Five Crimson athletes spoke at a panel last night to discuss queerness and athletics at Harvard in front of an audience of about 30 people in Sever Hall.

Harvard College Women’s Center intern Kameron A. Collins ’09 hosted the seminar after coming up with the idea for his senior project.

“I thought it was really important to start talking about gay athletes at Harvard,” Collins said. “It is more liberal [here] in some ways and I wanted to see if that would also be true in the locker room.”

The athletes—four of whom self-identified as queer, with the fifth calling himself a “queer ally”—responded to questions about the difficulty of coming out on a sports team, the social choices queer athletes face both on and off the field, and the quest for tolerance in a realm that is stereotypically unwelcoming.

The panelists, who cannot be named for reasons of confidentiality, shared a wide range of personal stories from the experience of dating teammates to what shower time is like when you are gay and on a team.

“I definitely had awkward locker room experiences where girls thought that I was checking them out,” one female panelist said.

After a series of scripted questions from the host, the audience members were invited to address the panel.

One concern expressed by an audience member had to do with how the Harvard Athletic Administration could contribute to increased tolerance on campus. Cross-country and track captain Kelsey B. LeBuffe ’10, who said she didn’t mind being identified, suggested that simply by co-sponsoring an event like this in the future, the administration would be making a positive statement about homosexuality and Crimson athletics.

“It’s interesting because, at least in the gay community, we always talk about the potential for closeted athletes...so it seems like there would be some good demand for an event like this,” Collins, the event’s sponsor, said.

“I think that this panel will be one of the most informative experiences that I take away from Harvard,” said one audience member, Adam R. Singerman ’09. “I haven’t had the experience of hearing from queer athletes or straight athletes or any athletes about queerness intersecting with the athletics sphere at Harvard, so in that sense it was completely new information which was fascinating.”

Though the event was the first of its kind at Harvard, Collins said the Women’s Center is excited about the prospect of hosting similar forums in the near future.