Ha! I was just about to post the exact same thing! Fully 50% of the guys on my floor were gay.
In Spain, college-owned dorms (c. the 1990s) are much newer than coed dorms (c. the 1970s). Some of those have two-people rooms. One of my classmates got to have a male roomie in such a dorm… her brother.
I recently took a sabbatical to spend a year in grad school in Scotland. All university-owned or managed housing was coed (one of the things they offered was flats, which had to be requested as a group, so if you wanted to live with 3 people of your own gender you just needed to find 3 and apply for a flat). Some of those flats included two-people rooms, I think all the rooms on campus were single-occupant (bloody tiny, too).
I’m reasonably sure the US will be able to survive the experiment without imploding.
Right. I’m gathering that the presumed beneficiaries are gay guys and gay-friendly girls.
My dorm in the mid 80s was mixed gender on the same floor. Half the floor was female, the other half male with no barrier between. We had our own bathrooms, by gender. We had suites that were mixed gender too, but not in the same bedroom.
I have no problem with mixed-gender rooms as long as the people involved are okay with it.
But does anyone else have a question about with Rutgers’ reasoning on this issue?
The situation that prompted this decision was a student suicide. A male student was having sex with another male student and two other students secretly videotaped it. The student committed suicide when the tape became public.
And Rutgers is announcing that it’s allowing mixec-gender rooms to avoid situations like this? I’m not seeing a connection. Is Rutgers claiming that if they let men and women live together there won’t be any homosexual relationships? And do they feel that homosexuality was the cause of the suicide?
No, they are suggesting (at least implicitly) that homophobia on the part of the roommate was (part of) the cause.
Maybe the assumption is that if Tyler Clementi had had the option to live in an LGBT friendly environment, he wouldn’t have had a roommate who would have taped him.
(Off Topic)
Stirling, by any chance? Urban legend has it the on-campus halls were designed by a Swedish prison architect 
Nope – I lived in a co-ed suite back in the early 1970s. We shared a bathroom. At first there was a marker on the door that told what sex was using the shower, and you weren’t supposed to go in if it was the opposite of your own. But that quickly got changed to only avoiding going in if people were getting into or out of the shower. As long as they were in with the curtain drawn, anyone felt free to go in and use the bathroom (there were three shower stalls, three sinks, and two toilets – no point in tying that up for an entire shower). No one violated the rules, AFAIK.
It wasn’t inherently sexy – it was like suddenly having a lot more brothers and sisters.
Freaked my parents out, though, when they came to visit.
(Oh, and BTW, the OP and most of the posts clearly aren’t discussing coed rooms)
I’m not seeing the connection. How does letting men and women live together make a place less homophobic and friendlier to gays and lesbians?
Well, if Tyler Clementi’s roommate had been a gay-friendly heterosexual woman rather than a homophobic heterosexual man, then at least his own room would have been friendlier, and no recordings of his sex life would have been made.
It would have been friendlier if he had had any type of roommate who respected his privacy , homophobic or not - and wasn’t a heterosexual female involved in spreading the recording?
Which brings me to the question- why would people think that in a coed room situation which is apparently not restricted in any way ( such as only open to gay men) the result will be gay-friendly women rooming with gay men ? I suspect that discouraged as it may be, most of the roommates will be heterosexual couples ( or at least they will have been couples at the time the assignments were made)
o tempora o mores
The OP is poorly worded. The article is clearly about coed rooms, and the OP addresses an example from literature. One room. Two beds. One man. One woman. I’m not sure why this evades most of the posters in this thread. Your experience in the 70s is irrelevant.
Agreed. The relevance is that a shared room with beds in that room will be able to be assigned to a mixed-gender pair. Having opposite-gender people assigned to a suite with separate bedrooms is not new.
Hmm. Like I said upthread, I lived in an all-girls dorm. Thinking back, I would guess that over half the girls in my dorm probably would have been welcoming to having gay guys share the building with us too. Some of the girls were ultra-religious and wouldn’t (they’re the same ones who had a problem with our lesbian dormmates), but probably 60%+ would have been okay with it.
Clementi’s problem was that his roommate was an asshole - a condition present in men and women, gays and straights.
Turn the situation around. Suppose there had been some serious problem involving two lesbians. And the university proposed a “solution” of allowing men to spend the night in women’s rooms. Wouldn’t that indicate that they thought the problem had been caused by lesbianism and that lesbianism could be fixed by making heterosexual encounters more available?
So how would mixing genders in the rooms create an LGBT friendly environment? That’s the part I’m not grokking.
I believe my alma mater already has a policy of mixing genders in rooms for at least some of the dorms. Not that it matters. I went to college in the late 80s/early 90s and pretty much, we all slept wherever, whenever. I used the bathrooms in male-only quiet study dorms when I was not studying with my BF. It’s just not a big deal at all, but I don’t see how facilitating straight relationship cohabitation creates an LGBT friendly environment.
What I found really amusing was the callers on CNN today. “Parents, would *you *want your daughter to live with a guy in college?”
Newsflash to parents of college-attending women: She probably already does. :rolleyes:
Other Newsflash to all the dipshits who called in to CNN: Most college students are at least 18 and therefore, at or above the age of consent. Even Rutgers is not allowing this option for freshmen and it’s not forced. Completely optional. Guess what? In the rest of the non-college world, 18-year-olds are legal adults and can live wherever they want and sleep with whomever they want. Some 18-22-year-olds are married and work and have children and everything. (Okay, not many, but have you been to Utah lately?) Some 18-year-olds are fighting wars overseas with the military. Some of those soldiers are even, gasp, women. :eek: Out here in the real world, most people do not have gender-segregated bathrooms in their homes. People share living space. Sometimes, a group of unrelated, unmarried adults pool their resources and rent houses together. And they all share bathrooms.
I’ll let any of you who are shocked by these revelations just absorb for a moment. I know, it’s a lot to take in. Some adults choose to have sex and that will not necessarily cause them to flunk out of school. (Personally, I did better when I was hanging out in my BF’s dorm room. We’d do the deed and then study together. Got the temptation/distraction out of the way so we could focus on our studies, instead of having to obsess about when the next time we might have a chance to sneak off somewhere to fuck.)
Warning - potential hijack ahead…
While I generally agree with **Dogzilla **- As a parent of a college age child, I will add one factor that has not been discussed.
Who is paying for it? Like it or not, children, if your parents are paying, they should retain some say in the matter. I get the whole “I’m 18! I’m an adult!” thing. To which parents have often pointed out - “OK, I guess you’ll be paying for everything on your own then?” Money in life comes with strings attached.
Believe it or not, it’s not always a matter of old-fogey parents being shocked at their children’s behavior. It’s the “best-of-both-worlds” attitude of kids wanting to be all growed-up and independent on mommy and daddy’s dime.
The thing that puzzles me about this is, people get to choose their roommates? When I was at Waterloo, it was the luck of the draw. I’m sure they did some preliminary screening (same year of study, for example–all the first-year students had to live on campus, for example), and the residence buildings in V2 where I stayed were all one gender, but other than that, you took your chances with whoever they assigned. I got a stoner as a roommate–open the door and clouds billowed out–and ended up spending more and more of my time in the architecture studio or at friends’ apartments…