I prayed the other night.
I was lying in bed when it occurred to me how incredibly lucky I am to have a family, a group of friends and a campus community who care about and respect me in my entirety?and could care less if I like guys or girls. So I thanked God for that. He and I don’t really let people who aren’t familiar with our relationship interfere in it, so I can be grateful about being gay regardless of what the Pope or Jerry Falwell or anyone else says about it. But we do get a good laugh out of how riled up people get about which pronoun is used to address a genderless deity; he told me that he could care less, since English doesn’t have a neuter pronoun anyway. While we were talking, I asked him to look out for the gay kids out there who are scared, who feel like their classmates, their country or their God are all out to get them. I prayed that they might cease to see themselves as perpetual victims, martyrs without salvation?and above all, that they might come to a place where they can feel comfortable with themselves without feeling bitter and angry about the hand they’ve been dealt.
Now, this isn’t a Swiss Guard piece?I’m not here to protect the Pope. Nor am I trying to take a jab at Joe McFadden (“Like a prayer,” Feb. 7, 2002). He’s out there fighting for others, which is more than you can say for most people. His heart is in the right place, even if his efforts are not. Really, I’m just writing this to say that gay Georgetown students have an alternative to begging the University to let them become cloistered, driven into officially sanctioned isolation by their own feelings of victimization and inferiority.
To me, that is what lies at the heart of the resource center debate. How does one of the country’s best universities provide for a group of students who have a need for guidance, community and support in order to achieve the confidence that many others have an easier time grasping? Critically, we must ask ourselves how can that be achieved without further distancing this traditionally isolated group from campus society at large. To fail in that will be to fail in eliminating the emotionally devastating sense of victimization that has been so palpable throughout this debate. Finally, we must seek to meet all these goals in a way that does not drain resources to the point that other groups with similar needs will receive unequal treatment. After all, society’s blindness to the needs of others is precisely what got us here in the first place. Nothing is worse than a hypocritical social justice movement.
The current proposal calls for a center replete with its own space and a full-time director. Although not part of the formal proposal, some center advocates are also pressing for an expanded GLBT academic curriculum and for Special Interest Housing. An expanded academic curriculum is likely to foster separation and divide the community. I’ve taken one of the few classes offered currently, “Representations of Lesbians and Gay Men in Popular Culture,” and found it to be little more than a rage-filled forum whose overall message was that gay people are always going to be victimized and should not seek to be part of the larger community. Some people say that a full-time director is needed because Counselling and Psychiatric Services is unqualified and unwilling to take on a guidance and support role. I can’t say that I know enough about the details to enter that fray. What I do know is that it makes a great deal more sense to fix a broken system that serves the needs of a wide range of students, rather than to create a whole new one that will serve only a relative few.
Center advocates say that the center’s space would be the mother of all Safe Zones, a place where GLBT students could gather together to create a sense of community and security. Those two things are critical to young, struggling gay people, and are critically lacking on campus now. However, a physically sequestered refuge is not the way to create them. When any group feels so antagonized that they feel the need to build a refuge outside of the community, then we truly have failed them. How could such a solution do anything but reinforce the feelings of isolation and victimization?
This is where Special Interest Housing comes in. Mr. Gonzalez would do well to look back over the notes from the ad hoc committee’s report of Aug. 7. A living center with a common room where GLBT students could, if they chose, hang out, create programs, and otherwise promote a “community within a community” would address many of the vital goals of the proposal without reinforcing the kind of fear and isolation that is all too common among young gay people. That fear appears to run deep in the housing proposal’s opponents, who, afraid that such a housing arrangement might be targeted for hate crimes, seem to have forgotten that those seeking to create communities and establish dignity must often put themselves at some risk. And although we should always make helping people our first priority over saving money, it is an attractive fringe benefit that this proposal would leave open more resources for other needy groups.
Victimization, bitterness and anger are the worst enemies of the happiness of individuals and communities. Individuals certainly have the right to stay on that path. But when they do, the community is not obligated to drown with them and pay for the trip.
Michael S. Ybarra is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. He thinks that Josh Hartnett, Sandy Berger and Marcus Aurelius are wicked hot.
