• About the Center
• Programs & Services
• About the Carriage House
• News & Events
• OUTlines
• Library
• Community Resource Guide
• Become Involved
• Interactive
• Room Reservation
• Alumni
• Prospective Penn Undergraduates
• Make a Donation
• Suggestions
• Contact Us
• myLGBTC
•  
• 

What a Difference a Day Makes

Last year, we all learned a valuable lesson in the worst way possible. We learned that in one single day, the world can change. If only it had been twelve years ago, when we could have woken up to the news of the Berlin Wall falling and looked to the coming decade with hope. Instead, the lesson of the day was a new definition of fear.

In a few decades, when my grandchildren call me up and say, “We learned about September 11th in school today, grandpa. You were there, weren’t you? What was it like?” I will tell them I was in the LGBT Center, sitting at the computer, wondering what my mother was so worried about in her e-mail that asked me to call her as soon as possible. Then, Bob came in and told me that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon. I was waiting for the punch line. We went into the front room and turned on the television. I watched as the towers collapsed and wondered whether I would live to be able to tell my grandchildren about the attack, or whether this would just be the first attack of a war that would destroy the United States, or the world. I still wonder.

I think if I had to pick anywhere on campus to watch my world turn upside down, it would have been the Center. The Center was the place that made me feel safe four years ago when I visited campus, a child of the Bible Belt desperate for a place where I wouldn’t have to worry about hiding who I was.

The Center has since become my on campus oasis. When I want to get out of my room or when I am too tired to face walking from Bennett Hall back to Super Block, I go to the Center. I walk in and there’s Erin at her computer and one of any number of work-studies there beside her, from Ilana, Kurt, and Alex to Mike and Ninah to Jen, Beth, and Preeti. There are always smiles, always jokes, and the little part of me that still remembers what it was like to be more afraid of rednecks than terrorists always feels safe.

There were a lot of days that have changed me. There was the day that Ilana made me realize that bisexuality was not a stepping stone to homosexuality. There was the day that Alex explained to me what transgender meant. There was the day Kate Bornstein came to campus, and the day she saw me direct her play. All of these days have worked together to transform me. I can’t call myself a gay man anymore, because both of those words feed into a gender binary I don’t accept anymore, and besides I have hooked up with girls and liked it, but not enough to go full on to bisexual or even pansexual. Right now I’m sticking with queer, and I still change on days like the last rally, where Dan actually convinced me that queer was not, in fact, a universal term. That makes one thing we agree on.

Back when I was still a gay man, I wrote an article in OUTlines that was a piece of advice to freshmen, a few happy-go-lucky pages about joining clubs and other recommendations. I am much more jaded now, but a whole lot wiser. So here’s my new piece of advice to everyone still at Penn. Enjoy the new Center, and let it be a home for everyone on campus to run to in the event of terrorist attack or rainy day.

Do not be complacent. There is still violence being perpetrated against our community. We still do not have the freedom to marry or to adopt children. We are still discriminated against in the workplace. Our campus is very apathetic, so it is vital that you do not let little problems slide. Do not let your friends say, “That’s so gay!” Do not let them vote for people who are unwilling to support sexual and gender minority rights. Remind them that “gay” or “queer” doesn’t mean someone else—it means you.

While you’re at it, take a look in the mirror and try to find any remaining homophobia inside, as well as any racism, sexism, lookism, classism, or any other prejudice. Because if everybody who is disenfranchised by the government, media, or economy stopped fighting one another and started fighting the system, it wouldn’t even take a day for changes to be made, and years from now my grandchildren won’t even understand why sexual and gender minorities would need a center at all.

On a less serious note, here’s one more piece of advice: sleep with someone in the Greek system. It will put a spring in your step! Tell your friends. Wait until your grandkids go to college to tell them.

~Rudy Ramirez is a senior English major from Texas.

Are You Going to Tell Your Kids?

Since I have been telling virtually anybody who even looks like they might listen, I have absolutely no shame in broadcasting it in print: I am engaged. My boyfriend proposed to me on New Year’s Eve, and since then most people have heard little else out of my mouth but wedding-related babble. My friends are humoring me, at least so far. I thought that, given the amount of time and energy I have spent not just babbling about but also planning my wedding and married life, I was prepared to answer any well-wisher’s question. Yet I was caught off guard when, a fellow student in the LGBT Center while I was working asked me, “Are you going to tell your kids that you’re queer?”

Although my fiancé and I aren’t planning to have children, I answered smoothly, “Sure. I think it’s going to be a real non-issue though. I mean, all my friends are queer. The kid’s Auntie Margot is going to be coming over with her girlfriend a lot, you know?” The conversation took another turn and the topic dropped, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

It’s not so much that she brought up the thought of having children. It’s that her question has got me thinking more and more about what kind of dimension being an out bisexual will bring to my marriage—or perhaps vice versa.

My fiancé has known from almost the first time we met that I am bisexual. I blurted it out to him literally minutes after we decided we were “officially” dating. In retrospect, this was perhaps not exactly the most logical way to handle things, but I was so attracted to him I was almost desperate to get it out of the way so that I could avoid getting my heart broken. I have learned the hard way that I do not want to be involved with someone who is not aware of and/or does not accept my sexuality.

Fortunately for me, my fiancé did not (and still doesn’t) think less of me for my outburst. He has never been phased by my sexuality. He has been one of my biggest supporters and has even started confronting people around him when they make homophobic/heterosexist comments because being with me has changed his perspective.

So the issue isn’t us, it’s how outsiders might react. I have always been aware on some level what it might mean for me to be a queer woman who is with a man. I have had people, both straight and queer, not take my declaration of my sexuality seriously. I am troubled by the fact that even though, by virtue of the definition of being bisexual there is the inherent possibility that I will be with a man at some point, somehow I don’t really “count” as queer if I am not with a woman.

I wonder: why do I care? Do I care? I must, if I have gone to all the trouble to write this. But I have to say that it bothers me that I do. Part of me wants to be in a position where my sexuality is visible, and yet marrying a man makes me even less visible than I was before. I am torn between not wanting to let the opinions of others influence my life and the temptation to just give up and hide. I think that this is a perpetual struggle for many queer people—do we deny who we are because the rest of the world does not want to see us? Or do we paint ourselves blue and jump up and down screaming so that they are forced to see us? Or is there a happy—and safe—medium?

I have spent several days writing this article, reading and rereading, trying to answer that very question. I have nothing all that satisfying to conclude. At this point, all I can do is deal with one person, one situation at a time as I encounter them, trying to keep in mind how I am adding to or taking away from my own invisibility. I want to remind myself that even that isn’t easy, that nothing important is ever that clear. I am writing this article, which is a very public declaration, but I have not yet officially come out to my closest friend here at Penn.

My need to feel invisible can be a powerful and dangerous force sometimes. Sometimes I want to stay invisible, although I know I shouldn’t, because I am afraid of what the other person will say or do. I worry that I will give in to the temptation to use my engagement ring as a shield and dive further back into the closet. Like it or not, I can’t help feeling that others’ opinions matter. I just hope that the past three years of being very out and very up front will help me remember what it feels like to be seen and known when faced with that temptation, and that in the end, no matter how hurtful people are, it feels better than not being known at all.

~Bethany is in the Reading/Writing/Literacy Program at the Graduate School of Education and is originally from Rhode Island.

Random Acts of Ignorance

After a week of attending as many QPenn events as possible, I was feeling good about queer life on this campus. I was impressed by the turnout at most of the events and the positive support from so many members of the PENN community. All too soon though, QPenn was over and I was attending other events on campus. I sat in an auditorium and listened to two young men sitting behind me make homophobic and racist comments about the performers on stage. Each word from their mouths erased a word I’d heard at QPenn. Every time they spoke I cringed. We asked them to stop. The people around us asked them to stop. We didn’t know what else to do so we moved.

Then my cousin called. He is interning at a high school in Central New Jersey. Although we’ve joked about terms like “that’s so gay,” he has tried to be supportive and educate the people around him. The other day though he found a situation with which he didn’t know how to deal. A boy at school came in for “Wacky Wednesday” (one of those terrible high school fun ideas) dressed “in drag” and the entire school decided to pick on him because he is “obviously” gay. My cousin was at a loss for how to counter all their terrible, homophobic comments. So he called me because he just knew that I would know what to say.

I didn’t know. Sometimes the little things really get me. I know how to plan educational events that I think are going to make a difference and change people’s views. All year I’ve been working on Seeking Common Ground, a joint endeavor between the LGBT Center and the Greenfield Intercultural Center aimed at increasing dialogue around issues of racism, heterosexism, and homophobia. I’ve had some wonderful, engaging discussions that have always left me feeling a little bit hopeful. But these little situations leave me feeling hopeless. I’m not quite sure what to do to challenge racist and homophobic comments in these smaller, more personal situations. I know that they need to be countered but I still haven’t figured out how.

I’ve started talking about it with my friends, as I thought maybe one of them would have the answer. No one seems to know though. Every one of them had encountered similar situations. One friend, the toughest I know, who came out at age thirteen and has suffered numerous attacks and fought her way through New York City, is now working as a paralegal and is totally closeted at work. She’s ashamed of it. Still, she needs to work and get through this one year in this one job. She’s had to listen to some terrible homophobic comments and does not know what to do. Other friends I’ve spoken with explained that they fear for their personal safety and would rather move their seats than confront homophobic people.

However we choose to deal with these situations — and I think it is a personal choice — we are usually left feeling powerless. A friend told me, “most people are harmless and stupid and always will be, Preeti,” but I want to believe that if I say something to them now and correct them, I’ll be preventing someone else from having a similar experience with them later. And if I don’t correct them and no one else does, then what happens? Time has passed since QPenn and I certainly haven’t found the answers to my questions. But I’m hoping that with more conversation, we can find a way to leave these everyday encounters feeling empowered rather than powerless and energized rather than discouraged. If we don’t stand up, who will?

~Preeti Advani is the Center’s Social Work Intern and is from New Jersey.

OUT & In-Focus: Darren Rosenblum C’91, L’95

If I were limited to describing Darren Rosenblum in one word, it would be ‘steadfast.’ Throughout his time at Penn and beyond, Darren has been open about his sexuality and has not changed who he is to please those around him.

While at Penn as an undergraduate Darren wrote for the Daily Pennsylvanian. He received quite a bit of backlash from these articles including death threats and the placement of the picture that ran with his column on a dartboard in a Penn fraternity house.

At Penn Law, he wore dresses to class regularly. He experienced little backlash from this within the Law School community, and attributes this to the maturity that is expected within that community. However, he would sometimes get catcalls from people while walking to the Law School from his apartment. Darren said that he was not trying to make “a statement” in wearing the dresses, but that he rather was “doing it because…[he] felt comfortable doing it.” He felt that people recognized that and “rose to the occasion when given a chance to be tolerant.”

Darren graduated from the College in 1991. At that time he took a year off to work for the Jewish Theological Seminary at Columbia University, which he stated was “at the heart of issues of lesbians and gays regarding Conservative Judaism.” He graduated from Penn Law in 1995 and then worked for a small litigation firm. After that he was a clerk for the U.S. District Court of Puerto Rico for two years. While in Puerto Rico, he was still open about his sexuality and felt that he escaped the pressures that his Puerto Rican friends faced because he “didn’t have people who he knew from high school” around to pressure him in terms of being gay.

He even wrote a brief for the Puerto Rican court stating that international law required Puerto Rico to overturn their sodomy law. The issue is still open to this day. After his time in Puerto Rico he worked for Clifford Chance Rogers and Wells LLP in New York City for two years, and currently he is working for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom LLP doing international arbitration and litigation.

He has also done a great deal of pro bono work, largely in the area of queer rights, on top of his regular assignments. His pro bono work includes a brief that he wrote in the Dale v Boy Scouts of America that was cited by the defense. The Boy Scouts were arguing that all religions viewed homosexuality as a sin, but the brief proposed “that the worlds various religions have different perspectives on whether [it] is a sin.”

Darren told me that “now [he is] working on marriage rights with the Freedom to Marry Project.” He also has had law review articles published on a few subjects. One article is on transgender prisoners rights, and he feels that the argument is relevant to the world at large because the problems of transgender prisoners represent a microcosm of the problems of society. Another of his briefs discussed how the “victories” in queer law don’t represent victories for the entire queer community but rather for only for certain segments of it. Another article discussed proportional representation and how it can benefit the queer community.

All in all, Darren has done a lot of work in the area of queer rights from his pro bono work to just living his life as he wants to and not changing based on the will of those around him.

~Shel White is a senior invidualized major in SEAS and is originally from Central PA.

A Death in the Family

Until this December, I had not experienced the death of someone or something very close to me. I’ve been to funerals and visitations, usually for someone else, and our pet rabbit died when I was very young...

But my Grandmother didn’t, in fact, die in December. In order for me to continue trudging through life and in an attempt to drag my feet less and less, in my mind, my Grandmother died in December. I had too many things to think about and too many things to do.

I seem callous, right? I suppose everyone has hir own way of coping. However, I experienced closure on that trip in December with my three brothers and my mother. On the 18-or-so hour drive down to South Carolina, I was troubled by the thoughts that I never really told my Grandmother the truth about my life. Of course, it is a larger societal issue that I even feel the obligation to reveal my sexuality to her or anyone. In our family, and especially in my Grandmother’s generation, it’s straight until proven gay. And yes, that parallels with “innocent until proven guilty” for a reason. To add to that, I am an extremely honest person who was raised Catholic. My guilty conscience was bred into me from birth. This all makes it difficult to deal with the idea that I may have been seen as, in some way, lying to my Grandmother for years (and I haven’t been to confession in at least four!).

To increase the pressure I was feeling on that never-ending car-ride, Mom mentioned that my Grandmother had no more than six months to live and no matter if she’s living or not, she would not be able to make it up for graduation. That thought had never before crossed my mind; of course my Grandmother would be at my graduation. It began to finally hit me that I probably wouldn’t ever see her again.

She knew it, too. While my Mother and Grandfather were speaking at the dining room table, my Grandmother signaled me over during Oprah, or some other revealing afternoon show like that which always makes me cry. She had a trachea tube, and I remember vividly her mouthing out the words of our conversation for which I had not a convenient moment for but I knew had to happen. In death, there are not many, if any, convenient moments.

She knew. She knew everything. Who told her? It doesn’t matter, but the air was cleared. My Catholic-raised self no longer felt guilty and now refused to buckle under the pressures of my upbringing within the relationship between my dying Grandmother and me.

She mouthed a lot of inspiring little, seemingly cliched or at least commonsense things during that conversation. The most important of which was that she loved me. That was something she never had to mouth or say because we all knew.

There are a lot of things that we all just “know,” and we often take these things for granted. Our parents and grandparents, perhaps. A roof over our heads. Heterosexuality. Our children growing up to marry and be happy. Gender is another. Race. When these things we just “know,” assume or take for granted turn out to be nothing we thought they were, for instance the idea that Gram will just always be there, it is how we deal with them that help us to grow, or not, as human beings.

Another death in my family has occurred recently, as well. I have been requested, basically, to tone it down and not “flaunt” who I am around my family. My Grandmother, despite her Father’s wishes, received her diploma and went on to business school in college and displayed that diploma proudly to him, only to have him throw it down on the table in disgust. She knew, and I’m sure expected, him to do that and it probably hurt when he did it, but her pursuit of what was right for her and in the future, her family, never impeded her from living happily.

Her choices made her the beautiful person she was and she lives in my heart as that person. Her person cannot be separated from the choices she may have been seen to make. She probably didn’t see the route she took as much of a choice at all; perhaps she was just dealing with the cards she was dealt.

She loved me and all of her grandchildren. She told me to be proud of who I am. I continue to do so, perhaps despite some of my family member’s wishes, and Gram, I didn’t tell Pop, but I did mail him a piece from athletics written about me and my involvement within the Penn community. So he knows, and hopefully still loves me despite that, like you did.

~Jen Moore is a senior English major, Women’s Studies minor originally from New Jersey.

Nothing Short of Amazing

These are the words that immediately come to mind as I reminisce on the series of events that comprised the recent QPenn 2002 extravaganza. As a first-time attendee, I must admit I was pleasantly surprised - not only by the depth and variety of activities scheduled, but more importantly the amount of active participants both on and off the PENN campus. Up until the day that the official supplement came out, I really had no concept of the magnitude of the affair. Matter of fact, it was not until I initially inspected the event packet that it became obvious that this indeed, would be LARGE!

Beyond merely being a celebration of our “queerness,”’ QPenn served as a positive medium to educate and inform the people of PENN and the surrounding area about the background, life and experiences of various members within the LGBT community. Judging by the number of overwhelmingly positive responses and the attendance statistics alone, I would say that it was a “smash success.” Among the many events of the week, we had a community social mixer, a lively dance party, an up-close and personal conversation with a prominent local lesbian government official, an electrifying live musical performance from an up-and-coming artist (who just happens to also be an alumnae), a stimulating series of academic and cultural workshops, and lastly, a special guest appearance from two rather high-profile MTV personalities. In short, there was plenty of fun and excitement for nearly everyone.

For those of you that missed it, shame on you… Hopefully you’ll be around for yet another year to partake in such a wonderful experience. Nevertheless here is a brief recap and overview of last week’s festivities:

A Time for Celebration

QPenn officially kicked off with an emotional opening day rally followed by several queer-related workshops geared at providing insight on gender, sexuality and on-going campus support activities. One of the most anticipated events for the week was the social mixer and dance party hosted by Lambda Grads. Many of us, still having residual effects from Spring Break no doubt needed the excuse to get “our groove on” once again. I won’t go into who had two left feet at the dance – I’ll let Steven and Michael dish that out, however I do know that if we can muster even half of the amount of attendees for subsequent parties, we’ll be partying pretty hard here.

Educational workshops and dialogue

Led by instructors and faculty from Penn, the week also included a variety of 20 minute seminars revolving around queer-themed topics. Each was distinct and offered rather unique and interesting subject matter ranging from sexuality and the law, queer spirituality, to the psychological well being of racial sexual minorities.

Perhaps the highlight of the overall event was the keynote speaker series which included several prominent and somewhat notorious figures. By far, the best attended and most anticipated lecturers were Danny and Sophia of MTV fame, who did captivated the audience for well over two hours. According to “buzz around the yard” the most intriguing speaker was without a doubt Philadelphia Department of Human Services Commissioner Alba Martinez. Even to this day, I’m still hearing extraordinary things about this woman. All in all, the educational workshops and guest speakers for this year’s event proved to be quite “on point.”

Cultural and miscellaneous activities

Overall, community events for QPenn proved to be diverse and stimulating on several fronts. In addition to the more traditional forms of entertainment and education, the event was rounded out by activities which also offered breadth and insight on areas often overlooked; the “Artfully Queer” art exhibit and the Open Mic session were quite popular and showcased the works and talents of several artists within the PENN community. I, for one, was very impressed with all of the participants that had the nerve to display or “strut their stuff” amongst the masses.

In general, every day seemed to be filled with something fresh, exciting and wonderful. It’s a shame it had to end, but already I’m looking forward to what next year will bring forth. To all of the QPenn organizers and participants for this year’s event, I’ll be “one of the first to give it up to you” – job well done!

~JC Warren is a first year graduate student from Los Angeles in the School of Arts and Sciences.