People kept asking, “Why would you go to a Christian school if you’re gay?” The question is unfair. So many factors—funding, family, a deep connection to the religious culture—could place a student at Harding. While more and more students may show up their first year of college with self-awareness about sexual identity, as they do at the public university where I teach, I know it is difficult to come to terms with yourself if you grow up in fundamentalist Christian culture. Many of us come out while in college; at Harding finding ourselves in a world in which something fundamental about ourselves is a category of silence at best, more likely a category of condemnation and stigmatization.
Ed Madden
Ed Madden is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His first collection of poetry, Signals, won the 2007 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. A second, Prodigal: Variations, characterized by one critic as “a brave and astonishing collection of parables sung by exiles,” will be published in April. Madden is also the co-editor of Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio, a collection of radio essays from one of the South’s only gay and lesbian radio shows.
