“You internalize it because it’s you, but it’s mostly that people now just know something new about you, and they move on with their lives,” John said.

For College junior Kate*, her friends all responded very positively to her bisexuality, but she was most appreciative of the friend who didn't react much.

“It was the best reaction when she didn’t make it a big deal at all, because I don’t think it should be this huge thing,” Kate said. “I let other things define me, and that should just be one other thing.”

Once they do come out, though, many students note how much the decision has positively impacted their sense of self.

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“I think I’ve grown a lot as a person and gained so much natural confidence by embracing more aspects of my personality,” Pongrace said. “When you’re trying to be someone you’re not, people can see through it, but now I can feel the change even in the way that people interact with me as I can connect with them on another level now.”

Like Pongrace, John now realizes how limited he felt before coming out and openly addressing all parts of his identity.

“I was not truly myself and I was always hiding something that wasn’t fully me,” John said. “It’s made me feel so much more confident, like I can be 100 percent myself now.”

Campus support

Many LGBTQ students see Penn’s resources as a crucial reason behind Penn’s welcoming environment, but both students and administration recognize that formal programs and services can only go so far.

“On campus and in the world in general, it’s important to be supported not just by a small group of people, but by the wider community at large,” Director of Counseling and Psychological Services Bill Alexander said. “For all college-aged students, lots of identities are being formed during this interesting time in their lives, so each of these normative experiences should really be celebrated.”

Alexander said the struggle with dealing with various identities, both related and unrelated to sexual and gender identity, often leads to associated health problems, including anxiety, sleeping issues and mild depression.

CAPS and the LGBT Center offer a variety of resources and programs with the goal of providing a comprehensive support system for everyone on campus.

“It is so important to students that Penn is an accepting place, even if they ultimately decide to not get deeply involved with the organized LGBT community here,” LGBT Center Director Bob Schoenberg said.

Many programs are designed so that students can find support dispersed throughout campus without having to explicitly reach out for services. The Safe Space program, for example, educates and trains students and faculty to openly offer support to any LGBTQ student who might need it. Other programs, like the Preferred Names program, deal with nuances of language and pronoun use for non-gender binary students.

Finding a place in the LGBTQ community

Despite the breadth of resources, Penn students often find themselves in a new world as they seek out connections with other LGBTQ students. For many, the organized LGBTQ community serves as the initial point of exploration.

“We strive to make it clear that we don’t have one profile of what a student who comes to the LGBT Center is like,” Schoenberg said. “We work hard to make everybody feel that they’re welcomed here and there’s no stereotype or description to fit.”

But in many ways, the institutionalized LGBT groups do not offer the type of natural connection that students are hoping to find.

“Having official LGBT groups can help, but people who want to be politically involved, for instance, aren’t the same as people who want to do other things, so even within the LGBT community, there’s different groups,” Ebsworth said.

Though Kate hopes to find more LGBTQ friends to relate to at Penn, she does not feel that the LGBT Center is the right place for her to find this connection.

“When people come out, they often don’t know what to do, let alone find someone to relate to, so I found myself going out of my comfort zone at first at some LGBT events, but with people who I really just didn’t connect with,” Kate said.

Kate also attributes her difficulty in finding LGBTQ friends to the fact that there are very few figures on campus who people can look up to. This lack of visibility perpetuates a cycle in which LGBTQ people refrain from coming out since their sexuality seems like such an anomaly at Penn.

“Especially for gay or bisexual girls, there are rarely any females at Penn that are open about it, so it’s really hard as a female to find people that are your people,” Kate said. “I do love my friends now, but it would be nice to have someone to relate to about certain stuff.”

The LGBT Center recognizes that its resources represent just one of many possible supports for students who are seeking personalized ways of dealing with the coming out process.

“We realize that not everyone will feel comfortable dealing with the Center,” LGBT Center Senior Associate Director Erin Cross said. “Each person is very unique and individual, and everyone takes their own time and their own journey through the process of coming out.”

Beyond official resources, students who have recently come out often turn to one or two people they might know to introduce them to others in the LGBTQ community. Because Penn social life is generally very segmented, students often struggle to find LGBTQ people if they were not already out before coming to Penn.

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“Penn tends be very segregated in terms of social scenes and groups, so coming in freshman year and not really knowing [about my sexual identity], all the friends that I made and groups I joined happened to be filled with mostly straight people,” Ebsworth said. “After coming out, I found myself asking where all the gay people were and how I could find them. It wasn’t an obvious social scene to break into.”

While the segmented nature of campus life reflects the diverse mix of people at Penn, it often discourages students from moving outside their comfort zones after already getting settled into their lives here.

“I think people get into these very rigid groups and worry that it’s not easy to change and find new people after a certain point,” Ebsworth said.

Ignorance on campus

In addition to the difficulty in connecting with other LGBTQ students, certain types of language and behaviors — while infrequently charged with malice — continue to isolate LGBTQ students on campus.

“While no one has given me a bad reaction overall, I don’t think that Penn is as accepting as people think,” Kate said. “I wish there were a lot of things that could be changed, but those little nuanced things are the hardest to switch.”

Especially for people in Greek life, certain customs can be seen as alienating. Beyond the norm that social life revolves around going to all-male fraternities, Kate explained less obvious customs, such as “My Tie” events, in which girls receive the tie of the guy who will be their arranged date for a sorority event.

“Especially if it’s a freshman girl who at first doesn’t want to proclaim that she’s gay, it’s natural to feel ostracized when it is assumed for you to be set up with a guy,” she said. “I think it’s really upsetting that there are things in place like that, on top of all the emphasis on male-female in the Greek system where everyone is always going to frats and places where it’s just hard to find your people.”

Pongrace similarly felt the alienating subtleties of the Greek system, such as the fraternity culture of almost exclusively inviting girls over for parties. Looking back, Pongrace thinks that the process of going through fraternity rush may have deterred him from coming out as a freshman.

“I think it would’ve been even harder to come out in the Greek system just because it’s generally more heteronormative, more based in hypermasculinity,” Pongrace said. “It would just make the newness of being out harder because you’re much more of a black sheep in that environment.”

On a day-to-day basis, many people at Penn subconsciously talk or act in ways that make LGBTQ students feel marginalized.

“I never was ashamed or needed to find it in myself to be OK — it was more other people,” she said. “I thought that it was so open at Penn and would be an easy platform to talk to people, but I feel invalidated all the time, especially being a girl who likes both [sexes].”

Kate described many instances where her relationship is overlooked. Her long-term relationship with a girl is often forgotten when friends talk about couples in their friend group, and her male friends who know about her girlfriend continue to flirt with her at parties.

“It’s very invalidating when they don’t take my relationship seriously,” she said, “and it’s little things like that time that show that people at Penn just don’t take it seriously in general.”

Even at an event for LGBTQ students, Casey talked to a fellow student who expressed his belief that bisexual people are only hiding their homosexuality. 

This lack of understanding about the intricacies within the LGBTQ community permeates all spaces on campus. Casey indirectly felt the sting of discrimination and ignorance when they came across a social media post by a Penn freshman.

“It wasn’t directed at me, but I came across his post that said, ‘I don’t dislike or discriminate against homosexuals; I just think that they’re disgusting,’” Casey explained, pausing to wipe tears from their eyes before finishing their story.

Casey also recalled a night during New Student Orientation when they accidentally approached a closed party and as they walked away, they vaguely heard a guy yell, “Get out of my house, d*ke."

“I really do count my blessings because everything and everyone here is generally very accepting, especially compared to Hong Kong,” Casey said. “But there are still bad things that happen, and even more things that happen and then are not talked about at all.”

While the process of coming out often comes with personal and emotional difficulties, Alexander, of CAPS, emphasized that the goal for Penn should not be to treat people in order to alleviate the hardships that may come from this experience. Rather, campus culture should encourage and foster self-exploration as an accepted and even healthy process.

"The discussion needs to be reframed so that the normative experience of discovering one’s orientation and identity is truly encouraged," Alexander said. "It’s a force that begins to move itself when it starts to become a public conversation."

*Names have been changed to protect the identities of individuals.