<p>I am currently a student in my freshmen year at Whitman College and I have recently been frustrated with certain aspects of the school. I identify as a queer woman and I have found that while Whitman is very accepting, the community has a very naive and heteronormative feel as well as that the surrounding area is unfriendly, making the school somewhat suffocating. I'm originally from Portland, and have had my eye on Reed College for some time. I applied my senior year and was waitlisted, but now am considering applying again as a transfer student with hopes of being admitted. Can anyone on here speak to the queer community at Reed as well as the general student culture?</p>
<p>If you’re originally from Portland, you probably have a pretty good idea of how much LGBTQ populations are accepted by the greater community. I would say Reed is somewhat of an extension of the surrounding community’s liberal attitudes about it and is probably even more accepting than Portland as a whole, especially wrt trans issues. Since I do not identify as a queer woman, I can’t totally speak to what the queer community at Reed is like, but in my experience it seems both visible and normal, like no one is going to freak out about queer PDA and queer theory is often included in lit, art history, social science, etc classes.</p>
<p>General student culture: studious, curious, smart, quirky, random, vocal, intense, creative, quite accepting of ‘alternative’ views and subcultures, sometimes stressed, often playful… </p>