Andrew R

Communications (‘11)

How was your experience at BYU as a queer student?

I remember going to a bishop to talk about having feelings of same gender attraction, or whatever, and I remember the bishop kind of saying, "Okay, what does that mean?"

You know?

And I was like, "I don't know, you tell me. Like I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this."

So it was kind of one of those experiences where I always felt like an outsider at BYU, even though I had always wanted to go there from when I was a kid. I mean, my parents kind of, growing up, my parents took me to see the campus and to experience that, and I always kind of knew that that's where I wanted to go to school, and I didn't really know why, and I applied, got rejected, applied, got rejected.

What advice do you have for current queer students?

Like, as soon as I graduated, a year later, I saw this video going around of all these students talking about how they were gay or they were lesbian or whatever.

And I'm like, "Wait a minute. Where was this when I was there?"

And I was still coming to terms with it, so it was, in a way, when I saw that video, I was kind of angry, you know.

It was like, I wish I would have known that there were other people like me at this school; it would have totally changed my experience.

Answers to the questions are transcribed from Andrew’s video interview. The transcription does not cover the entire video.

Posted August 2022