When I arrived at college, I had not begun to grapple with the ethical underpinnings of social justice. I dove into [my university’s] First-Year Urban Program, a week of volunteering which stressed that it can be counterproductive to work on behalf of a group without working with those people themselves. As I listened to a homeless speaker reminisce about how clueless volunteers could be, my mind flashed back to rooms full of white, middle class Midwesterners, and I wondered what I had actually contributed to local campaigns against poverty, racism, and violence. I kept myself updated on the politics of those movements, but without attempting to interact with individuals who were personally fighting those battles, I could never confidently say whether I had helped or hindered their efforts. In the years that followed, I threw myself into gay and lesbian activism on campus—and felt naturally authoritative when I spoke up.