LGBTQ open forum leaves hope for the future
The LGBTQ Student Coalition is one of UHCL’s oldest organizations with its origins spanning all the way back to the 1990s. The LGBTQ Student Coalition was formally known as “Unity,” before it was renamed the LGBTQ Student Coalition two years ago. Since then, membership has been an issue and visibility on campus has almost been nonexistent. To try and solve this problem, the LGBTQ Student Coalition held their LGBTQ+ Open Forum April 4 in the Garden Room. This event was set up to allow students, faculty and staff come together and discuss what they wanted to see at UHCL in terms of LGBTQ+ community and visibility on campus.
Although I do not identify as LGBTQ+, I came to the LGBTQ+ Open Forum as an ally and to see what ideas were passed around for LGBTQ visibility on campus. Natalia Marfil, biology major and president of the LGBTQ Student Coalition, welcomed everyone to the event and explained that ever since she stepped foot on campus, she didn’t feel a sense of LGBT community. To try and combat this, Marfil and Madi Coates, communication major and member of the LGBTQ Student Coalition, started the open forum to get feedback and ideas for how to increase initiatives and LGBTQ programming on campus.
Coates and Marfil wanted to keep the open conversation focused, so they started with a big sheet of white paper and split it into 4 different sections. These sections represented Building Community, Events on Campus, LGBTQ+ Visibility and Healthy Allyship.
In terms of building an LGBTQ community on campus, a lot of the ideas centered around creating more helpful and informative LGBTQ programming while helping to establish a more accepting and open-minded campus culture.
For potential events and LGBTQ visibility on campus, there were a lot of ideas. These included a potential flag day – serving to display all the different LGBTQ flags – a smaller-scale gay pride parade, a potential field trip to Montrose, Lavender Graduation – a small commencement ceremony to honor and acknowledge the graduating LGBTQ community and acknowledge their involvement on campus – the resurrection and rebranding of Safe Zone training and many more great ideas.
LGBTQ Allyship is loosely defined as the lifelong process of learning, developing and building relationships based on trust and accountability with the LGBTQ community. Allyship is a big part of creating a healthy LGBTQ community, so there was a lot of discussion on this topic. Ideas on how to build healthy allyship on campus spanned from developing a poster campaign around the campus of faculty and staff so that students knew who they could go to for allyship and support, to transitioning the safe zone training certificates from stickers to actual certificates so that it could be more meaningful. A potential rebranding of the term “safe zone ally” to “hawk ally” was also discussed to help make UHCL’s allyship unique.
This open forum was very informative and it’s a definite step in the right direction to building a supportive LGBTQ+ community on campus. The LGBTQ Student Coalition is even going to the Queer Collegiate Summit, a conference specifically for LGBTQ+ identifying students, to gain valuable experience and learn about programs/techniques that can be implemented at UHCL. Exciting things are happening for the LGBTQ Student Coalition! If you’re interested in joining or just want to know more about the organization, send an email to moqnuhcl@gmail.com for more information.
