When Georgetown’s LGBTQ community won their decades-long battle for a resource center in fall 2007, the biggest beneficiaries were expected to be current LGBTQ students. But according to LGBTQ Resource Center Director Sivagami Subbaraman, even greater success has centered around alumni.
Although it ‘s not a role anyone in the university administration expected her to embrace, Subbaraman has made it her mission to bring Georgetown back into the good graces of estranged LGBTQ alumni.
“Some are very angry. The experience was detrimental to them, and toxic. Some have sworn to never, never, never come back to campus …. They are a very angry and disenfranchised group,” she said. Any community experienced while they were at Georgetown “was like a cabal. It all functioned like a secret society, it’s sad.”
Subbaraman has been contacting alumni who have identified themselves as LGBTQ and encouraged them to come back to Georgetown.
But because it was not until the 1980s when GUPride successfully sued Georgetown University for the right to exist as a University-sponsored group, many alumni went their entire Georgetown careers without having any sort of open community—University-sponsored or not.
When Subbaraman arrived at Georgetown, she said, she was given a list of four or five alumni who identified as LGBTQ and kept in contact with the University, meaning they donated or attended University events.
With the help of those alumni, and the results of an alumni survey conducted by the Alumni Association in which more than 40 alumni disclosed that they were LGBTQ, the list has grown to over 300 alumni.
Bringing new alumni into the fold, of course, is an opportunity to increase donations to the school. Asked about this, Subbaraman chafed a bit.
“I’m tired of people thinking that the only reason we’re contacting our LGBTQ alums is for money,” she said. “Yes, the donations have been coming in, but … many of our LGBTQ alums are extremely politically or corporately successful, and they deserve to be celebrated just as any other Hoya. Think of the intellectual engagement, knowledge, mentorship we’ve been missing out on. The greatest thing that we’ve been missing out on is the human capital.”
William O’Leary, the Vice President for Marketing and Communications in the Office of Advancement, said that his office does not track giving based on sexual orientation.
