GLBT Center Celebrates a Decade on Campus

It’s hard to miss the GLBT Center on the fifth floor in Talley Student Union. Signs declaring “Black Lives Matter” and promoting women’s rights adorn the large windows. Bookcases and colorful seats encourage visitors to spend time in the large, airy lounge.

并非总是如此。当GLBT中心于2008年开业时，它占据了学生中心大厅附近的一个小而不起的空间。

On Feb. 12, the center celebrates its 10th anniversary with an event that examines its past, present and future through an exhibition and a slate of speakers. The celebration will take place in the Piedmont-Mountains Ballroom in the Talley Student Union.

From the beginning, the center advocated for LGBT students. It also provided a support system so they could feel comfortable and flourish both academically and personally and enjoy their university experience.It has since expanded its mission as well as its space. It’s still a place to welcome LGBT students and educate others about the community, but now it’s also a place that champions equality and inclusivity for people of all identities.

导演蕾妮·威尔斯（Renee Wells）说：“我们正在进行教育，但我们正在接受一种非常不同的教育，并在此过程中以截然不同的方式吸引人们。”

论坛所带来的差异

Justine Hollingshead, chief of staff and assistant vice chancellor with the Division of Academic and Student Affairs, recalls the decision to create a dedicated center.

The LGBT community had established its presence decades before, Hollingshead says. NC State has had a student group for the community since the 1960s. In the mid-1990s the university had a group called BGLA (Bisexuals, Gays, Lesbians and Allies). Awareness training for allies, called Project SAFE, debuted shortly afterward, at first just for faculty and staff and then for students. Continued efforts to support LGBT students, expand training and roll out additional programming grew over the years.

2004年，成立大学多样性咨询委员会的小组委员会，专注于与LGBT社区有关的问题。在统计学教授比尔·斯沃拉（Bill Swallow）的带领下，教职员工和学生研究了国家趋势，进行了校园气候调查，并收集了数据和信息，证明了对校园专用LGBT中心的需求。

Hollingshead说：“对于我来说，气候不欢迎GLBT学生，这对我来说并不奇怪。”“但是我们需要这些信息来肯定我们所知道的。”

2007年，学生政府主持了一个论坛来讨论该计划。主持人包括何塞·皮克特（Jose Picart），多样性副教务长；汤姆·斯塔福德（Tom Stafford），学生事务副校长；咨询中心的理查德·泰勒·沃克（Richard Tyler-Walker）；和校园活动主任Debucadoo。教务长拉里·尼尔森（Larry Nielsen）和学生，公众和媒体成员也参加了会议。In a 2016 story for the Bulletin, Luckadoo recalled how some members of the audience applauded that night when they heard LGBT youth have a higher rate of suicide than other youth.

“It was very emotional, very tense,” Hollingshead says. “I saw the color on Dr. Nielsen’s face change.”

The next day, the provost talked with Stafford and Picart and approved Swallow’s proposal to create the GLBT Center.

霍林斯黑德说：“如果你在1995年问我，当我来到这里上班时，我们会在校园里有一个GLBT中心，我会告诉你不，没办法，这不会在这里发生。”

That forum was a pivotal moment. NC State would become the second university in the North Carolina system to open a center especially for the LGBT community.

A Decade of Growth

该中心于2008年1月23日正式首次亮相。创始董事Hollingshead感到骄傲，但谨慎。便衣警察参加了该活动，以提供安全性，但是在大量和支持人群的剪彩顺利进行。

该中心最初是在Arts NC State提供的房间中运营的，然后搬到了学生中心三楼的一个更明显的空间，窗户上有彩虹旗，俯瞰着中庭信号，表明了中心的任务。当塔利（Talley）关门进行翻新时，该中心搬到了哈雷尔森·霍尔（Harrelson Hall），然后在2014年重新开放时搬到了当前的空间。

员工成长。起初hillingshead的实验worked with just a graduate student and a student worker. Eventually the center added an assistant director and a program administrator. Today the center boasts two student assistants, an administrative support associate, a program coordinator, an assistant director and Wells, as well as student volunteers who tackle projects such as archiving LGBT history at NC State.

One thing hasn’t changed: the foot traffic.

威尔斯谈到今天的中心时说：“我们的休息室总是很喜欢。”“我们每天都有学生坐在地板上，因为每个人都没有足够的空间。我们为大量的学生提供服务。”

Hollingshead说，一直这样。

她说：“我们有很多学生。”“非常像GLBT中心一样 - 学生一直在那里。这就是中心一直是学生的物理空间，无论空间如何。”

As well as a place for student support, the center has always advocated for the LGBT community and sought to educate others about it. The center took over Project SAFE from the BGLA student group, created the Lavender Graduation and implemented the Transgender 101 program to raise awareness about transgender people and issues. Staff worked hard to elevate exposure of programs and events, with notable success: The first major speaker in Talley who had an audience of almost 1,000 people was actress Laverne Cox during Diversity Education Week in 2014, Hollingshead says.

The center also became involved in work off campus, helping with the creation of the LGBT Center in Raleigh. Hollingshead, who served on the board of that center for six years, says it’s an option for people not comfortable with going to the center on campus.

并非一切都顺利进行。抗LGBT诽谤在自由表达隧道中出现，Hollingshead说，偶尔在校园周围分发了可恨的传单。2011年10月，同性恋涂鸦出现在中心本身上。

霍林斯黑德说，校园对这一事件的反应是“惊人的”。学生们像教务长一样，在砖房中集会谴责这一事件。当时总理兰迪·伍德森（Randy Woodson）出门在外，但每天通过电子邮件发送电子邮件检查人们的情况。

“The support categorically from the top down here at NC State has always been unwavering,” Hollingshead says. “I think that’s an important part of how NC State has been successful in our support of the GLBT community on campus.”

The Center Today

Ten years after it opened, the center enjoys campuswide support. It’s still a place to learn about the LGBT community, but in a new way. Most people have a baseline knowledge about LGBT individuals and issues, says Wells, who became director in August 2014. The goal is to build on that.

“A lot of the barriers that students face are because people just don’t know a lot about the community, and they’ll unintentionally say things that students find offensive,” Wells says. “Even just really outdated terminology that is now considered inappropriate, and people don’t know that.”

The center has added programs, including the Volunteer Internship Practicum Program and the GLBT Advocate Program. The former is for students, and the latter is continuing education for faculty and staff. The LGBT community is not static, Wells says; terminology and issues shift over time, so learning is a constant process. The center also educates beyond campus, including a youth leadership summit this month for LGBT-identified high school students from Wake and Durham counties.

Intersectionality plays a key role in the center’s work. Project SAFE and Transgender 101 still exist, but there are also programs and workshops that talk about how people have multiple identities. Those include Queer and Transgender People of Color, a bimonthly meeting that discusses how racial, ethnic and LGBT identities influence one another, and a collaboration with the Women’s Center on intersectional feminist theory.

“We can’t just teach people ways to be inclusive around sexuality or gender; they need to be comprehensively inclusive,” Wells says. “They aren’t just focused on LGBT as an isolated part of identity. They’re looking at ability, race, privilege and oppression and all of these things that we need people to understand because they impact our campus climate.”

一个里程碑和垫脚石

Wells sees the center’s 10th anniversary as a steppingstone as much as a milestone. Many LGBT alumni will be missing from the Feb. 12 celebration, something she hopes will change in the future.

“One of the challenges we’re trying to navigate is because of the nature of this population and the history, and the fact that we don’t track this aspect of identity, we don’t even know who all of our alumni are,” she says. “Us trying to do a lot of stuff without having all those folks to reach out to and engage felt like there was a big piece of the puzzle missing. We’re hoping, moving forward, to have the capacity to really try to make the next celebration something that engages a much broader population.”

Hollingshead同意LGBT社区仍然面临挑战，但她很高兴看到学生对该中心的广泛支持。

“We see more students come to campus every year being out, or being an ally, wanting to get involved in programmatic outreach efforts,” Hollingshead says. “We still have lots of inequalities that are out there: employment, some of the things targeting the transgender community. We still have a lot of work to do. I see students taking this up, students who are more service-oriented and advocacy-oriented, so that gives me hope.”