M’kay. Sorry to let this sit unanswered for so long - I was trying to figure out what, exactly, to say. I guess the queer scene at Oberlin is a microcosm of the school in general: small, quirky, and occasionally frustrating, but still much better than most other places.
There are lots of queer students here; I’ve heard estimates ranging from thirty to sixty percent of campus as some flavor of LGBQ. Most of us come to Oberlin from high schools where very few students were out, so it’s obviously a refreshing change. Being out is a non-issue, and most folks find friends who are queer without really trying. As a consequence, the queer community isn’t super organized, since you don’t really need to join clubs or go to events to find support or like-minded friends. That said, there are several LGBTQ groups on campus – Lambda Union, Trans Advocacy Group, Queer Jews, Zami (for queer people of color) – that hold events and support meetings, and are a good way to meet people. The Multicultural Resource Center has an LGBTQ Community Coordinator and hosts social events.
Hook-ups are more common than relationships, but there’s hardly a dearth of people who want to date. Finding a dating pool can be weird, though hardly just for queer students: take 2,800 people and subtract the ones who are already taken, who are of the wrong gender and/or sex, who are not attracted to your gender/sex, who have nothing in common with you, and your roommate… There’s not a lot of casual dating – probably because the student body is so small that by the time you ask someone out, you usually know them pretty well and are ready to skip ahead into a more serious relationship (the “Oberlin marriage”).
If you’re like most people, you’ll spend anywhere from three months to three years cursing the dating scene, and then meet the perfect person and promptly forget what the problem was. It was amazing for me to get to campus and meet real live queer folks who were actually
couples – in high school that just didn’t exist, especially for guys.
As for vocal performance… well, both of the male voice majors I’ve met were queer
That’s a tiny and probably unrepresentative sample, but there are plenty of queer connies. You won’t lack for company.