5 times higher-ed LGBT culture ate itself
Last month marked the launch of the New Gay Liberation Front (NGLF), an LGBT advocacy group. Piggybacking off of the Gay Liberation Front’s title—a group founded in 1969 following the Stonewall riots in Manhattan—the NGLF seems to have vexed many within the LGBT circle. NGLF’s recent press release writes that the group seeks to “fight back” against the attack on “homosexual people’s dignity” from “ender identity ideology, radical trans activists, and major institutions”.
”Homosexual people’s dignity and autonomy are under direct attack by gender identity ideology, radical trans activists, and major institutions — and the NEW GAY LIBERATION FRONT is here to fight back,” it says, along with their stated mission of combatting “a new wave of homophobia that has emerged, thinly veiled by inclusivity and disguised as a ‘human rights movement.’”
This is not the first time the left has found themselves locking ideological horns with one another. As colleges continue to push the LGBT agenda, Campus Reform has reported numerous instances of the campus left condemning members of its its own communities for not being woke enough.
Here are five times LGBT advocates on campus scolded their own for not being woke enough.
1: Houston student: privileged white males too prominent in LGBTQ movement
In 2017, then student journalist Laura Gillepsie wrote an op-ed for the University of Houston Daily Cougar’s ”sex-week” issue, in which she argued that bisexual and transgender people are underrepresented in the media -- drowned out by “white, cisgender… gay men”.
“The Western world is becoming more accepting of gay individuals, but often the acceptance begins and ends with white, cisgender (meaning a person who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth) gay men,” Gillepsie wrote. She then tied her objections to “white or male privilege”, insisting that the LGBT community focuses too much on white, gay men in the same way that other communities focus too heavily on white, straight men.
Director of the University of Houston’s LGBT Resource Center Lorraine Schroeder, told Campus Reform that, “There is not equal representation [in the media]... Gays and lesbians are lumped into one group, bisexuals are almost invisible, and transgenders are more represented than bisexuals, but still less than gays and lesbians.”
2: College tells students that saying ‘homosexual’ is offensive
Emerson college released “Guidelines for Inclusive Language” in which students were encouraged to “avoid the use of homosexual and homosexual relationship” and instead, to “use gay or lesbian when describing people who are attracted to members of the same sex.”
The language guide also encouraged students to refer to a disabled person as a “person with disability”, and encouraged swapping “manmade” with “artificial” , “manpower” with “workforce”, and “minorities” with “historically underrepresented groups” or “people of color”.
3. Dartmouth College panel: gay men are misogynistic, too
A Dartmouth College event titled “Gay Men Can Be Misogynistic, Too,” promoted the idea that, “[g]ay male culture has a problem...and its [sic] benefiting from patriarchy and misogyny too.”
The event was hosted by The 2015 event, hosted by yhe Ivy’s Inter-Community Council. In a now-deleted description of their website, the council aimed “to advocate for a more inclusive campus by serving as liaisons for: “Women, Men, International, Black/African American, Latina/o, Pan Asian, Native American, LGBT, Multi-faith, Greek letter, Accessibility, Athlete, Environmental Justice, and Socioeconomic Class.”
4. UW-Madison renames ‘LGBT Center’ to avoid ‘binaries’
In an effort to avoid “binaries” and “labels”, UW-Madison renamed their LGBT Center to the “Gender and Sexuality Campus Center”.
According to the school’s newspaper, “The purpose of the name change is to better align with the center’s mission. The center continues to serve those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender, but also serves many more students who use an array of other language for their own identities and experiences”.
The name change also came to match the trend of school’s like Duke University and UIC, who implemented similar measures, according to UW-Madison spokeswoman Meredith Mcglone.
5. Admin slams ‘homonormative whiteness’ of LGBTQ Centers
Former Assistant Director of LGBTQIA Programs & Services at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Jonathan Prior argued in an academic journal that the school’s LGBT Center and Greek Life on campus fosters “homonormative whiteness” by “upholding power for White, Christian, able-bodied, and middle-class people.”
Pryor also claimed that even the school gym and locker rooms constitute an unfriendly environment for gay men by expecting them “to be fit” and to display “manliness”.
Pryor interviewed a gay student who told him that locker rooms, “represent a space dominated by straight cisgender men, where masculinity is rewarded, heterosexuality is supported by sexist and homophobic comments, and athleticism is attributed to a specific body and masculinist nature.”
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