Wheaton's (Unofficial) Homecoming For Gay Evangelicals

When José Vilanova graduated from Wheaton College in 1989, he assumed he wouldn't be going back to visit his alma mater — known as the Harvard of Evangelical schools — either by himself or, God forbid, with his gay partner. Like most Evangelical colleges, Wheaton maintains that homosexuality is not God's design for humanity. That's why Vilanova felt like he couldn't come out at the suburban-Chicago college.

The need for secrecy, plus the fact that he was a low-income minority student at an expensive, mostly white school, contributed to his feeling of not belonging on campus. "Being Latino, poor and gay was this spectacular triple threat of wrongness," says Vilanova, who teaches religion and media courses at Miami's Florida International University. And so, after all of his friends at Wheaton had graduated, he says, "I had zero reason to go back."

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