QNOC Digest 2010.06.27

Queer News On Campus [QNOC] Articles Digest
For the week ending 2010.06.27

Brought to you by the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals. http://www.lgbtcampus.org

Archives of the QNOC Digest can be found at http://queernewsoncampus.blogspot.com

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1. Duke Today - NY Event Launches New Duke LGBT Network
2. Marketwire - Academy of Art University "Comes Out" for LGBT Community
3. University of Minnesota Press - Twin Cities Pride: Then and Now

1. Duke Today, June 14, 2010
615 Chapel Drive, Box 90563, Durham, NC 27708-0563
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2010/06/lgbt.html
NY Event Launches New Duke LGBT Network
Office of News & Communications

DURHAM, NC -- President Richard H. Brodhead, Duke alumnus and former trustee Tom Clark (pictured above) and more than 150 people helped kickoff the new Duke LGBT Network June 2 at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York City.

The network is dedicated to serving the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community of the university and involves students, alumni, faculty, staff and friends of Duke. The Duke Alumni Association helped sponsor the kickoff.

The event included comments by Clark, a member of the LBGT Network Steering Committee and a past president of the Duke Alumni Association, and Janie Long, director of Duke's Center for LGBT Life.

Clark, Trinity '69, received the Charles A. Dukes Award one of the alumni association's top awards for volunteer service.

He was honored for his work as DAA president and for efforts to established the DAA's first Diversity Inclusion Committee, which promotes outreach to underserved groups of alumni.

"This kick-off event is an extraordinary example of how Duke alumni want to remain connected to each other, and to the campus community," said Kyle Knight, communications chair for the Duke LGBT Network. "President Brodhead's presence at the event sends a strong message about the priority that the University places on advancing an inclusive and supportive Duke community."

Credit Suisse underwrote the event through the effort of alumnus and steering committee member Todd Sears, Trinity '98.

Brodhead encouraged the network to play a valuable role in Duke life through building connections between students, alumni and others and by serving as an advocate on campus.

For more information about the network, click here.

2. Marketwire, June 23, 2010
607 Market Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Academy-of-Art-University-Comes-Out-for-LGBT-Community-1280710.htm
Academy of Art University "Comes Out" for LGBT Community
By David Perry

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - June 23, 2010) - They're out, they're proud and they're on parade for the first time as San Francisco's esteemed Academy of Art University (www.academyart.edu) shows its support for its hometown's LGBT community by sponsoring a float in the annual "Pride Parade" on Sunday, June 27. Designed and staffed by "Outloud" -- the Academy's LGBT student group -- this year's float is the proud punctuation point to a season of philanthropy. This past Saturday, the City's LBGT Community Center held its annual "Pride Party" underwritten by a $25,000 donation from Dr. Elisa Stephens, President of the Academy of Art, the largest private university in the country.
"As a native San Franciscan, I am proud to have been raised in a family of artists, and in a family who has always nurtured and understood the unique and exportable qualities of San Francisco values," said Dr. Stephens, whose grandfather founded the Academy in 1929. "At the Academy of Art, we celebrate art and creativity -- a celebration that would, literally, be impossible without the contributions of our Transgender, Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, children and colleagues, friends and lovers, and yes -- husbands and wives. So yes, here in San Francisco and at the Academy of Art, we do understand the meaning of family."
San Francisco's annual Pride Parade is the largest LGBT event in the world, and the second largest parade in California, with total attendance exceeded only by Pasadena's Rose Bowl Parade. With more than 500,000 expected attendees, and a global audience of millions via television and social media, it has become the most popular public event in San Francisco.
"At the Academy of Art, we don't just celebrate diversity, we embrace it with students from over 100 countries," said Sue Rowley, the Academy's Executive Vice President for Educational Services, speaking at this past Saturday's event at the Community Center. "Diversity, as exhibited by the LGBT Community, is what keeps art fresh and alive. At the Academy we have a similar mission to the Center: No one should be left behind. We are both in the business of making the dreams of today into the reality of tomorrow."
The San Francisco LGBT Community Center serves as the nexus for the Bay Area's diverse LGBT community, providing community building and leadership development opportunities. Its critical safety net of programs serve the most vulnerable members of the community, while providing a welcoming gathering place for all LGBT and allied people. Each month, The Center serves over 9,000 visitors and hosts more than 400 events.
"The San Francisco LGBT Community Center is very grateful for the support of its many community partners, including the Academy of Art University," said Center Executive Director Rebecca Rolfe. "Working together, we are building a stronger, healthier and more just world for LGBT and allied individuals."
"The Academy of Art has a diverse student population and strongly supporting the LGBT Center ensures services and programs meeting their needs," said San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty.
With nearly 16,000 students, Academy of Art University is the nation's largest private art and design university. Established in 1929, the school offers accredited AA, BA, BFA, MA, M.Arch and MFA programs in 16 different majors, as well as continuing art education, with classes in Advertising, Animation & Visual Effects, Architecture, Fashion, Fine Art, Graphic Design, Illustration, Industrial Design, Interior Architecture & Design, Motion Pictures & Television, Multimedia Communications, Photography and Web Design & New Media. Game Design and Music for Visual Media and Art Education are the school's newest majors, offering AA, BFA and MFA degrees. Students can also enroll in flexible online degree programs in most majors. Academy of Art University is an accredited member of WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges), NASAD, Council for Interior Design Accreditation (BFA-IAD) and NAAB (M-ARCH).
"We're looking forward to debuting a new rainbow hued Academy look and logo this Sunday," said David Lynam, President of Outloud and Screenwriting and Directing Major at the Academy. "It means a lot to know that the place that supports our educational and artistic aspirations also supports our human rights ones as well."

3. University of Minnesota Press, June 25, 2010
http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/06/twin-cities-pride-then-and-now.html
Twin Cities Pride: Then and Now
Unknown

In honor of this weekend's annual Twin Cities Pride festivities, we wanted to share an excerpt from the forthcoming book Queer Twin Cities, compiled by the Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project. In this excerpt from the chapter “Gay Was Good: Progress, Homonormativity, and Oral History,” Kevin P. Murphy analyzes testimony from Twin Cities interviewees about changes in Pride events and local LGBT activism over the past four decades.

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Many respondents, while recognizing positive changes associated with the gay and lesbian movement of the 1970s, resisted a characterization of the preceding period as “repressive.” For example, like many of those we interviewed, Lynda, a sixty-year-old white lesbian, looked back with nostalgic longing to the 1950s and 1960s: “Well, I think it’s unfair to just say that was a repressive time. I mean, I lived in that time and I know it was a warm and sweet and tender time.” Others spoke of some perceived losses that attended the “post-Stonewall” period. Tom, a fifty-nine-year-old white gay man, referred to some of the costs of gay visibility and the negative consequences of a politics of “coming out”:
When you’re known and you’re out you can also be an easier target for people’s homophobia, whereas in years gone by when people were closeted, maybe they could sneak through without getting the homophobic reaction. I mean, look at all the born-again Christians that are much more hostile to homosexuals than maybe they ever would have been in the past. Don’t you think that’s a part of what we’re dealing with now?

Judy, a fifty-nine-year-old lesbian, spoke about positive changes that emerged from identifying as lesbian and as a feminist, but also ruminated with some ambivalence about the consequences of the gay liberation and women’s movements. When asked about the challenges for younger generations, she responded:
Well, I think there are many, many more choices and life is consequently much more difficult because there are more choices to make. I followed a path that I thought I didn’t have any choice about and so I didn’t agonize about whether to have kids or not. They happened to me. And then I took care of them. And I loved them. So it’s a blessing and a curse to be nineteen now. More choices and more choices to make.

This ambivalence about the past was even more pronounced in testimony that dealt with changes in queer politics and culture over the past several decades. Some interviewees spoke of a decline in community feeling and politics. Judy, for example, answered a question about changes in the “lesbian community” over the previous twenty-five years as follows:
I don’t know that there really is much of a community anymore. I think people are scattered and integrated more. The whole idea, we were very downwardly mobile at the time. It was not okay to be middle-class or above. You were to be working-class. You were not to be making a lot of money. That has changed dramatically. People are allowed to make a lot of money. It’s valued. People are allowed to dress in a variety of costumes. People are allowed to be feminine or not. People are allowed to change genders, for that matter. People are well regarded if they raise children, if they stay together. This is all different. People are home. And family is important where before it was dancing and drinking and politics. Political action. There isn’t a lot of political action now.

For Judy, the stakes of losing a coherent community politics are high: “It’ll be too bad if we let our community splinter. You know, if it happens that our freedom start[s] being taken from us, we’re not going to have a way to fight that. And it could happen. It’s happened before.”

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For her part, Claire identifies commercialization and corporatism as the engines of declension, as evinced by her comparison of early Twin Cities “Pride” events with those that took place decades earlier:
Of course, now it’s [Twin Cities Pride] just a mega-event. I think much too orchestrated, and much too commercial, in my opinion. In the early ’70s, there still was a sense of this kind of special, secret community, and there was something about the secrecy that was actually kind of appealing because it was—it was like a family, in kind of a way. And the other interesting thing is that you were thrown in with people of different socioeconomic groups than yourself, people with different interests than yourself, different professional areas, different races—in a way that you might not have been elsewhere.

Claire is not alone in recalling the excitement of secrecy and of claiming an outsider status. In a 2004 newspaper interview about early Pride events, for example, gay activist Gregg White recalled, “Back then, being out was scandalous and exciting, and walking into a gay club was almost revolutionary.”[i]

[i] Dylan Hicks, “Pride: How the Twin Cities Pride Fest Helped Turn Minneapolis into the San Francisco of the Wheat Belt,” City Pages, June 23, 2004.

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Queer Twin Cities is forthcoming this fall from University of Minnesota Press.

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