LGBT (Task) Force

… but words will never hurt me.

Wouldn’t that be great if it were actually true? The fact of the matter is that our words have more impact than we may acknowledge. Some people have developed a thick skin, while others take comments to heart. Part of the Task Force’s charge is to ensure that students, faculty and staff feel safe and welcome on the UWW campus and in Whitewater.

One of the manners in which we seek to achieve this goal is through the SafeZone program. You may have seen the placards in office windows and wondered what exactly that means. The people with the signs have gone through our training, and the placard serves as a public declaration that anyone can feel comfortable approaching the owner to talk to you in confidence. Whether a student comes to you distressed about their changing world or a colleague informs you about possible discrimination, they will know that you will listen without judging them.

Although it is called SafeZone ‘training,’ it is more of an open dialogue about issues that face the LGBT community. We discuss how the words we use in our everyday conversations may inadvertently exclude LGBT individuals, what you can do to make sure that you are being inclusive, as well as a chance to learn about common scenarios in which you can positively display yourself as an open-minded person.

If interested, please come to UC 261 on either October 29 or December 4 from 12-1 PM to participate in the training. No sign-up is necessary. If you would like more information, please contact any member of the LGBT Task Force.

We met last Wednesday (10 September) - here are the highlights:

• Melissa reported that the Involvement Opportunity Fair was a success (I know, I was there!). There was a lot of interest in learning about the task force and attending the Safe Zone trainings.
• Mary Beth went through a mock Safe Zone training for the group. The first training session will be 23 September (next week!) over the lunch hour (12-1 PM) in the UC, room 261.
• Kate Clinton is coming to Whitewater - Young Auditorium, 23 October at 7:30 PM. Questions? Contact Ken Kohberger (kohbergk@uww.edu).

You can also read the full minutes (PDF) if you’d like.

In Susie’s absence, Melissa graciously took minutes - thanks Melissa!

A number of studies have been done with regard to the prevalence of suicide amongst LGBT youth when compared to their heterosexual counterparts, which may suggest that LGBT youth are more prone to ending their own lives prematurely.¹

The Greater Chicago/Illinois Chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is hosting a free webinar about the issue next Thursday (4 September) from 7:30-8:45 PM. From the organization’s website:

Suicide Risk & Prevention Among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgenter, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Youth, presented by Dr. Brian Mustanski, Asst. Professor, Dept. of Psychiatry at University of Illinois at Chicago. This webinar will describe research on suicide risk among LGBTQ, report on new findings on the role of family and peer support in promoting mental health of LGBTQ youth and will provide practical advice on what you can do to help support LGBTQ youth in your family and community. There is no charge to participate in this webinar, however connection lines are limited and pre-registration is required by emailing Illinois@afsp.org.

¹ I did a little research in Academic Search Premier through the library and found an interesting article about the media misconstruing study results. It was published in the Journal of LGBT Health Research and is titled Contested Conclusions: Claims That Can (and Cannot) Be Made from the Current Research on Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Teen Suicide Attempts. Although the article is not available through our electronic subscriptions, the article was part of the sample issue (PDF) made available on the publisher’s website.

Thanks to Jill for the information!

It’s official - summer is almost over. I know, major sad face. How do I know that summer is almost over? Fall Orientation begins in three days. Yikes.

And what would fall orientation be without the Involvement Opportunity Fair? On Tuesday (26 August) at 9 AM in the Kachel Center, the Task Force will be present, spreading the word about what we do and to promote upcoming events, like the Safe Zone training.

Hopefully you’ll be attending the Chancellor’s State of the University Address - so come a little early and say hi to Melissa and Kyle (that’s me!).

One of the purposes of the blog is to be able to let everyone know what we’re up to. Because of that, it just makes sense to put the agendas and minutes from our meetings up. I know, it’s a novel concept.

We met last Wednesday (13 August) - here are the highlights:

• Kim and Eric met with Chancellor Telfer and he thinks we’re doing a great job (score for us!).
• A committee, with representatives from various departments and formed by Chancellor Telfer, will investigate campus response to any incidents of hate and how to proceed.
• Sonya has gotten the ball rolling on the PB Poorman Achievement Award, which will recognize a student and their efforts to promote LGBT equality.
• We went over the Safe Zone training agenda and set dates (September 23, October 29 and December 4) - look for more on that later.
• Melissa and Kyle will be at the Involvement Opportunity Fair to let people know about us and what we do.

You can also read the full minutes (PDF) if you’d like.

As always, thanks to Susie for taking the minutes!

So we missed a familiar face at our meeting last week. And he’s not going to be at the next meeting. Supposedly he has this good excuse to not be there - something about being in Beijing or whatever.

That’s right - Eric Barber, co-chair of the task force, will be in China to compete in the 2008 Paralympic Games with the US men’s wheelchair basketball team! That’s right - he’ll be over there until the middle of September going for gold. We wish him, along with the other athletes (including several UWW alums and students), the best of luck!

If you’d like to stay on top of the latest happenings with the team, two wheelchair basketball fans have started a blog and will be keeping this side of the world in the loop - 2008 Paralympics USA Wheelchair Basketball.

I hope that I don’t get arrested for not asking her first, but in case you missed the August edition of Safety First: UWW Police Services Newsletter (PDF), then you didn’t get to see the featured staff member for the month - our very own Cindy Estrup. Cindy has been on the LGBT Task Force for a while now (longer than I have) and makes sure that we don’t get too rowdy at our meetings.

Congratulations Cindy!

They say knowledge is power. How you do gain knowledge? From information, whether it comes from books, the interwebs, or talking with other people. Well, when I think about getting a hold of information, I think of the library. Yes, I may be slightly biased because I’m a librarian, but still - it’s a perfectly valid place to begin the quest for knowledge.

When one is seeking information on a particular topic, it can be quite daunting to even know where to start searching. Researching LGBT issues is no different. For this reason, check out the Guide to Locating LGBT Materials in the University Library for a little nudge in (hopefully) the right direction. The guide doesn’t list every single source that could possibly be useful, but it’s more to get your wheels spinning and that should take you where you need to go. The guide is linked from the Library’s website under Guides → By Subject → Assorted Topics.

With the fantastic thunderstorms that have woken everyone up before they actually intended to get out of bed, Susie has provided the perfect solution.

More pictures: PB’s Garden 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 (photo credits: Susie Williams)

If you haven’t walked past Winther in a while, these pictures show you just what you’re missing (though you might want to wait until the rain stops).

Oral histories have been a way to capture the past passed down from generation to generation. Many family histories never make it into published form, and word of mouth serves as the vehicle for remembering days gone by. In the same way, the LGBT ‘family’ has its own vivid (dare I say colorful?) narrative and there needs to be a way to channel the plethora of voices from the community into one collective body of knowledge.

It turns out that there is a way. I attended a conference in Seattle last month and heard a presentation by the Northwest Lesbian & Gay History Museum Project, a group that seeks to record the events of yesterday with first-hand accounts of the people that LIVED those moments. In addition, they also collect ephemera like party invitations, photos and other lesbian and gay artifacts to ensure that future generations will be able to learn and understand what it was like to grow up ‘different’ in the Northwest. The group, which includes two geography professors from the University of Washington, has also produced a historic map of gay Seattle and a collection of narratives from the project.

After the presentation, that got me thinking - is there anything like that in Wisconsin? As a matter of fact, there’s the Milwaukee LGBT History Project, which has a collection housed at UW-Milwaukee Library - Archives Department. You’ll also find more items of LGBT interest on the Archives website. Pretty cool, huh?

Anybody know of any more local collections?