Hopkins played host to the second annual Bmore Proud Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Questioning and Allied (LGBTQA) Leadership Summit last Saturday, Feb. 12th.
The event featured LGBTQA students from 14 different schools around the Baltimore-Metro area (as well as schools from as far away as Washington D.C.) coming together to discuss their experiences and make connections.
The all-day summit lasted from 11:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. and featured keynote speeches from Staceyann Chin, an openly lesbian spoken word poet of Jamaican-Chinese descent, and Eric Alva, whose experiences as a gay man forced into the closet by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as a Marine was a major contributing factor to the repeal of the law late last year.
“I am inspired by this gathering; you truly are the rainbow nation,” Chin said, addressing a packed crowd in the Glass Pavilion before she started her speech.
Chin proceeded to leap into a profanity laden poetic tirade against modern society continually trying to pigeonhole her into a specific group — as black, as Jamaican, as a lesbian.
“Black power, I am your afro sister. But do you love the fact that I eat pussy?” she asked the receptive crowd, who applauded her at the end of every poem that she read and erupted into a standing ovation when she finished performing.
Punctuated throughout the event were volunteers clad in black t-shirts that displayed the “Periodic Table of Queer” on the back and the element “Pr” (standing for proud) on the front.
The summit began at Towson University last year, the brainchild of LGBT Director of Student Development Marien Greathouse.
“The goal of the summit is really to bring students together to talk about the different ways that [LGBT is] organized on campuses,” she said. “We want to also introduce them to LGBT culture and some of the different components of our community.”
Greathouse also emphasized the importance of learning about different components of the LGBT community (with this year’s focus on gay slang) and leadership in a difficult setting.
The summit was brought to Hopkins partially by openly gay Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Michael Falk, who attended Hopkins as an undergraduate and also serves as the current faculty advisor to the summit. He hopes that the event will serve to broaden the discussion on how LGBT affairs are handled at Hopkins.
“I think that gay students are much more active now than when I was an undergraduate,” he said. “But I suspect there are some things about Johns Hopkins undergraduate life which haven’t changed too much — that people tend to be much more focused on their academics than exploring who they are as individuals. I think that makes it maybe a more challenging environment to find yourself.”
Falk hopes that by bringing the summit to Hopkins, he can try and raise awareness about gay issues on campus.
At present, Hopkins does not employ a full time “advisor” to the LGBT community as Towson does — indeed, the only other university that has a similar full-time employee in the entire state of Maryland is University of Maryland College Park, according to Greathouse.
“I knew that in order to start doing collaborative work I would have to identify some folks, so I started reaching out to some LGBT students around the area,” she said.
The second year of the summit saw a large increase over the previous years, and Greathouse hopes that it will continue to balloon in size.
“We don’t want [the summit] to just be the Baltimore area; we want to start expanding,” she said. “We want to move into the D.C. area, into Pennsylvania . . . we’d like to see [1,000-1,500] students for a three-day conference. We’d like to see it grow in length and size.”
Greathouse compared her ideal conference to the Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally conference, which will be hosted by the University of Michigan next Friday.
Students at the event were treated to an opening reading of poems by Chin, along with a catered lunch. Afterwards, they attended “breakout” sessions, lectures and small discussion based clinics designed to shed some light on certain aspects of the LGBTQA culture (one of the most popular was “So what is this ‘Bondage’ thing anyway?” hosted by Lochai Stine, the director of Rope Bite and Bondage Club Baltimore).
More speakers, breakout sessions and lectures followed, punctuated by an early dinner and a “mingling” hour for students to exchange pleasantries and information with other like-minded people in the nearby community. The event concluded with Alva’s speech followed by a dance party and drag performances.
Also present at the event were targeted resource groups including Star Track, an organization devoted to preventing the spread of HIV.
The summit was advertised through a variety of means including inclusions in Hopkins’s “Today’s Announcements” and flash ads in the Rec Center.
Although the event benefited from support from Hopkins administration, the driving force behind the setup came from the students.
Conference co-chairs Mikki Lambert, a Hopkins senior majoring in Economics and Spanish and Ray Delgado, a Hopkins graduate of 2010, were instrumental in setting up the summit and improving on last year.
“[We had] more publicity because last year we were a new conference . . . No one really heard about it,” Delgado said. “But this year, we’re more legit.”
There were over 300 students registered for the event, according to Delgado.
Student reactions to the event were overwhelmingly positive.
“I thought it was a lot of fun and it was nice to be in a place where you felt the strength of the gay community of Baltimore,” freshman Joseph Puma said.
“It was nice talking to people like you and that’s different to regular life where most of the people you meet are straight.”
“I thought the event did a fantastic job of strengthening intercollegiate LGBT relations,” senior Patrick Armstrong said. “I made a lot of good contacts, got some really great ideas for events on this campus. If I’m in Baltimore next year I’ll definitely attend the next summit.”
The event will be hosted at a different university next year.
