GLBT panel discusses double discrimination

As part of a Residence Hall Association series following Martin Luther King Jr. Day, minority members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community played host to a forum Thursday at Eigenmann Hall. Seven panelists answered questions from a group of about 40 students.\n"It's a shame that these things are such a huge issue, because being gay is not a huge part of my life," Aliza Cord, a nonstudent and member of the panel, said. "It is a part of my life, but it's not the core of who I am."\nPanelists shared stories and opinions about the level of acceptance they find within their minority communities, within the GLBT community as a minority member and within the larger straight community.\nFreshman Liz Craig, who said she is one-quarter Native American, said she finds a source of acceptance in the Native American community.\n"In the Native American community, they actually welcome us because it has been a part of their culture for hundreds and hundreds of years," Craig said. "They are entirely accepting of it."\nPanelists Cord and senior David Reinwald, both active in the Reform Jewish movement, said they have found their community very welcoming. They said the synagogues they have attended have placed homosexuals in leadership positions. The Reform movement also limits its support to groups who actively discriminate against homosexuals.\nHomosexual African Americans might face a steeper climb, sophomore Nick Simpson said. Simpson said although he finds individual cases might vary, prevailing religious attitudes in the African-American community offer condemnation rather than acceptance.\nBesides facing resistance within their own communities, the panel discussed how minority members might face discrimination within the GLBT community itself.\nCord, who is in a mixed-race relationship, said she believes people who already carry the stigma of being homosexual do not want the additional burden of being associated with someone of another race.\nAlthough some panelists said they have found acceptance in the straight community at-large, significant barriers exist around the GLBT community. Bennie Richmond, a junior, said he has more straight female friends than straight male friends. \n"Normally, straight guys don't want to be too close to you in public," Richmond said. "Because they think that their friends are going to think that they're gay. That's a problem. I don't have very many straight guy friends."\nSometimes, discrimination takes a more active form. A couple weeks ago, Collins Center was spray-painted with anti-gay phrases. If anything, panel members said the act bolstered GLBT members' resolve to sit on the panel. Simpson, an RHA executive, said he was angered and saddened by the act.\n "It made me want to attend the panel even more than I originally wanted to," Simpson said. "The reason being, that person may show up to the panel, and because they may not know anything about us, by being at the panel they will leave knowing something they didn\'t know."\n Reinwald said he thinks part of the problem comes from people not seeing the GLBT community as people, but as a group disconnected from the rest of the community.\n"I think that a lot of the ignorance comes from people just not making the connection with, in our case, what the GLBT community is," Reinwald said. "It's a community of people just like them, and they see information about it and they don\'t realize that there is a group of people behind it"