Dear Luther Community,

I don’t know how familiar any of you are with our neighbors to the south at Grinnell College, but here’s some recent news from their part of the world: the weekend of Feb. 23 a student’s door was vandalized. She was apparently associated with the queer group on campus, and the things she had on her door were ripped down and replaced with anti-gay slurs. This incident was treated as a hate crime, and both campus security and the Grinnell Police Department were notified. Later in the week, over 30 students who were known or perceived to be queer received hate mail in their school mailboxes. Again, both campus security and the police were notified.

There has been an enormous student response at Grinnell in demonstration against whoever is doing these things, and I am in no way trying to diminish that. A rally has been held, students are putting anti-hate stickers in their windows and the Bible study group has joined forces with the queer student group. That’s huge.

But none of this stops it from scaring me.

If it’s happening at Grinnell, what’s to say that Luther’s not next? My door pretty blatantly displays that I’m queer. I’m actively involved in PRIDE. What’s to say I’m not next? I have not once in three years felt unsafe at Luther with regard to my sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression — and for the first time I’m wondering how safe I am. My significant other goes to school at Grinnell, and I’m wondering how safe I’ll be the next weekend I visit. Everybody here and everybody there knows I’m gay, and everybody here and everybody there is fine with it or keeps their mouth shut. I’m safe here. I always have been.

Or am I? I don’t think that there are people at Luther who want to hurt me just for being queer. But I didn’t think that anybody at Grinnell would want to hurt me, either.

I don’t like being reminded that there are people in this world who think I would be better off dead. I don’t like them hurting other members of my queer community. I don’t like it when they’re in a place I sometimes consider home. And I am terrified to know that they might have friends up here.

Stefanie Boren