I attended the Building a Community within an LGBTQ+ Community breakout session during the DePauw Dialogue. Previously, I’ve participated in other groups, meetings and parties for students concerned with the issue of diversity with respect to sexual orientation. One of the first things I noticed about this session, which anyone could have attended, was the diversity within this minority group that society deems LGBTQ+. I’ve seen many iterations of that acronym with different letters; it seems hard to keep up with the diverse landscape of sexual identity. Attending this session made me realize the breadth and depth of the lifestyles of those who do not directly identify as heterosexual.
As a gay man, I have always felt straightforward about things (take a moment to appreciate the irony). I am a man who is attracted to men; however, my ability to express my sexual orientation and identity in a few words is not everyone’s situation. Our discussion leader directed us through an exercise to challenge how we viewed difference. The general concept of the game was to nonverbally group the 50-some attendees based on a prompted identifier. We started the game by trying to group students, faculty and staff based on “above the waist clothing.” Wearing a long sleeve shirt, I tried emphasizing my sleeves with gestures to find other individuals also wearing long sleeves. Once the groups had settled, we identified the identifying trait with which our group associated. Clothing was just the warm up, we had found out, and we began to experiment with more difficult conceptual prompts.
The leader of the breakout then offered up more challenging cues for the group to organize into. Suggestions like “education,” “skin” and “gender” proved more difficult to orient a distinct group when we could not use our words. The skin prompt brought up issues of skin versus racial or ethnic identity— we found that skin color was not always an accurate way to classify one’s self and fostered a discussion on the difference. Similarly, the “gender” prompt demonstrated that one’s own gender identification is not straightforward, even from my increasingly trans-competent perspective.
The following conversations illuminated the difference in gender and orientation. Although I was born a male and have always identified as male, I grew to understand that gender identity is not so black and white. There are so many shades and hues by which one can identify. In the game, listening to a gender group self-identified as “figuring it out” proved a humbling experience by exposing me to identities even more complex than my own non-traditional identity. While I have grown up feeling different from most people and from the heteronormative society we live in, I still only saw only a few more colors than black and white in the world of diversity. I have cultivated a more technicolor perspective of diversity by pushing myself to open my eyes.
Organizing ourselves based on difference was challenging without the ability to communicate with each other. Once we could communicate again, we were able to open our eyes to the different colors of everyone’s life. Participation and communication on issues of diversity have never seemed more necessary in order for us to appreciate our technicolor world.
-Petersen is a senior economics major from Edina, Minnesota.