Junior Benjamin Brown has started, in conjunction with the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Student Support Services office’s library, a book club and discussion group called MyDentity focused on exploring identity. It will meet for the first time at 6 p.m. Thusday, Oct. 1, in the GLBTSSS office.
The official theme for the first meeting and discussion is defining identity, but the theme will change each month.
Future topics are not yet decided because Brown said he wanted to listen to participants’ desires for discussion themes.
“I definitely want this to be revolved around them and their growth, and I want the book ideas from them,” Brown said.
Brown said the club would use four books during the first meeting to facilitate discussion of identity. He said a central idea of the discussion will be how actions define people.
The books for the first month are “Openly Straight” by Bill Kongisberg, “To the Lighthouse” by Viginia Woolf, “Annabel” by Kathleen Winter and “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” by Benjamin Alire Saenz.
Brown pitched the initial idea for a book club last semester, but it took several months for Brown and Andrew Wang, the coordinator for the GLBTSSS library, to work out the logistics and decide exactly how the club should function.
Wang said one attraction of the club is the ability for people to talk about themselves as mediated by text.
He said he liked the exposure the club will bring to the GLBTSSS library, of which he said many students are not aware.
The four books are on reserve at the GLBTSSS library, housed in the GLBTSSS office, until the meeting and can be checked out for a maximum of three days or read in the library. If students do not read the books but still want the main ideas from them, Brown said he will be writing and posting short summaries and analyses of them on the GLBTSSS library blog.
Wang said he wanted potential attendees to know the club does not have to be a long-term commitment and people are welcome to come to as many or as few of the meetings as they want and are not obligated to attend the full length of the meeting.
He also said he felt it was important to have a book club geared toward LGBTQ people because often the material and people discussed in history or English classes aren’t LGBTQ, or, if they are, their sexuality is not brought up. He said he felt omission of LGBTQ contributions to history and literature creates a misconception that LGBTQ people do not exist or are not important.
Brown said the club is open to anyone interested in exploring self-identity despite being located in the GLBTSSS office. He said the reason it is located in the GLBTSSS library is because often LGBTQ people are the ones struggling with identity and resources were already located there.
“I would say this is not a LGBTQ book club — it is just hosted in the GLBTQ library,” Brown said. “I think it becomes dangerous whenever we are making a separation between straight and gay book club, and that’s not the goal. I would hope that at the end of some of these discussions that that stigma would be broken.”
