“I survived it”: LGBTQ Student Leaves Campus, Lives to Tell Tale

In an act of sheer courage, Elon senior Reagan Nutt left the safety of Elon University’s campus to go grocery shopping at the Burlington Walmart last Friday and returned unscathed to her Mill Point apartment before dinner.

“It was scary,” Nutt said in an interview with ASS, “And truthfully, I’m just glad to be alive.”

Nutt, 22, realized she was missing the Fruity Pebbles she needed to make her “gay rice krispy treats,” because, Nutt says, “They’re just better.”

However, she realized she had just one hour before she had to return to campus for the Gender and LGBTQ+ Center’s Bi Ice Cream Social, where her presence and her gay rice krispy treats were expected. “Normally, it’s a whole week of preparation before I leave campus. I have to dye my hair from its current pink to “natural” bright blonde, uncuff my jeans, and remove all the punny pins from my backpack. But Friday, I just had to wing it.”

Nutt packed up her Subaru and convinced her best friend, a straight, white male, to let her borrow his Jeep Wrangler with the North Carolina license plate. “The Subaru was a dead giveaway,” she noted. She blasted “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show -- none of this new Darius Rucker bullshit -- and other country anthems as she sped down Williamson Ave. She wore her only pair of skinny jeans and a sweater that did not look like a bag on her.

Back in her hometown of just-outside-of-Boston, Massachusetts, Nutt was an activist in her community for other bisexual women like herself. At Elon, she works at the GLC as a student activist. “But as soon as I step off campus and into Burlington,” she said, “I am a straight white woman who enjoys placing my elaborate coffee order at Starbucks and shopping for throw pillows at TJ Maxx.”

Nutt’s girlfriend, Erica Seed, was coincidentally in Walmart at the same time. “We acted like we didn’t know each other. You know, like you do when you’re thirteen and you’re ‘dating’ a girl, but your parents don’t know you’re gay yet,” she commented.

“It’s just the price we have to pay to get Fruity Pebbles in the South,” Nutt sighed.