Two LGBTQ students came to the Twin Cities campus from Greater Minnesota: One stayed, one left.

By Katie Gans and Michael Haubner

Ashton Burke came to the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities in the fall of 2018 as a freshman, hoping to find the acceptance of his gay identity that had eluded him in his small, conservative South Dakota hometown. Within a semester, he had left for a college closer to home.

Jack Nimz arrived at the university after years of what he called a “repressive state” of denying his queer identity while spending most of his youth in Blue Earth, Minnesota, and attending a conservative religious college. Now he has found his community and a full acceptance of who he is.

The range of experiences undergone by LGBTQ students from Greater Minnesota who come to the University of Minnesota are as varied as the number of those students. Some come to campus to seek diversity they did not find in their hometowns. Others come for reasons that have nothing to do with the places they leave behind.

Even so, rural counties can be difficult environments for LGBTQ youth, which is one of the reasons they might move to the cities, according to research conducted by Dr. Marla Eisenberg, an associate professor of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. Eisenberg studies social influences on kids’ high-risk health behaviors, which over the last few years, she said, has been focused on LGBTQ kids.

Eisenberg began studying bullying victimization, emotional distress, and protective factors of trans and gender diverse adolescents from city, suburban, town, and rural areas after the 2016 presidential election, when Eisenberg said it became “abundantly apparent that there were real differences in rural areas compared to metropolitan areas.” This, she said, was especially noticeable in Minnesota.

“Aspects of the [rural] community can make it really, really hard for [LGBTQ] people to feel welcome,” Eisenberg said. And as a result, “A lot of [LGBTQ] people choose to come to the cities…because that’s where they believe there is a community that will nurture them.”

But just as easily, youth can feel isolated and uncomfortable on campus, detached from the important support they’ve developed to help them cope. While it is common to assume that LGBTQ people only live on the coasts or in the cities, millions choose lives in rural America and are woven into the fabric of its social systems, a new study reports.

According to the report by the Movement Advancement Project, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ equality, between 2.9 million and 3.8 million LGBTQ people live in rural areas. As with most people who move to small towns, they choose that life for the tight-knit community, the report says.

AccessU: Beyond the Cities is committed to sharing stories of rural students at the Twin Cities campus. We can’t generalize about the experience of all LGBTQ students who come from Greater Minnesota. We can tell you about two.

Ashton Burke

Burke, 19, had been openly gay for much of high school in Chamberlain, South Dakota, population 2,800. It was an identity that sometimes generated watchful, or hateful, reactions and one that everyone in town knew. The diversity, acceptance and wide population of LGBTQ in Minneapolis appealed to him.

But Burke grew anxious halfway through that first semester at the university. During winter break, he decided to transfer out, leaving for Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, only two hours away from his family in Chamberlain.

For Burke, the anxieties of acclimating to a metropolitan lifestyle proved more difficult than the anxieties of returning to a university close to a town he sought to leave behind.

“Small towns, like any other place, have their upsides and their downsides,” he said.

Even at a young age, Burke understood the difficulties of being gay in a rural conservative town, where people would ask him why he spoke with the voice of a little girl, or if he was gay because of its high pitch. He said he experienced bullying and discrimination throughout middle school and high school, which has shaped his behaviors and attitudes as an adult.

“It tore away my self-confidence that I once possessed when I was younger,” he said.

In a 2017 study published by the Centers for Disease Control that surveyed LGBTQ high school students throughout the country, 60 percent of LGBTQ+ youth in high school reported feeling “sad or hopeless.”

Burke experienced anxiety about his sexuality as early as middle school. He said he feared locker room interactions during physical education. He didn’t want to ask questions in class or even come to class at all. His anxiety isolated him, something he said he still struggles with. Isolation doesn’t quite work in a small town where everyone knows one another.

In high school, though, life began to change. He got involved in musical theatre and met more people accepting of LGBTQ lifestyles.

“I realized that there were people in my town that I could be myself around,” he said. “I started to gain a sense of pride in my sexuality, and people started to notice.”

He had friends and a kind of popularity. His senior year, Burke was crowned homecoming king.

The honor came with a dark side. Social media posts, which have since been taken down, declared two homecoming “queens” had been crowned that year. Derogatory, hurtful and threatening posts aimed at his sexuality spread for a week, filling Burke with a sense of disgust for and disconnection from the hometown he loved.

That same week, Burke was accepted to the University of Minnesota.

“I decided that I was going to leave that unaccepting environment and place myself in an inclusive environment,” he said.

But that wasn’t easy. When Burke arrived at the university, he said he had a difficult time acclimating to a busy, populated campus. Two months into his first semester, his anxiety reached heights he hadn’t felt since his isolation in middle school locker rooms.

“I would sit in the dorms too often and would start feeling depressed,” he said. “I wanted to combat these feelings in any way that I could.”

It was too familiar to him. The isolation he felt in high school, eating lunch by himself, or just chilling with his family on the weekends, translated into eating by himself in the dorms and opting out of social interactions. He said he even avoided the dating scene.

“I’m so used to being by myself that I often deflect attention from other men, or don’t know how to react,” he said.

Reflecting on his decision to leave the Twin Cities, Burke said that self-confidence is one of the keys to succeeding at a large university. Speaking up in class, talking to professors and being “present” can be difficult when those experiences were different back home.

“I really lacked that confidence to tackle college in this manner. For me, it was hard to feel like it mattered that I was even showing up to classes,” Burke said.

After returning home during winter break, Burke realized how much his family’s support mattered in his personal life.

“I am pretty lucky that I have such an accepting family.” he said. “Not everyone does.”

Although it has meant starting all over again, Burke said the smaller campus—Augustana has fewer than 1,800 students compared to the U’s 35,000 undergraduates – and its more intimate classes has given him a stronger sense of community, more comfort in his studies and less anxiety. He is now majoring in media studies and theatre.

As for his desire to find an inclusive, diverse campus, ultimately Burke said he realized that a smaller community that may be less accepting of his lifestyle was more comfortable than a more diverse city that is too large to notice him—at least when his family is so far away.

“I think that if I had felt a stronger sense of community at the U, I might’ve reconsidered a bit,” he said. “I really enjoyed living in the city, but not the loneliness that came with it.”

Jack Nimz

For the first 16 years of his life in Blue Earth, population 3,000, Nimz said everyone knew a lot about everyone. Gossip was everywhere, especially among those in the LGBTQ community. Secrecy was the rule.

Nimz said he identified as straight at Blue Earth Area High School. When he moved with his mother to Minneapolis and attended his final year at Southwest High School, he kept the label.

“I felt like I was at a repressive state,” Nimz said.

Today, the junior history major with a minor in social justice at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities openly identifies as queer.

After moving eight times in four years and attending two high schools and two colleges during that time, Nimz said he is finally able to declare and express his identity with more ease and frankness.

But until recently, and especially when he lived in Blue Earth, Nimz said he was terrified of doing so.  

“You didn’t really want to express it in that atmosphere,” Nimz said. “Being gay or being trans, or anything like that, was widely unaccepted.”

His family, and his community as a whole, he said, was “overall pretty religious.”

Nimz tried attending the University of Northwestern in Roseville, Minnesota, right after high school, but found the small Christian school too conservative. After one semester, he transferred to the University of Minnesota, which he calls “pretty good” in its inclusivity of LGBTQ students.

“I’m not gonna give them ‘great,’” he added.

Nimz said that, specifically, he thinks the university could improve the climate for LGBTQ students by making campus more inclusive for its trans students, citing a lack of representation in university policies and facilities, such as gender-neutral bathrooms.

Nimz said he has also noticed a “huge, kind of alarming” disconnect between urban and rural people, which he sees within the LGBTQ community.

“It’s hard to engage rural queer people and urban queer people,” he said. The two groups don’t interact, he said, and rarely even talk. A goal of his, since moving away from Blue Earth, has been to challenge his rural friends to engage with more political issues.

While Nimz doesn’t miss the environment in Blue Earth, he said there are some small town things he misses, like his family farm. After college, he said, he hopes to become a teacher and has considered returning to a rural area, because a lot of teachers in the rural areas, like Blue Earth, aren’t openly pro-LGBTQ.

But for now, he said, “I call Minneapolis home. Blue Earth is where I grew up. That’s not home. Minneapolis is home.”