Ed Madden

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.