At Wesleyan, Lucas F. Schleusener '07 was the kind of athlete who learned to live deep inside discomfort. He swam the 200 butterfly and 400 individual medley, two events that demand endurance, pacing, and the ability to keep moving when every part of you wants to stop. Today, he is the CEO and co-founder of Out in National Security, a professional and advocacy organization for LGBTQIA+ people working across the national security field. The connection between those roles is tighter than it sounds, and it starts in the pool.
Swimming taught Schleusener how to perform under pressure without losing control of himself. In long, punishing races, he says, you learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable. You learn to stay composed for one more stroke, then another. Sometimes, after a race, a teammate had to help pull him out of the pool. But the lesson was never just physical. It was about how to carry responsibility, how to stay calm when the stakes feel high, and how to keep going when the work is hard and nobody can do it for you.
That mindset shaped the rest of his Wesleyan life. He chose Wesleyan because it gave him room to take both athletics and academics seriously, and he did. While training and competing, he was also writing an honors thesis, studying Arabic, serving as a regional Amnesty International student chair, working on the student-run history journal, and studying abroad. What mattered most to him was that he never felt he had to choose between those parts of himself. He could be a swimmer, a historian, a politically engaged student, and an out gay athlete all at once. That experience taught him how to integrate demanding commitments under real pressure and still show up fully in each one.
His academic interest in the Middle East took shape in that same environment. Like many people of his generation, he first became interested after 9/11, initially through Model United Nations. But Wesleyan pushed him past the usual national security frame. A first-year course in Islamic art history changed how he understood the region, moving him away from seeing it only through terrorism and crisis and toward a much deeper understanding of culture, religion, power, and continuity. Arabic study deepened that view. So did a junior-year seminar on the history of religion that met after swim practice, where students brought dinner, presented work, and wrestled seriously with theology, history, and philosophy. Wesleyan, he says, strengthened his ability to engage unfamiliar material with openness and discipline.
That habit of looking past the surface stayed with him after graduation. He studied in Cairo and Jerusalem, then completed a master's in Middle East Studies at the University of Chicago. Those experiences changed not just what he knew, but how he understood policy itself. In cities like Cairo, history is not abstract. It is layered into everyday life. That shaped how he later approached government service. Policy is not just designed in Washington. It is lived differently by real people in real places, often in ways institutions do not immediately see.
If swimming taught him endurance, it also taught him something about teams. He trained most closely with two teammates, Josh Tanz '06 and Matt Donne '07, and he remembers them as very different people with very different interests and approaches. One was deeply focused on medicine; he was equally focused on history and Arabic. They pushed through the same hard work in different ways. That experience stayed with him. Success, he learned, does not require everyone to think the way you do. It requires understanding what people are capable of, what they respond to, and whether they will show up when it matters. Performance may be individual. Success is collective.
That understanding followed him into some of the most high-pressure rooms in American public life. Schleusener went on to work in the Obama administration, first at the White House and then as a speechwriter to three Secretaries of Defense. The role, he says, sat at the intersection of policy, communication, and judgment. Day to day, it meant moving between meetings, conversations, and drafts, gathering input from across the building and shaping it into language that senior leaders could use. At that level, words matter. A single sentence can shape how policy is understood and acted on.
What made that work possible was trust. Chuck Hagel, he recalls, used to say that "the coin of the realm is trust," and Schleusener saw that up close while helping revise Hagel's 2013 West Point commencement address in real time as sexual assault scandals were unfolding across the military. In moments like that, credibility depends on recognizing what people are experiencing right now, not just what you planned to say a week ago. Wesleyan had already given him practice in that kind of composure. Confidence, he says, did not come from certainty. It came from experience, from learning how to adapt, and from trusting he could operate effectively even in demanding environments.
Eventually, though, he realized he needed to build something of his own. During the later Obama years, particularly as the Department of Defense moved to open all military roles to women and end the first ban on transgender servicemembers, he saw how change inside institutions actually happens. Durable progress requires policy, leadership, and culture to move together. But he also saw that many advocacy models outside government were not built to engage institutions at that level. There was a gap between how change worked inside systems and how people were trying to push on those systems from the outside.
That gap led to Out in National Security, which he co-founded in 2018 with Shawn Skelly and Rusty Pickens. The organization was built not just around representation, but around translation. Schleusener had become comfortable in rooms with senior national security leaders and in LGBTQ spaces, and he understood how to help those worlds talk to one another. Out in National Security was created to connect people, institutions, and partners so that policy, pressure, and implementation could move together. Since then, it has grown into a national organization that has helped connect more than thirty national security appointees across government, supported automatic discharge upgrades for more than eleven thousand LGB servicemembers, and built leadership programs and practical tools for the field.
For current Wesleyan student-athletes interested in public service or national security, Schleusener's advice is clear. Discipline, writing, judgment, and integrity matter over time. So does understanding how institutions actually work. Organizations are made of people, but they are also shaped by structures, incentives, and habits. If you want to create change, you have to understand both the moral claim and the machinery that can carry it.
Looking back, he says Wesleyan gave him two things he still relies on: creativity and resilience. Swimming taught him how to stay steady under strain. Wesleyan more broadly taught him how to bring his full self into difficult work and to do it with decency. That combination has shaped everything since. The races changed. The work got bigger. But the core challenge stayed the same: stay calm, keep moving, and build something that allows others to thrive too.
