Grace Bendon was a 16-year-old sophomore in high school and a stand-out soccer player when she and her former girlfriend went public with their relationship.
“I was nervous about what the upperclassmen on the team would think,” said Bendon, who identifies as a lesbian. “That was the thing that got me the most nervous. If they had feelings about it, they never told me.”
In college, Bendon, a goalkeeper for the St. Joe’s women’s soccer team, had to start the process over with a new set of teammates. The fact that St. Joe’s is a Catholic university added to her worries.
“I was definitely very nervous,” Bendon said. “I was more nervous coming into a Catholic university, Jesuit university. What am I going to be experiencing here? Are people going to be cool with it? I was worried about how it was going to go over in general, even with people outside of athletics.”
Bendon said she is the only member of the team who openly identifies as part of the LGBTQ community.
“In my entire four years I’ve been the only gay person on the team,” Bendon said. “It was pretty shocking.”
Bendon holds the school wins record with 33 wins and the single season wins record with 14, both records set last season. She also served as a team captain her junior and senior years.
Throughout her time at St. Joe’s, though, Bendon said she has leaned on friends and teammates for support. Without them, Bendon said her experience would not have been the same. She said she found comfort in familiar places alongside her teammates and in the support of Head Coach Jess Mannella.
After former assistant men’s basketball coach Geoff Arnold ’85 spoke to the team about his experiences as a black man this season, Mannella asked Bendon if she could tell her story of being a lesbian.
“We started doing this thing after the incidents in the fall, [asking] what can we do to promote diversity on our small scale?” Mannella said. “The more we have these open dialogues, the more we can learn about each other.”
Bendon spent about 30 minutes talking to her teammates telling the story of how she came out and other stories about her experience.
“I just wanted to make sure the team knew what it was like to live in her shoes,” Mannella said.
Cameron Perrott, a junior Hawk goalkeeper, attended Bendon’s talk. Perrott said the experience was eye-opening, as she learned that even though Bendon is confident around her teammates, she can still feel self-conscious.
“She is so confident in herself that I never even thought that [feeling self-conscious] was a possibility,” Perrott said. “But I guess when you have people that look at you differently every single day, it can really get to you.”
Amanda Reiser, Bendon’s girlfriend, said the experience made Bendon feel as though there was room at the table for her.
“We often go through life and we assume people know things because if it’s in our field of vision, we feel like it’s in everyone’s,” Reiser said. “If you just are operating and letting people think, you hear it once and never talk about it again. It feels like you are hiding part of yourself away.”
Although Bendon said her experience of coming out and attending college had been generally good, she thinks it is important to remember the exclusion many people who identify as LGBTQ feel.
“Something that I think goes forgotten and is really misunderstood is that feeling of the other,”
Bendon said. “Being someone who has a certain quality that makes you feel like the other around people and in society. I think that is a huge part to understanding what it is like to be gay.”
Reiser said the lack of conversation around LGBTQ experiences makes it harder for those within the community to feel validated in their own lives.
“One of the most crippling things that people don’t realize is the silence,” Reiser said. “Being straight is the norm. That’s what’s comfortable.”
At one point during the team discussion, players posed questions to Bendon: “How are you not so angry?” “How do you fix that for people?” “How do you not feel that way?”
Bendon said her main goal of the discussion was to help her team understand what she knew was outside the norm for them.
“I wanted to make sure it was clear that this was my experience, and not everyone’s is the same,” Bendon said. “I made it more general because I was uncomfortable with being maybe the first person they have heard talk about this. There was a lot of pressure but I did feel that it went exactly how I had hoped. They got a lot out of it and I got a lot of out of it.”
Mannella said she plans to hold further dialogues with the team in future semesters to continue educating them on other social issues.
Even with her team’s support, Bendon explained it is difficult for people outside of the LGBTQ community to understand those issues.
“That’s the one thing I will say,” Bendon said. “They don’t really understand what it’s like to be gay, and they don’t understand how decision-making affects me because it doesn’t really affect them. [I’m] not saying they don’t have struggles of their own, but they had a hard time understanding my struggle.”
Alex Mark ’20 contributed to this story.
