Experimented in College

I understand large sample sizes are key to a low standard error of the mean, but the entire sophomore class?

Ramona: Oh, calm down, Scott, it was just a phase.

Scott: You had a sexy phase!?!

— Scott Pilgrim finds out that one of Ramona's "evil ex-boyfriends" ("evil exes") isn't a boy.

Maybe it's because young people are living independent of their parents, maybe it's the abundance of booze and parties, or the existence of sororities and fraternities that commonly only allow one gender to join, but it's assumed that when a young adult goes to college, they possibly experimented sexually with the same gender. While it's usually played for titillation purposes when done with women, this trope can also apply to guys as well. It should also be noted that even though this trope is oftentimes applied to heterosexual characters, it could also apply to cases of homosexual characters who experimented with heterosexuality. It's often a Pet-Peeve Trope for anyone queer, as if the character is straight it can imply that homosexuality/bisexuality is just a phase (though granted, heterosexual individuals experiencing a bi-curious "phase" that goes away eventually isn't unheard of).

For those who are gay or bi, it might be the first time they ever acted on their same-sex attraction, leading to other gay plotlines. For those that are straight, it's either accepted as having been a brief phase or rarely spoken of and only in the vaguest terms, a sort of sexual Noodle Incident. In some cases, the person they're experimenting with may feel "used", jilted, or manipulated, or suffer any manner of emotional damage when their partner decides it really was "just a phase" or "just the alcohol talking"; more happily, it may be revealed they were "just experimenting" themselves, or at least weren't expecting anything more than a casual hookup.

Also known as being a "lesbian until graduation", or a LUG. If the experimentation was with both sexes, it's known as "bisexual until graduation" (BUG).

If the relationship is romantic, rather than sexual, it's Gay Romantic Phase. Compare Pseudo-Romantic Friendship, Situational Sexuality, Fanservice Faux Fight. May be a result of Kissing Under the Influence.

No real-life examples, please.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Beastars and Beast Complex: Played with, in the sense that it has not to do with the gender of the partner, but the species. In this setting of anthropomorphic animals, relationships between animals of different species, especially between carnivores and herbivores, are seen as things that people can fool around in school, but that must be cast aside once the characters have become adult to find a partner of their own species. A major conflict of the story in the former is protagonist, the wolf Legosi, realizing he is exclusively attracted to herbivores and wants to pursue a serious relationship with a small rabbit named Haru.
• Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: Averted, compared to the previous works in the franchise. Roxie is treated as just another Evil Ex, it's not seen as a surprise that one of the Exes is a girl, and Ramona doesn't dismiss their relationship as "just a phase." By all indications, their relationship failed due to a combination of Roxie's anger issues and Ramona's Commitment Issues, and there is no hint that Roxie being a girl had anything to do with it.

Comic Books

• In the "Green Inferno" storyline in The Authority, the renegade (and bluntly homophobic) ex-Doctor disdainfully challenges the team with the phrase "Poofs first." It's presumably aimed at the canonically gay Apollo and The Midnighter, but the Engineer steps forward with a cool:
  Engineer: Does a lesbian fling in college count, Doctor?
• In Grendel, Crystal Kennedy has a sexual relationship with her Butch Lesbian prison guard Susan Veraghen, but after a while, she drags Susan unwillingly into a three-way relationship with a man and finally dumps her altogether in favour of the kind of political marriage that Susan thought she was rescuing her from.
• America Chavez is an inversion when she appears in Young Avengers: she identifies as lesbian and dismisses her earlier relationship with a male teammate while she was in the Teen Brigade as an experiment that she didn't enjoy much.
• In Scott Pilgrim, Ramona experimented with her roommate Roxanne, who became the fourth Evil Ex when she ended it.
• Strangers in Paradise: Casey experimented in college and is more than open to a relationship in the present.
• In the erotic graphic novel Teach Me! by Enrique Villagran, one of the female teachers is complimented on her skill in cunnilingus; especially as she claims to have never had a lesbian experience. She then admits that "There was this one summer, in college..."
• Wonder Woman: The kreel, whose Sangtee Empire Diana fights in Vol 2, have an interesting take as heterosexual relations are highly illegal and women are considered revolting by the ruling class. This does not prevent women kreel from existing or having romantic relations, they just have to present themselves as and publicly identify as men to take part in society as adults which makes any teenage romances they had flings by necessity since they can no longer use their feminine identity.
• XXXenophile: In "Now Museum, Now You Don't" we get this exchange:
  Trixie: Sometimes all a girl needs is a change. To clear the palate as it were.
  Sydney: But I'm not... I've never even thought of...
  Xynotreen: Oh? What about Cindy, in college?
  Sydney: How did you?
  Trixie: Minor deities, yes. Incompetent deities, no.
• The Marvel character Noh-Varr, sometimes known as Marvel Boy, is a Kree from an Alternate Universe. While starring in Young Avengers he indicated that he had served as a cadet on an "exploratory ship", and that sexuality was one of the things they explored.
  Noh-Varr: Exploratory does have multiple meanings. The Kree are efficient like that.
  • Later appearances in West Coast Avengers (2018) and a subsequent relationship with Hercules confirmed outright that Noh-Varr is bisexual.

Fan Works

• Advice and Trust: Misato reminds Ritsuko that the two of them had slept together at least once back when they were in college while trying to convince her to ask out Maya. Ritsuko's response makes it clear that the incident in question was a case of Alcohol-Induced Bisexuality between both women; however, of the two Ritsuko is ultimately revealed to be genuinely bisexual, if not having a case of If It's You, It's Okay for Maya.
  Misato: Take her out for drinks next time instead of me and Kaji? [...] It's not like you've never kissed a girl before. Or done even m-
  Ritsuko: And you promised that we'd never speak of it again and that it was only because we were both hammered out of our minds and hadn't had a guy in months,
• Interpretive Steps for a New Tango: Bruno used to experiment with other guys when he was younger by masturbating together and occasionally helping each other out, but he still considered himself straight because he thought of only girls while doing it until he met Pablo. Pablo, on the other hand, never experimented with other guys because he knew/feared deep down that he would enjoy it more than he was "supposed" to.

Film — Live-Action

• Most characters in Another Country seem to agree that a little homosexual hanky-panky in college is entirely natural. They even fault the master (instructor) for walking in on Martineau and his friend masturbating because if he were an old boy (i.e. a former pupil) he would supposedly have known from personal experience what goes on in the gym changing rooms.
• Basic Instinct: Beth dismisses her fling with Catherine as this, but both women claim that the other stalked her afterwards. It's never established who was telling the truth.
• At the end of The Birdcage, Armand and Albert sneak the Keeleys through the titular nightclub by disguising them as members of the opposite sex. One college-age man approaches Louise, who's dressed as a leather-clad biker:
  College Kid: I've never done it with a man before!
  Louise: (Lowering her voice) ...there's always a first time.
• Cassanova Was A Woman: Evette, after learning Cassanova's dating a woman, relates she once had kissed her best friend in college and nearly had sex with her. Cassanova is unimpressed by this in terms of her lesbian experience.
• Within Definitely, Maybe, the diary Emily gives Will to return to Summer shows that they had an experimental relationship in school.
• This is intimated in Four Christmases after Kate's sister tells Brad about the bullying Kate went through during their childhood.
  "My husband and I tell each other all our embarrassing secrets. He knows I slept with the entire water polo team in college, just like I know he experimented with men."
• There's an awkward conversation in Four Weddings and a Funeral that ends with this:
  Fiona: I was a lesbian once at school, but only for about 15 minutes.
• Holly Slept Over: Audrey tells Noel she had a fling with Holly in college. Though she says it was an experiment for her, it turns out she'd fallen in love with Holly.
• Reverend Frank alludes to this in License to Wed.
• Discussed in PCU where the Pit's leader tells the prospective freshmen that college in the 1990s is different from the old days where they "swill sherry and screw goats for fun."
• In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Ramona experimented with her roommate Roxanne, who became the fourth Evil Ex when she ended it.
  Ramona: I was just a little bi-curious.
  Roxanne: Well, honey, I'm a little BI-FURIOUS!

Literature

• Girls Don't Hit: Joss convinced her roommate Crystal that them kissing or later sleeping together was just harmless college experimentation. It wasn't for Joss however-she genuinely loved Crystal, and avenged her murder.
• In Inda the all-male class of teenagers in the military school enthusiastically experiment with one another until they are given leave to visit the pleasure houses in the city, from which point on all but two seem to be pretty much exclusively interested in women. Of the two for whom this is not true, one is gay and the other is bisexual.
• In the novel The Last Theorem, the protagonist briefly experiments with his roommate, but it doesn't get very far before a friend of the family finds out and tells his father. (His father is quite explicit that he doesn't mind experimentation, but he objects strenuously to the person his son was experimenting with.)
• In a way in Loveless. After Georgia tells Rooney that she's definitely not into guys, she assumes she's gay and drunkenly suggests they kiss 'just to be sure'. This upsets Pip and drives her away because she believes that Georgia betrayed her by kissing her crush Rooney.
• The Robert A. Heinlein novel The Number of the Beast has Jake (the elder of the male protagonists) mention he did this in college.
• Sorry, Bro: People who knew about them thought Nareh's past sexual experiences with women were only this usually. Even she tried to tell herself it was. Most of the women whom she'd been intimate with were straight and for them it really was just experimenting. She's really bisexual though, and knew this from very early on (age seven) by having crushes on boys and girls.
• From The Wheel of Time, "pillow friends" among the novices and Accepted of Tar Valon. Such relationships are (usually) suspended upon taking the Shawl.

Live-Action TV

• According to Jim: When Jim and Cheryl accidentally learn that a couple they're friends with use "Little Winston" as a nickname for the man's penis during sex, Jim tries to balance out the humiliation they feel when they find this out by telling them an equally embarrassing secret of his — that he experimented with a guy in college. Given how he and Cheryl initially can't agree on the name of the guy, he's probably lying... but he does say after the couple leaves that he misses him.
• Averted in Batwoman (2019) when Sophie Moore admits to her husband Tyler that she had a lesbian relationship with Kate Kane in the military academy. Tyler demands to know how long this relationship lasted, and when told it lasted three years, he points out that's longer than any previous relationship he had before meeting Sophie.
  Tyler: What was it between you two? And don't say it was just some drunk college hookup unless you were actually drunk for three years.
• This is how Angela's relationship with Roxie started out on Bones. Then she went back to mostly guys, then to Roxie for a while after the wedding fiasco, then back to Hodgins.
• Eric tried to invoke this in an episode of Boy Meets World, flirting with a pretty college student while dressed as a woman. "Oh, come on, everyone experiments in college!"
• Dark Desire: Zoe sleeping with her best friend Karina (a lesbian) at first seems to be this, since after it she concludes she's straight. However, in Season 2 they're dating. When Zoe cheats on her by having sex with a guy though, Karina thinks that it was just experimental for her, to get over Darío. Zoe denies this though, saying she's really been attracted to girls so long as she can remember, but also likes guys.
• Subverted on Dharma & Greg, when Dharma "comes in" to her mother, admitting she's never had a lesbian experience.
• Ellen DeGeneres parodied this on her eponymous talk show.
  "I experimented with heterosexuality in high school, who didn't?"
• Friends:
  • In one episode, Rachel claims that she kissed one of her sorority sisters, only Phoebe doesn't believe her. In the end, it turns out to be true (and the woman in question is still in love with her).
  • Inverted in another episode. Phoebe's Citizenship Marriage husband is an ice dancer who everyone (including himself) thought was gay. It turns out he's really straight.
    Duncan: Well, I've never told you this but, there were one or two times, back in college, when I'd get really drunk, go to a straight bar and wake up with a woman next to me. But I, I, I told myself it was the liquor and everyone experiments in college.
• On Fresh Meat, J.P. and his public school fellows apparently got up to all sorts of stuff that seriously stretches the concept of Gay Bravado. He talks about it with Giles, who to J.P.'s horror later turns out to actually be gay.
  Giles: Come on, all the "power showers"... when you think about it, it was pretty gay.
  JP: What's gay about it?
  Giles: What, two men wanking each other off?
  JP: Don't call it that!
• Invoked in an episode of Game of Thrones, Tywin Lannister discusses a proposed marriage between Cersei and the extremely gay Loras Tyrell with Loras' grandmother. When Tywin refers to Loras' homosexuality as an "affliction", Lady Tyrell calmly asks him if he and another boy ever "[had] a go at each other under the sheets" when he was young and is genuinely surprised when Tywin flat out denies it.
• Glee:
  • Holly Holiday tells the kids she had some "experiences" as a student while at an all-girls boarding school.
  • Quinn does this in the fourth season with her BFF Santana during Mr. Schuester's botched wedding.
  Quinn: So, that's why college girls experiment.
  Santana: And thank God they do.
• Happy Endings:
  • Penny blurts that Jane "hooked up with a bunch of girls in college and called it a phase." Jane calmly says, "It was a phase," while husband Brad sits speechless.
  • This turns into a subversion later on when Jane reveals that one of her exes, Ryan, was someone she was in love with... and that she had several more ex-girlfriends.
• On House of Cards (US), Frank is revealed to have had a relationship in college with a male classmate. The man himself seems to wave the affair off as just experimentation by commenting 'we were just fooling around,' but Frank himself disagrees and lovingly says 'I was drawn to you', claiming that when he feels attraction to someone that's what happens, implying that he's bi. His sexuality is further proven in season 2 when he and his wife have a threesome together with his male bodyguard.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Lily discusses that one of her lifelong dreams back in college was having a "lesbian experience". Robin kisses her to check it off her list.
  • Inverted for laughs where Barney refers to his gay brother James as having had an embarrassing "hetero college phase" that he decided not to mention in his best man's speech. In some of Barney's flashbacks to his own early 20s, the audience gets to see James during his overcompensating phase. He wears nothing buts sports jerseys and gives his brother sex advice about how everybody finds (hetero) sex gross, but you just do it because it's what is expected of you as a man.
• In Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, John finishes his segment on student loans by imploring his college-age viewers to enjoy their time at college, including having some gay experiences.
  John: It doesn't count!
• On Mad About You, Paul's sister comes out of the closet. When Jamie asks her if she's always known that she was gay, she admits to this trope, word for word, but still didn't realize her true sexuality until recently.
• Melissa & Joey: It's implied that Mel may have experimented with bisexuality in college when Lennox pretends to be a lesbian.
• NTSF:SD:SUV::: When Piper is seduced by a female Russian spy, she notes that she "hasn't done this since college".
• Orange Is the New Black: In the first episode, Piper frequently insists that her old relationship with Alex was just college experimentation and she's straight now.
• In one Parks and Recreation episode where Leslie is convinced by a computer matchmaker that she and Tom are soulmates, she tries to tempt him into being interested in her by admitting that she kissed a girl when she was in college. It works, a little.
• Saturday Night Live: A skit in which everyone at The Daily Planet is aware of Clark Kent's true identity has Lois, Jimmy, and Perry tormenting the clueless man by making comments about Superman, including speculating that he's gay. Kent furiously defends himself, insisting, "Superman isn't gay! I mean, sure he experimented a little back in Smallville. . .", shocking the other three, who were just making things up.
  • In a Beauty and the Beast parody, Kristen Wiig's Belle is getting confused about how sexual attraction works with the anthropomorphic household objects. The clock says he's attracted to women. The candelabra says he's attracted only to candelabras but one time in college, he dates a menorah.
• Inverted in Spin City:
  Stuart: You're gay, right?
  Carter: Except for one time in college when I was drunk.
• On the season two finale of Veronica Mars, Veronica has a dream of what her graduation from high school would have been like if Lilly hadn't been murdered. Lilly, who is a year older, tells Veronica her relationship with her college boyfriend went south after a "disagreement about fooling around with his ex." Veronica assumes it was the boyfriend doing the fooling around, but Lilly corrects her:
  Lilly: Oh, no no, it was um, it was me. I kinda fooled around with his ex. I mean, you'd think that guys would dig that, right? ...What? It's college, it's expected. You'll see.
• Will & Grace:
  • Will hires a maid to clean up after Grace...
    Will: Grace, this is gonna cheer you up.
    Grace: A short brunette woman? Come on, Will, I tried that in college, remember? It really wasn't my thing.
  • In another episode, Grace is trying to hide from her boyfriend and ends up ducking behind Karen. In doing so, she knocks Karen off balance, and Karen ends up bent over a table. From Karen:
    Karen: Grace, I've told you before, I only did this once in college, and it just so I could borrow her Halston skirt.
  • In fact, Karen frequently makes jokes about this, implying things so often it eventually stops being college experimentation and becomes her simply being Ambiguously Bi. In another episode, when acting as a magician's assistant for Jack, when he tells her to climb in the magic box, she quips, "I haven't done this since my senior year at Sarah Lawrence."

Music

• Garfunkel and Oates' "The College Try" is about an unsuccessful experiment. (Though the only reference to college as such is in the title.)

Theatre

• In The Toxic Avenger musical, apparently Professor Ken had this, as mentioned during "Evil Is Hot."
  Mayor: I am woman!
  Professor: And I am man!
  Mayor: I am straight!
  Professor: And I am too– exceptforthatonetimeincollege–

Video Games

• In Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, you can encounter the Elf courtesan Ymir, and it turns him and Elf party member Aloth, had a fling in while they were studying magic in their college days. While Ymir is quite happy to see Aloth again, his dialogue implying that Aloth was something of a Closet Key for him, Aloth, while not hostile to Ymir, is clearly somewhat embarrassed with the situation and tries to downplay the whole thing and deflect questions about it. The fact that Aloth's female Split Personality, Iselmyr, chimes in and strongly implies that it was in fact her that actually seduced Ymir, goes some way to explain Aloth's discomfort with the situation. Iselmyr was the one that wanted to do the dirty with Ymir and Aloth was just along for the ride, whether he liked it or not.

Web Comics

• A&H Club: Inverted, Hilde claims she knew she was a lesbian before college and experimented with ''guys''. In chapter 2 one of the guys she experimented with invites her and Adrian to dinner with his wife, who turns out to be a Christian fundamentalist with some possible repressed homosexual feelings herself.
• DAR! devotes a strip to the concept, and to the author's feelings about fitting it - by accident, as she was an exclusive lesbian who bewildered herself by falling in love with a man.
• Dinosaur Comics: T-Rex and Utahraptor.◊
• El Goonish Shive:
  • In this Q&A comic, Chika reveals that she experimented a bit because apparently she liked to be scientifically rigorous in everything. She declines to reveal the results of the experiment.
  • In the non-canon "Goomanji 2" storyline, Liz declines to join a board game involving heightened attraction magic (it's fine as long as everyone agrees beforehand!) once she learns all the other players are female, because she's "saving [her] bisexual experimentation for college".
• In Fans!, Shanna mentions that she and Kathryn were Lesbians-Until-Graduation and were even a couple at one point. After having conflicting feelings at the sight of Kathryn with Will, Shanna wonders if she might still be attracted to her... until she realizes it's Will she's jealous over.
• Ménage à 3: Late-introduced character Peggy invokes the trope here. She subsequently says that she concluded that she just prefers men, but she clearly doesn't regret the experiment, and the presence of sex goddess DiDi makes her quite happy to revert for an evening. Also, at one point Dillon, a gay man, reveals to Gary that he experimented with heterosexuality in high school.
• In the BDSM webcomic Sunstone, it's revealed that Ally and Alan learned the ropes (so to speak) of BDSM by experimenting with each other back in their college days before realizing that two dominant partners make for a rather poor match. In addition, Lisa and Anne both mention having some same-sex experiences back in their college days before meeting Ally.
• Parodied in this xkcd, where a guy awkwardly finds out his girlfriend's experimentation with her sexuality was "scientifically rigorous".

Web Original

• In the CollegeHumor sketch, "Friends with Benefits Wedding," several men that Courtney has been with object to her becoming Raymond's FWB because she is (or has been) their FWB...and one girl speaks up and says she is too, explaining that "She was curious."
  • In another sketch, Jessica, Grant, and Claus reminisce about how they experimented in college. They all realized they liked both men and women, Grant had an orgy, Jessica tried drugs and cheated on her first boyfriend, and Claus conducted many experiments which defied the laws of God and Man.
  Claus: I sewed the head of a Great Dane to the body of a man, and now the dog-man terrorizes villages in the Swiss Alps. Do I regret it? No. Did I learn from it? After four to five new tries, yeah, now I have a loyal beast-man to do my bidding.
• Todd in the Shadows: Mentioned when briefly discussing "Only Girl (In the World)" by Rihanna:
  Rihanna: I want you to love me/ like I'm a hot guy.
  Todd: Okay, but judging by my experimental days in college, it'll just end disappointingly for everyone.

Western Animation

• One Cutaway Gag on The Cleveland Show showed a graduation ceremony at an all-girl college, with every girl there immediately breaking up with the girl next to them the second they graduated.
• Family Guy: In "Partial Terms of Endearment", it's revealed that Lois once experimented with her college roommate, Naomi.
• On Robot Chicken, the "My Stalker" sketch has commercial jingles for various inappropriate parodies of the "My Buddy" dolls popular in The '80s. One of them is "My Friend I Once Experimented with at Summer Camp":
  My friend I once experimented with at summer camp, My friend I once experimented with at summer camp
  Though you think of me night and day, I'm not the one who made you gay,
  My friend I once experimented with at summer camp and me!
• The Simpsons:
  • In "The Italian Bob", where the titular family goes to Italy that also happened to be one of the "Sideshow Bob" episodes, the family discovers that not only has Bob become the mayor of a village in Tuscany and given up on killing Bart, but he now has a wife and son named Francesca and Gino. Homer's the most surprised by Bob being married to a woman and admits that he had always thought that Bob was gay—Bob responds by admitting to this trope.
  • Judging from the Photo Montage in "Holidays of Future Passed", Lisa's implied to have gone through a bi-curious stage when she was in college.
  • "Mr. Lisa's Opus" is a flash-forward episode where we follow Lisa trying to get into college. At the end, she meets her roommate and they hit it off and shakes hands. Lisa ecstatically thinks "I have a friend!" only for her roommate to wink at her and Lisa then musingly thinks "Oh... or maybe something more than a friend..."
• Lampshaded in South Park, as Chef proclaims that "There's a time and a place for everything, and it's called 'college'."

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