WOMYN Wednesday

Hey, everyone!

I promised to keep you in the loop about WOMYN, so here's the rundown: Our Senior Layout Editor, Robert Kollenberg, has begun putting the magazine together. We're also working with an artist to create a unique cover design for the magazine, as well as a layout redesign. Finally, just as a reminder, if you're on the Review Board, please return your comments on new submissions ASAP - y'all are the ones who have the power to accept or reject submissions!

I don't know if y'all are interested in my eensy saga of grad school applications, but I'll keep telling you anyway. So, I decided to leave my LGBTQ-related activities on my C.V. without offering any kind of explanation. In most ways, it has been a non-issue, but there is one particular incident that was a little unsettling.

Some of you know that, in addition to applying to graduate school, I'm in the midst of the scholarship competitions for the Rhodes and the Marshall. In order to be an official candidate from Duke, I had to have an institutional endorsement interview, which works kind of like a mock scholarship interview and a constructive criticism session all rolled into one. As you might imagine, it was pretty stressful, and I was very nervous. The interview was more of a rapid-fire grilling session than anything else - I was asked about a range of things pertaining to my thesis and my personal statement. Some of the questions I couldn't answer (I don't yet know everything about the sixteenth century in France, unfortunately), which didn't really help. The last question, though, sent me over the edge. I was asked what the climate was like for LGBTQ people on campus, and whether that environment had anything to do with my involvement with WOMYN.

I was not in any way expecting such a question, and my experience as part of the LGBTQ community is not something that I enjoy explaining to a roomful of complete strangers. Nor is it a story that I should have to tell, especially since my interviewers are human, with their own notions and prejudices that could affect whether I continue in the competitions.

I got something coherent out before I started crying uncontrollably (mortifying). Now, let's be clear: there are certain questions that should never be asked, and the one I responded to probably falls under that category as well. My situation is a little different - because it was not a job interview, I don't think that there is any kind of legal issue at stake. However, I think that every interview should follow the same basic, ethical principles. One of those is that no one has the right to force you to come out (or to out you) in any setting. We still have to negotiate a world full of prejudices and injustices, and in many states (and other nations) we have no protection against discrimination for being LGBTQ. So, know your rights, people, and assert them if you have any doubt about a situation.

My story has a happy ending, or perhaps a new, happy beginning: I am continuing on in both scholarship competitions, which is very exciting. I don't know how much farther I'll get, but even being at this point is amazing.

Every Duke Gay Should Know #2: The Gothic Queers

For this week's post, I decided to post a Chronicle article from 1997. The undergraduate LGBTQA organization at the time was called the Gothic Queers...and they too had a little bridge incident. It is important to know where we have been...to know where we are going!

Gothic Queers charge censorship
By Devin Gordon
October 10, 1997

Blotted out by intermittent scads of white paint, colorful slogans on the East Campus bridge celebrating homosexuality and National Coming Out Week have been systematically removed from the view of passersby during the past two days. An unnamed official at the University's Department of Facilities Management, which ordered the whitewashing, considered the messages offensive. The gay community-outraged and upset-has called it censorship.

"We were all shocked to discover that there's a speech code at Duke," said John Howard, director of the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life. "We were appalled to learn that it's administered by Facilities Management." As part of the National Coming Out Week festivities, dozens of members of the University's homosexual community gathered earlier this week to paint the East Campus Bridge pink and decorate it with slogans of queer pride.

But during a scheduled street-cleaning project Wednesday afternoon, a crew of facilities management workers obscured a considerable number of the messages with white paint.

In a statement to The Chronicle Thursday evening on behalf of the senior administration, Executive Vice President Tallman Trask said the whitewashing was performed, in part, to delete offensive words and phrases that had been painted on or near the work by the gay community. Facilities management officials, he explained, ordered the deletions in accordance with its long-standing policy against "vulgar or obscene graffiti... placed on Duke campus."

"Some of these [deletions] were obscene and, consistent with the past policy, should have been painted over by facilities staff," Trask said in the statement. "Most, however, were statements which reflected the world view of gays and lesbians and were consistent with their right to free expression. The removal of these statements was an error in judgment that cannot be condoned. The facilities department has been instructed to be more circumspect in future decisions to paint over language at the underpass."

Sgt. Sara-Jane Raines, the Duke University Police Department's minority liaison, said she investigated a complaint that LGBT Center officials filed about the repainting. Prior to the actions of facilities management, she asserted, the bridge contained little or no anti-gay graffiti and no patently offensive language that would have justified the whitewashing.

Every Duke Gay Should Know #1: 2007 Addition of "Gender Identity" to Duke's Non-Discrimination Policy

In 2005, Duke University's LGBT Task Force formed a committee to research and advocate for the extension of the university's nondiscrimination policy to transgender individuals. The committee examined policies favored by other states, corporation, and peer institutions, such as Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. After ten months of research, it issued a report, recommending that the university protect transgender members of the university community from discrimination based on "gender identity or expression." In February 2007, the board of trustees approved an update to Duke's statement of equal opportunity that included the words "gender identity." It also voted to change the wording of the section covering LGBT individuals to refer to "sexual orientation" rather than "sexual orientation or preference," to reflect the evolution in the ways that sexual orientation is understood.

Sounds great on paper, right? Fast forward to August 30, 2007, when a parent's complaints resulted in the eventual relocation of a transgender student from a West Campus dorm to an off campus apartment.

So I ask myself, how far is our university willing to go to protect a transgender student? Is it really just an advocate until the threat of a lawsuit arises? What does the fact that it took three years for the inclusion of "gender identity" to be voted on by trustees say about our university's willingness to pioneer the way for LGBT student rights? What does our administation's response to the transgender student's housing situation only months after the nondiscrimination policy was officially changed say about the weight of this commitment to equal rights?

Two years later, as we look ahead to the construction of a new dorm wing on West Campus, with no administrative mention of active measures being taken to ensure that the new housing options will accomodate transgender students...how much has really changed?