Sarah Lyev, secretary of Lesbians Rising, said she has found a level of comfort and acceptance with the club that she has yet to find anywhere else in her life. “I really wanted to meet other gays and lesbians and people like me,” said Lyev, a 19-year-old sophomore from Staten Island. “I want to be in a place where I feel accepted, and though I’ve only been with the club for two years, we’re all great friends, and we’re really, really close.”
Members often find a connection they cannot even find in their own homes. Lyev, a lesbian, who comes from a religious family, said her coming out “didn’t go very well,” so she said she understood the need of gays and lesbians to feel accepted. Clearly comfortable in her own skin, Lyev said she did her best to reach out to students of all alternative lifestyles.
“We want to make this room (Thomas Hunter Hall, Room 309) a safe spot for gays, bi-sexuals, transgenders, kids from any and all alternative lifestyle,” said Lyev. “We’re a very close-knit group and we want people to feel welcome here.”
Lesbians Rising shares the office and lounge with the Gay Men’s Alliance and the Women’s Rights Coalition, and by the spring semester they may add a new transgender group that has just gotten up and running here at Hunter. Lyev joined Lesbians Rising as a freshman last year because she “wanted to help with activism,” and this semester has been and will continue to be a particularly active one. The close-knit feeling between the three groups likely stems from their holding many events, parties and discussions in conjunction with one another.
This past October they held a ‘Coming Out’ event in their lounge where members and a few non-members shared personal experiences about coming out to their friends and families. That discussion took place on National Coming Out Day and was led by Sam Scholl, a junior from Woodside, Queens, who serves as the treasurer of the Gay Men’s Alliance, which has been around at Hunter since the 1970s. Scholl, a bi-sexual, said he “went to a school in western Massachusetts for a few months and didn’t like it so much,” so he transferred to Hunter and joined the GMA, and has been a member for a year and a half.
Scholl said it can be difficult reaching out to prospective members at school so they “table, use Facebook and MySpace, and sometimes that stuff works, but mostly it’s just word of mouth.” Yet, he still believed that the Gay Men’s Alliance was “growing more and gaining prominence every year,” he said.
“Every year we have a big Halloween party, and a Drag party with performances and such, like lip synching,” said Scholl. “This year will be our second Drag party, and it’ll be held in March, here in Thomas Hunter 309.”
For the record, basically events and discussions are held in that room, another example being a discussion on bi-sexuality that was held Wednesday, November 7. Scholl also led that discussion, one Lyev felt was very important because in her opinion, “bi-sexuality is less accepted in the gay community than some of the other alternative lifestyles, and it shouldn’t be that way.”
They ran a sex toy workshop in early November that promoted the use of sex toys while also encouraging attendees to engage in safe sex, and next semester they hope to conduct an S&M workshop in the same vein as the sex toy workshop, hoping that it will be run by Kristina Cooper, 22, a Hunter student who works as a sex educator. These such workshops are supported by the Women’s Studies department.
On November 19, they hosted a Thanksgiving Dinner, and that event was to be followed on December 1 by the eighth annual Queer Community Conference, officially titled, “Queer CUNY VIII presents The Twilight of Queerness.” Referred to on a flyer as a “student conference that seeks to end reductionist political discourse” and “encourage queer students, activists, teachers, community members, and others to imagine life and scholarship beyond the limits of ongoing dichotomy and division,” the keynote speaker will be Lisa Duggan, a professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at NYU as well as the director of the American Studies program.
At the time this article was written the specific location of the conference was still yet to be determined.
Tricia Orlando, a 19-year-old sophomore, said she would have joined earlier if she had known about the club. “I met Sarah in class and she told me about Lesbians Rising and it seemed interesting,” said Orlando, clad in sneakers, blue jeans and a pink hooded sweatshirt. “Now I’m here literally every single day, so I’d consider myself a pretty active member.”
Asked for one of her favorite memories since joining, Orlando, bisexual and singled, cited the Halloween party as being “pretty awesome,” but she could not leave out: “The best thing to happen in general has just been meeting all the new people and making new friends.”
Orlando, a Brooklyn native, believes that adding the new transgender group to the mix would be a good thing for everyone involved. “I think it’d be awesome if the transgender group joined us here. This is really the only place where I’ve met transgenders and they’re really not represented that much. One thing we know they’ll be fighting for is more gender neutral bathrooms on campus.”
Orlando and Lyev said they believed that there are only two gender-neutral bathrooms on campus – much too low, they said.
With an obvious concern for the comfort and the welfare of others and with an impressive passion for activism, the Queer Student Union is building an undeniably strong reputation on the Hunter campus, no matter students’ orientation.