Carolyn O’Laughlin has been a college professor for more than 25 years, and she’s learned to recognize the rhythm of a student who needs to tell her something. They linger after class. They ask a question that doesn’t really need answering. They hesitate.
Then, eventually: “I think I might be gay.” Or: “I started seeing someone, and they’re nonbinary, and now I’m trying to figure out what that means about me.” Or sometimes just: “I need to talk about this, but I’m not sure to who.”
O’Laughlin, an assistant professor at Saint Louis University, is an openly queer woman. In her first class each semester, she introduces her whole self — slides about the syllabus give way to photos of camping trips, baseball games, her wife and two teenage sons. For some students, she is the first openly queer educator they’ve ever had. And that fact alone makes her office a different kind of space than the rest of campus.
“I am honored that you told me,” she says, every time. “I’m proud to have earned your trust.”
The Conversation That Doesn’t Start at Home
There’s a pattern that keeps surfacing in O’Laughlin’s office, and it’s one that anyone who’s worked closely with LGBTQ+ college students will recognize immediately. The students who come to her aren’t usually afraid of outright rejection from their families. They’re afraid of something quieter and maybe harder to name: being a source of anxiety. Being a disappointment. Making the people they love suddenly have to worry about their future, their safety, their happiness.
“Many feel shame that the people they love will suddenly be burdened by the messages and hateful rhetoric,” O’Laughlin wrote in a CNN essay published during Pride Month 2026. “My students don’t want anyone to worry about their future, their safety or their happiness. They want their parents to really know them.”
This is the thing that doesn’t get talked about enough in the discourse around coming out. It’s not always about fear of being kicked out or cut off — though that still happens, and it’s devastating when it does. Sometimes it’s about not wanting to make your mom cry. Not wanting your dad to stay up at night googling hate crime statistics. Not wanting to become a problem that needs solving.
So students find other adults first. A professor. A resident advisor. The one counselor at the health center who has a rainbow sticker on their door. Someone who, as O’Laughlin puts it, serves as a “parent-proxy” — the stand-in for the more important conversation they’re working up the nerve to have at home.
What Happens When Someone Doesn’t Flinch
O’Laughlin’s own coming-out story has a detail in it that stays with you. In the late ’90s, as a college student at a Midwestern Catholic university, she wrote a paper for a communications class about the concept of self-disclosure. She used a novel with a closeted queer protagonist as her source text and wove in examples from her own experience — the weight of anxiety about being found out, the exhausting work of controlling what she revealed or concealed.
It was the hardest she’d ever worked on a paper. She got a D. The professor called the novel “an inappropriate text” and suggested she hadn’t understood the concept of self-disclosure.
The hell she hadn’t. The paper was self-disclosure.
That moment — a professor who didn’t see her, who graded her act of reaching out as a failure — is the inverse of what she now offers her own students. She knows exactly what it costs to extend yourself toward someone and have them miss the point entirely. And she knows what it means when someone doesn’t.
“I smile and raise one eyebrow,” she wrote, describing a student who casually mentioned coming from his boyfriend’s house. “‘Is this new?’ I ask. He’s kind of bashful, blushing, nods yes. I thank him for trusting me. I tell him that I am proud of him. He releases a breath. Stands a little taller.”
That’s the whole thing, right there. A breath released. Standing a little taller. It’s not a policy change or a diversity statement or a mandatory training module. It’s a person, in a room, who doesn’t flinch.
The Gap Between Policy and Presence
Universities have gotten better, on paper, at supporting LGBTQ+ students. Pride Centers exist. Preferred name policies are increasingly common. Gender-inclusive housing is spreading, even if the pace feels glacial. These things matter.
But the gap between having a policy and having a person who actually shows up is where a lot of students fall through. You can have the most progressive nondiscrimination statement in the country and still feel completely alone on a Tuesday night in October when you’re trying to figure out if the thing you’re feeling has a name.
Northeastern University School of Law announced in June 2026 that it’s launching an LGBTQ+ legal clinic this fall — giving students hands-on experience representing trans, nonbinary, and intersex individuals, vulnerable queer youth, and people caught in anti-immigrant policies. Connor Leighton-Cory, the clinic’s inaugural director, called it “a robust voice and resource for the LGBTQ+ community and a springboard for students pursuing careers in social justice lawyering.”
That’s institutional support done right. But the students who walk into that clinic will have gotten there because someone — a professor, an advisor, a friend — pointed them toward it. The institutional structure and the human connection have to work together, and too often the second part gets treated as optional.
The Mentors Students Actually Remember
I’ve talked to enough LGBTQ+ graduates to know that the adults they remember aren’t necessarily the ones with the right titles. They’re the ones who did small things consistently.
There was the biology professor who, during office hours, noticed a student had changed their name on an assignment and simply started using it — no fanfare, no awkward conversation, just a quiet adjustment that said I see you. The dining hall worker who kept a small progress pride flag pinned behind the register and always smiled at the kid who came in alone. The academic advisor who, when a student came out as trans during a routine degree-planning meeting, said “okay, let me make sure I update your records” and then went right back to discussing course sequences like nothing had happened at all — which, in its own way, was everything.
These aren’t dramatic stories. They’re not the stuff of campus newsletters or diversity awards. But they’re the moments that students carry with them, sometimes for decades. Because what those adults communicated, without saying it directly, was: You are not a problem. You are not a burden. You are a student, and I am here to help you succeed, and your identity is not something I need to process before I can do my job.
The Summer Vacuum
Here’s the part that gets overlooked in most discussions of campus support: summer.
From September through May, the infrastructure is there. The Pride Center is open. The LGBTQ+ student group meets weekly. The faculty mentor holds regular office hours. Then June hits, and for a lot of students, that scaffolding disappears overnight. They go home to families who may or may not know, to hometowns where the nearest affirming space is a two-hour drive, to summers that stretch out long and quiet.
“It’s a weird whiplash,” one student told us for a previous article. “In May, I’m going to Pride events every weekend. In June, I’m back in my hometown where the Pride Center is a folding table in a church basement that’s open twice a month.”
The mentors who matter are the ones who don’t disappear in July. They’re the professors who send a quick email checking in. The advisors who keep their virtual office hours open over the break. The staff members who remember that summer isn’t a vacation from identity — it’s sometimes the hardest season of all.
What Pride Actually Means
O’Laughlin closes her essay with a point that’s worth sitting with: “Pride is bigger than a parade float or a drag show — though those are certainly central, celebratory elements. Pride is also a foundational element to a feeling of belonging. It’s knowing that people care about you. That you are valuable and have worth.”
That’s what the best mentors offer. Not just information or resources or the right referral — but the quiet, steady message that you belong here. That who you are is not an asterisk on your student file. That someone sees you and isn’t looking away.
A few weeks ago, San Diego’s Dyke March returned to the city’s official Pride celebration after a long hiatus. KishaLynn Elliott, San Diego Pride’s first Black lesbian executive director, brought it back immediately after joining the organization in January — not as a symbolic gesture, but as a way to “mobilize the community and increase visibility.” That’s what leadership looks like when it’s rooted in actually knowing what your community needs because you’re part of it.
The same logic applies on campus. The faculty mentors who make the biggest difference aren’t necessarily the ones with the most credentials in LGBTQ+ studies. They’re the ones who are visibly, consistently present — who put a pronoun pin on their bag not because HR told them to but because they know someone in their 9 a.m. lecture is counting the days until they can talk to someone who gets it.
A Small Act That Echoes
If you’re a faculty member or staff person reading this, you might be thinking: I’m not qualified. I don’t know the right language. What if I say the wrong thing?
Here’s what students actually need from you: not expertise, but presence. Not perfect vocabulary, but genuine welcome. You don’t need to know every term in the evolving LGBTQ+ lexicon. You need to know how to say “thank you for trusting me” and mean it. You need to not flinch.
O’Laughlin’s D-grade paper from the ’90s is proof that being a professor doesn’t automatically make you a safe person. But her office, decades later — the one where students linger after class, where they practice the words they’re still learning to say out loud — is proof that being a safe person is something you can choose to become.
“Shame shrinks us and silences our stories,” she wrote. “Pride lets us grow.”
Somewhere on your campus right now, a student is working up the nerve to tell someone who they are. It might be a professor. It might be a coach. It might be the person at the library circulation desk who always smiles. Whoever it is, they’re going to remember how that person responds for the rest of their life.
Be the one who doesn’t flinch.
