Candlelight Vigil a success

Today we had two events, one hosted by the One Project and another by the Pride Alliance.

Today's lunch discussion about National Coming Out today brought out a group of students who opened up and shared their varying stories about coming out. What seemed surprising is that a lot of them did not have "bad" experiences coming out and that may mean an overall change in the atmosphere surrounding gay stigmas. I know it doesn't mean there is a massive change (or else we wouldn't need vigils anymore), but maybe small changes here and there.

Tonight's vigil drew out about 150 students, faculty and staff and it was a great showing to celebrate the lives and mourn the deaths of the 7 (and presumably many other) deaths caused because of harassment, bullying, discrimination, poor language, etc. that happened in the month of September and probably happens daily across the country. It is good that our media has picked up on these few, but no doubt there are many more out there. The vigil was planned by The Pride Alliance and featured students, staff and faculty reading poetry that expressed both love and anger and also speeches urging us all to love each other and see the beauty in one another. There was also an opportunity to the staff on campus who interact with the LGBT community to come up and introduce themselves to the students there so that the students knew who they could turn to. Overall, it was a great event!!!! Hopefully we won't need to do another one anytime soon or ever again.

Repost from Chronicle of Higher Education

Queer Youth Not a Tragedy

October 3, 2010, 9:00 pm

By Laurie Essig

This past week, my inbox has been flooded with messages from colleagues about how “we must do something” to show our outrage at the five suicides of gay teens that have occurred in the past three weeks in this country.
That’s right—five young gay people who killed themselves apparently in response to homophobic bullying and harassment by their classmates. By now the names of these five young men are etched into our collective consciousness. Asher Brown, 13, of Texas; Billy Lucas, 15, of Indiana; Seth Walsh, 13, of California; Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who threw himself off the George Washington Bridge; and now Raymond Chase, 19, a student in Rhode Island.
Ellen DeGeneres made a video calling these deaths a sign that teen bullying is an epidemic. Dan Savage decided to put a call out on YouTube to stop queer youth from killing themselves. The campaign, entitled It Will Get Better, invited queers and other outcasts to “talk” to suicidal teens through videos about how different life gets after high school. Video after video discusses how the idiots who bully you in high school grow up to be miserable nobodies while you can grow up to be as fabulous as you want to be. Many schools and universities are responding to the suicides with vigils, speak-outs, and other forums for marking this national tragedy.
But the sociologist in me keeps deleting all those urgent e-mails. After all, anti-queer violence and bullying is not “news” to me. But the e-mails tell me we must respond right now because five is an extraordinary number of gay teens killing themselves. Really? Five gay teens killing themselves is five too many, but ultimately it is the news media that has decided this is an unusually high number. Suicide among queer youth is quite high, with some estimates that queer youth are four times as likely to commit suicide as their straight peers.
So what makes this story “news” and why are we being urged to action rather than the thoughtfulness that these young men’s lives deserve?
Perhaps it is because there is something powerful about narratives that posit an innocent victim pitted against evildoers. And even when the hero of our story dies, or perhaps especially because the hero of the story dies, we just can’t wait to hear it over and over again.
But there’s something else too that we like to hear. That there’s something wrong with kids today—not the queers, but the bullies. They’re meaner than we were. They have access to Twitter and other technologies of “cyber bullying.” Pathologizing youth is a story we’ve been telling for a long time. Kids today, why can’t they be like we were, accepting of sexual and gender diversity? Remember how fun junior high and high school were? Especially if you were queer in anyway? Yeah, right. Classic displacement. We were totally evil to anyone who was different in any way, so we conveniently forget that and panic over how awful kids are today.
Finally there’s the other story, the one that has been told at least since earlier sexologists tried to save the sodomite from jail by marking him as “sick” and not “criminal.” This is the story of the pity of those in power, the sexual elites, for the poor, sad sexual minorities who are such tragic figures. Pity them; do not punish them. The fact that way more than five queer teens had an amazing month, had their first love, their first encounter with the richness of queer culture—from drag to politics—is not a story we want to hear as a culture. The fact that hundreds or even thousands of queer kids stood up to a bully, injected queer consciousness into a classroom or a family dinner, and generally lived technicolor lives over the rainbow rather than locked down in some black and white Kansas is lost in the news cycle. We prefer our queers as victims. They’re easier to support and much less scary that way.
So maybe I’m an incredibly hard and cold person to not want to jump on the “queers are more victimized than ever” bandwagon, but I just can’t help thinking that there’s a lot more going on for queer youth than bullying.
The fact that schools and universities are not enforcing anti-bullying laws and that this has fatal consequences is a tragedy. The fact that anti-queer rhetoric is so commonplace that “fag” practically means “Yo what’s up” in some circles is a tragedy. The fact that the same news media that decides queer youth are a tragedy gives plenty of airtime to hate-spewing homophobes in politics and religion is a tragedy.
But the queer youth of today—out in middle school, showing up at their local queer youth center, making fabulous lives outside of heteronormativity—are not a tragedy.  They’re a triumph.

The One Project in The Diamondback

The One Project unifies LGBT students

In wake of recent suicides, UNIV 100 section works harder to create sense of community for freshmen

By Melissa Quijada

Yesterday, they talked about the suicides.
A dozen first-year students in the university's One Project - a specialized section of UNIV 100 offered to members or allies of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community - sat in a classroom yesterday afternoon, discussing the recent string of suicides among young people taunted about their perceived sexual orientations.
Now more than ever, organizers said, they wanted to make sure this university's students feel secure.
"The students were asked if they felt safe in their halls," said Dian Squire, assistant director of orientation and the One Project coordinator.
Squire developed the program with the help of other administrators and student groups such as Pride Alliance to address the special needs of students coming to terms with various aspects of their identities.
"Not only are they experiencing the transition to college, but also coming out again for the first time," Squire said. "The ultimate goal is to retain LGBT students who might not belong to an LGBT community. Once students feel like they belong, they are more likely to persist throughout by continuing to their academics and graduating."
The course is partnered with mentorship, various events and an alternative spring break trip.
One of the project's teaching assistants, junior kinesiology major Sam Mohen, said the program builds a solid academic and social foundation for freshman students to take full advantage of the university's resources, similar to the objectives of other UNIV 100 courses.
Each week Mohen reads the journals of students in her section. She said the entries are meant to encourage students to write about their individual identities and their first semester of college living.
This week, the students turned their attention to the suicide of Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman who committed suicide after his roommate filmed and broadcast online a sexual encounter between Clementi and another man.
"It's good to know that we have people here to talk to," freshman speech pathology major Colleen Tuohy said. "Obviously it's tragic that something like that would happen, especially someone as young as a college student."
Tuohy identified herself as an LGBT ally - an active supporter of LGBT issues - which she said stems from her experience with her best friend in high school, who is gay.
Next week, the students plan to take their activism and outrage one step further: They will collaborate to create a video to post on the It Gets Better Project's YouTube page - an outreach campaign, started by openly gay writer Dan Savage, that consists of a series of brief, personal messages assuring LGBT teenagers who are being teased that every life is worth living.
Jazz Jordan, a freshman letters and sciences major, said she looked forward to shooting the video with her classmates.
Students in the One Project also bond in events that promote vocal discussion on contentious topics. Monday, students will share their stories on National Coming Out Day at Stamp Student Union.
The formula seems to be working.
"I hate getting out of this class early! It feels like such a friendly atmosphere and I can say whatever I'm feeling," one student wrote on the course's midterm evaluation. "Everyone involved is so supportive. The One Project is my favorite thing about UMD so far."
quijada at umdbk dot com

http://www.diamondbackonline.com/news/the-one-project-unifies-lgbt-students-1.1673201

The media affects how the gay community is viewed...

At tonight's discussion, Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Image and Identity in the LGBTQ Community, we had 22 people show up to our event!

We had a lot of freshmen students including a couple new ones and a lot of upper class-men and RAs. The discussion surrounded how TV, movies and news play a role in how the world views the LGBTQ community. I think there was a general consensus that the image shown has grown over time from just a shell of a "queeny"  man to a more well-rounded human being with a family, job and personal life outside of fashion.

We touched on the recent tragedies with the students who have killed themselves over gay bullying and if the media has a responsibility to make statements for or against certain gay issues. The room was split, but what was agreed upon is that adults do have a responsibility to not perpetuate hate or stereotypes and that people do not see an issue with LGBTQ hatred, but that they should in the future and that hate is a learned behavior.

In the end we all left with a lot to continue to talk about and it was certainly a great discussion. I look forward to what is coming next!

Today was a good night...DC Center Volunteer Night

Today we went down to The DC Center. It's an LGBT Resource center located on U street (just exit on the 13th street side and walk down one block). We met there with David Mariner who is their Director to make safe-sex kits. As mentioned before, 1 in 20 people in DC has HIV/AIDS and so we wanted to do our part to help out the community. These kits, through a program called FuKit, provide free condoms, lube and education to the local clubs and venues for gay men and women. We had to have stuffed at least 1000 kits to send out to the clubs this week.

We had 9 people come including 4 new people which was great. It was really nice to see some new faces. Also there was a man named Bob (not sure of his last name). Bob has spent the last ten years of his life working to gain marriage rights for LGBT people and he finally did so this past year. It's because of his work that we all have the same rights in that respect.

I think we had a great time and it was a lot of fun once again to learn about new people, to bond over something fun, to learn a little more about our community and to learn about a new resource just down the road.

More information is available at www.thedccenter.org