Elizabeth Hunter had fewer than 700 Twitter followers when her Christian college administrators discovered her tweets in 2018. Officials at Bob Jones University, a nondenominational Christian school in South Carolina, called her into the Student Life Office seemingly at random. When Hunter entered, she noticed a manila envelope that contained printouts of tweets they had flagged as “inappropriate.”
The Head of Student life at BJU started the meeting with questions about a tweet she’d posted on sexual assault. (She had expressed exasperation with a male classmate who claimed women were “just looking for attention” if they came forward years after an incident.) Then, they brought up two other tweets.
“Happy pride to all my friends in and out of the closet. You’re incredibly brave, and I love you,” read one. In another, she shared her excitement after meeting the author of the novel that was adapted into Love, Simon, and said that she, too, was writing a book with queer protagonists. The administrator, according to Hunter, stared at her coldly. “Are you a homosexual?” he asked.
Hunter was choked up and unable to respond. When she was hauled before administrators, Hunter was still struggling to figure out her own identity—and had only told “like three people” she wasn’t straight. She told the administrator she was probably asexual “like the Apostle Paul” because she wasn’t attracted to men. He wasn’t satisfied. “He repeatedly asked me if I was homosexual, like he wanted me to ‘confess to being gay,’ which I refused to do,” Hunter told me. “But I also refused to say that I was straight, because I couldn’t lie.”
Elizabeth had not broken any policies. “I was asked to disavow my support for LGBTQ+ rights and relationships. I refused,” she said. “It would have been like disavowing myself.” BJU immediately placed Elizabeth on disciplinary probation, charged her a monetary fine, terminated her from her on-campus student life position in the school’s media department and forced her to attend mandatory counseling with the Dean of Women.
“This was the darkest month of my entire life. I felt depressed and suicidal. For the rest of my time at BJU, I was forced completely back into the closet and had to hold my head down in shame. I survived and graduated in May of 2019. But I still feel the sting of the discrimination I endured.”
Listen to Elizabeth’s experience in her own words
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