Paul Breines, who worked for years as a professor in Boston College’s history department, said he was ‘moved to tears’ by the turnout of BC’s panel discussion concerning lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender issues Monday night.
The discussion, in honor of Breine’s LGBT activism on campus, featured a panel of five BC faculty members, including Breines, who spoke of their experiences attempting to spread campus awareness of LBGT issues, as well as their struggles to incorporate awareness and knowledge of these issues into the classroom.
‘I was extremely moved,’ Breines, who now works as a doctoral thesis advisor for BC students, said.’ ‘It was interesting. It was stimulating.’
BC Professor and panelist V. Paul Poteat said he incorporates awareness of LBGT issues into the classroom by making students responsible for information concerning LBGT research and allowing them to choose LBGT topics for research projects.
‘It’s been nice to see that students are really interested in discussing these issues,’ he said. ‘They talk about them outside the classroom, so why can’t we bring the discussion into the classroom?’
The panelists admitted that bringing LGBT concerns into the classroom is easier said than done.
One of the biggest problems with integrating LBGT issues into the regular curriculum is the lack of knowledge many professors have about them, panelist Susan Tohn,’ professor in BC’s Graduate School of Social Work, said.
‘You don’t need to know everything,’ she said. ‘Your students actually know more than you, so you need to let them take control of the classroom and teach you.’
BC Resident Director and panelist Manuel Vasquez said students often teach each other about the issues.
‘I see when students have an experience, whether positive or negative, they come back [to the dorms] and talk to each other about it,’ he said.’
Vasquez said he would like to see a center for LBGT issues at BC. There is support for gay and lesbian students, but not as much for bisexual and transgender students, he said.
‘I think students are really pushing for that one centralized location,’ he said.
When the floor was opened for questions and discussion, sophomore Kelsey Gasseling shared a story of how one of her foreign language professors had pigeonholed her by assuming that she would use masculine pronouns to describe her ideal partner.
‘It kind of just forces you back into the closet,’ she said.
After the discussion, she said she was pleased with the turnout, but some aspects probably kept people away.
‘Most of the time, it’s the stigma,’ Gasseling said. ‘If you show up for one of these events, then you’re gay.’
Senior Amir Shirazi said he found the discussion engaging, and not necessarily what he had expected.
‘What I liked about this panel was that it wasn’t really a lecture,’ he said. ‘It gave a lot of questions for the audience to think about,’ he said.
Shirazi said he hopes this discussion will lead to other changes regarding attitudes towards homosexuality on campus.
‘[This discussion] will hopefully be one little injection of fuel to make the BC administration a little less nervous about homosexual desire,’ he said.’
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
