The intersection of race, faith, and sexual orientation is a complicated place. This chapter examines students with these multiple identities and uses theory and personal accounts to illustrate the challenges of navigating community on campus. NEW DIRECTIONS FOR STUDENT SERVICES, no. 111, Fall 2005 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 41 4 Multiple Identities: Creating Community on Campus for LGBT Students Kerry John Poynter, Jamie Washington The popularity of public figures such as Ellen Degeneres and Rosie O’Donnell, and of television programs such as Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Queer as Folk, suggest that mainstream audiences are tolerating and, perhaps, accepting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. More often than not, however, these entertainers and tele- vision shows reflect only one LGBT community, one whose members are white and not religious. This perception of the LGBT community is com- mon on college and university campuses, too. As one African American stu- dent commented: I had been a member of BSA (Black Student Association) my freshman year, but was discouraged when I consistently encountered homophobic attitudes in the organization. My friends and I often laughed at our slogan for it, ‘It’s either Gay or BSA!’ We also couldn’t help but notice the undercurrent of racism within the gay community. It was passive and subtle, but clear. Our white LGBT peers felt as though the LGBT student organization was not meeting their needs because programming and social events were too ethnic or “did not reflect who they were or their interests” [Mills, 2005, n.p.]. A gay seminary student noted similar experiences: