>In Oklahoma City, Brewer attended an
>arts-intensive magnet high school, where his
>best friends were white girls and being gay
>wasn't that big of a deal. His senior year, a
>recruiter persuaded him to apply to Morehouse.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-morehouse22-2008may22,0,5375310,print.story
Morehouse College faces its own bias -- against gays
The 'Morehouse man' is a paragon of virtue and strength, a leader destined for great things. But can he also be gay? By Richard Fausset Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 22, 2008
ATLANTA Michael Brewer, a senior at Morehouse College, was strolling purposefully around this storied campus on a hot spring day, his heavy frame dripping sweat, his hands clutching a small stack of fliers.
"No more hate," the fliers read, in a stylish typeface. "No more discrimination. No more."
"What's up, brother?" Brewer said in a lilting, cheerful voice as he approached a fellow student in a dark business suit. "Take one of these, if you will."
The young man gave the flier a glance. It was promoting what was perhaps the most ambitious week of gay rights events in the history of Morehouse, the only historically black all-male school in America.
"What the hell is this?" he said under his breath. He laughed and threw it in the trash.
But Brewer had already moved, unfazed, into the lobby of WheelerHall, where he was taping up posters. The events had been his idea, and he knew they wouldn't go over well with everyone.
"Morehouse is like this enclave where Stonewall never happened," Brewer said, referring to the 1969 New York protest that galvanized the gay rights movement. "It just doesn't exist in this realm of reality."
Brewer, 22, didn't come to Morehouse with the intent of changing it. But he found that he had no choice. He had arrived here from Oklahoma City pretty comfortable with himself: outspoken, proudly smart and, at 5 foot 9 and 300 pounds, hard to miss.
Early on, he decided he wouldn't water down his gay identity.
And that, historically, has been a problematic strategy at Morehouse. The 141-year-old college has played a key role in defining black manhood in America. But with a past steeped in religion, tradition and machismo, it has struggled to determine how homosexuality fits within that definition.
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