The University of Arizona Alumnus / Winter 2008
CULTURE CHANGE
Campus strives to create a welcoming environment for lesbian and gay students, staff, and faculty.
by Maragaret Regan
Jacob Chinn photos
Juan Herrera ’96, was the kind of student universities prize.
A political science major, he was president of the University of Arizona Student Alumni Association, and a member of the prestigious Bobcat Honorary.
“I was active on campus,” he remembers, speaking by phone from New York, where he has a cool job in external relations for the MTV network. “The UA is a great educational institution.”
Despite all these positives, Herrera didn’t stay connected to his alma mater after graduation. The reason — it was hard being gay at the UA.
“The campus was not welcoming,” he says. “I didn’t stay close to the UA. My experience senior year soured me, when I was struggling with my identity and my sexuality. I didn’t come out. People in my circle who came out were ostracized.”
Skip ahead a dozen years. Rosie Reid-Correa, a 21-year-old junior majoring in geological engineering, is having a very different UA experience. An out lesbian, she’s codirector of the Pride Alliance, the campus group for the LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) community.
“The UA is one of the most progressive universities,” she says. “The UA is way up there in tolerance.”
For instance, just last October, when the Pride Alliance set up a table on the mall in honor of Coming Out Week, nobody blinked.
“We got no negative comments,” Reid-Carrera says emphatically. “Faculty came by to thank us.”
The opposing stories of Herrera and Reid-Carrera provide only anecdotal evidence that the campus climate is changing. But the Advocate, the national LGBT newsmagazine, gave the UA a nod of approval in a comprehensive 2007 study. The publication vetted some 680 American campuses, and selected the top 100, rating the schools on institutional policies, housing, student life, and other criteria, says Cathy Busha, the UA’s brand-new director of LGBTQ Affairs.
“The UA made the list of the top-100 gay-friendly campuses,” Busha reports, “with a score of 15 out of 20.
“Sexual orientation and gender are both included in the UA’s nondiscrimination policy,” she adds. “It creates a positive environment.”
Busha’s appointment in November is perhaps the most visible sign of change. Operating out of Old Main, under the auspices of the Office of the Dean of Students, Busha’s new office joins a host of others geared toward minorities on campus. Like Chicano/Hispano Student Affairs and African American Student Affairs, and others, the new LGBTQ office will be a central clearinghouse — and advocate.
But while the other programs concentrate only on students, Busha’s will look out for LGBTQ staff and faculty, as well as students. Her goal, she says, is “to encourage a campus that is welcoming and safe.”
UA President Robert Shelton, now in his second year, created the new office on the advice of an LGBT advisory council.
“All Pac-10 and peer institutions have a support body for LGBT issues,” says Professor Eithne Luibhéid, an advisory council member. “We thought if one person was hired, they would have the authority to make things happen. Shelton said yes. We’re excited. It’s wonderful for the campus.”
But Busha’s hire is not Shelton’s only gay-friendly initiative. Taking a two-pronged approach this fall, he not only OK’d Busha’s position, which will offer support to the campus’s estimated 3000 to 7000 LBGT’ers. He also strengthened the campus academic unit devoted to gay and lesbian scholarship, upgrading the 14-year-old Committee on LGBT Studies to the level of an institute.
The new designation raises the institute’s profile, says Luibhéid, its director, and puts the UA in the company of just a half-dozen universities nationally that offer such a program.
“As a committee, we have an amazing history, and we’ve gotten tons of grants and support,” she says. But the new status ratchets the enterprise up to a whole new level. “By becoming an institute, it’s a good way to leverage private grants.” That money in turn will help fund the institute’s multiple initiatives, from its interdisciplinary faculty “research clusters” to its visiting scholars program.
A third piece of good news came in December from outside campus. Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano decided to provide domestic partner benefits to unmarried state employees, whether they’re in a same- or opposite-sex relationship. The controversial policy is expected to be met with resistance, but if approved by a state administrative panel in 2008, the UA’s LGBT faculty and staff will get the same valuable health benefits for their loved ones that their married colleagues already enjoy.
Plus, the move will put the UA and ASU on the same footing with peer universities, Busha says.
“The UA and ASU are the only Pac-10 schools that don’t offer domestic partner benefits,” she points out.
All three state university presidents, Shelton included, also publicly opposed Proposition 107, on the state ballot in 2006. That failed measure not only would have banned gay marriage, it would have forbidden any official recognition of domestic partnerships, no matter what the gender configurations. Had the voters passed that law, Napolitano’s benefits proposal would not have been possible.
“It’s exciting,” Busha says of the benefits. Adds Luibhéid, “For gay staff and faculty, the domestic partner health benefit has been the biggest issue.”
Eithne Luibhéid (pronounced ETH-nuh luh-VAID), presides over the new Institute for LGBT Studies in a cramped office in the Department of Women’s Studies, where she is a tenured professor.
“I’m half-time faculty,” she says, and half-time director of the institute.
An Irishwoman who immigrated to the U.S. at 16 from County Galway, Luibhéid holds a Ph.D. in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley. In her first book, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), she explored the problems of gay and lesbian immigrants.
“Since 1970, about 1.2 million immigrants (to the U.S.) have been LGBT,” she says. “Until 1990, federal law barred homosexuals from immigrating. The bar was lifted in 1990, and the law repealed. But how are they doing?”
The UA’s Committee on LGBT Studies was long led on an ad hoc basis, by assorted professors rotating in and out from women’s studies, religious studies, and media arts. But participants wanted more stability, and two years ago, after a national search, the group hired Luibhéid away from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her research made her a perfect fit for a university in the borderlands.
“Not too many people work with sexuality and borders,” she says.
While running the institute, Luibhéid will continue to do her own studies, which mesh nicely with the committee’s longtime Borders, Migration and Globalization Initiative, funded by a Rockefeller grant. And she’ll still teach — this semester she’s offering a graduate seminar in sexuality and international migration.
“The institute is a big tent,” Luibhéid says. It oversees everything from the popular campus Lesbian Looks films series run by media arts Professor Beverly Seckinger, to a distinguished lecture series that invites visiting scholars to campus. The research clusters bring together professors, students, and community members who do interdisciplinary work in such fields as health, medicine, and history.
One of this year’s projects, for instance, is “Oral Histories of Southern Arizona,” organized by Liz Lapovsky Kennedy of women’s studies. The goal is to document LGBT lives, and to bring their stories out of the shadows. Another cluster is looking at the health issues of transgender youth, the “hidden minority” in the LGBT community. Still another is examining sexuality and political culture.
While it’s not an academic department, the institute makes up a list of all the classes in sexuality and gender issues offered by departments across campus, from history to English (http://lgbcom.web.arizona.edu/). But its members did develop a popular undergrad elective, Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies, which students can use to fulfill a gen-ed requirement.
Sponsored at different times by different departments, the class “emphasizes the gen-ed learning outcomes,” Luibhéid says, “how to read, analyze, and write. The demand always exceeds the seats.”
Luibhéid taught the class last semester, and the students who turned up for it ran the gamut, from gay to anti-gay. Some challenged her, worrying that “politically correct” ideas would be “shoved down their throats.” Other students told her, “I’m gay. I’ve never heard the word ‘gay’ in class. I need to know something from you about my life.”
But students don’t get graded on their point of view. Instead, Luibhéid insists that they examine ideas critically in a scholarly fashion.
“We need to look at LGBT through the lens of sexuality, gender, race, and class. We ask such questions as, ‘How did you learn you’re heterosexual? What kind of privileges do you get?’ We think about the broader social justice struggles.
“It’s about how to read and write. You make your own decisions. Did you answer a set of critical questions? Then you get an A.”
Student Reid-Correa took the class as a freshman. “It’s very intense and demanding,” she says. “A lot of reading and writing. A true challenge.”
Cathy Busha (pronounced Boo-SHAY) is across campus in Old Main. The location signals her outreach function: while Luibheid is physically situated within an academic department, Busha is within the dean of students’ territory.
A college basketball player at Millersville State in Pennsylvania, Busha originally went into teaching in her hometown of Lancaster, a conservative community in the middle of Amish farm country. She loved teaching 8th-grade English, but “between my second and third years, I began the process of coming out,” she recalls. “I knew I didn’t have job protection.”
So she reluctantly left the job, and found her way to Tucson. She picked the city sight unseen.
“It’s progressive, it has access to the outdoors, and it has the UA, which adds a cultural piece.”
Arriving in town in September 1998 in 107-degree heat, (“I thought, ‘What have I done?’”), she quickly discovered Wingspan, Tucson’s LBGT community center. At first, she volunteered with its youth group, but she soon hired on to its domestic violence project. Eventually, she rose to the number-two job, director of programs. Wingspan grew along with her career, going from three staff members when she arrived to 21 employees today, and a budget of $1.1.million. Along the way she got her master’s in social work at ASU.
Her community experience at Wingspan will serve her in good stead st the UA, but she’s delighted that her new job brings her back to where she started.
“It gets me back to education and working with students,” she says happily. “I left education because I came out. This is full circle.”
Busha is not so naïve as to think that she won’t run into some opposition to her work. But she believes all parties can agree that the campus should be safe and welcoming for everyone who learns, works, or visits here.
“I think everyone would want that. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect.”
Busha started at the UA in November. Her first order of business was to meet with as many people as possible, particularly the leaders of the assorted LGBT groups that already exist, including the students’ Pride Alliance and the faculty and staff group OUTReach.
“I’m listening and assessing,” she explains. “I’ll support all the plans they already have in place.”
On the calendar already: a Day of Silence in April, “to raise awareness of how we’ve been silenced,” and a Second Chance Prom, for “students who couldn’t go in high school.”
By December, she’d put together a Web page, http://dos.web.arizona.edu/lgbtq/index.html, and fired-off her first monthly newsletter. Before long, she’ll undertake a “needs assessment,” to find out what LGBT professors, staff, and students want and need. Part of her job is to interact with the local community as well, a task made infinitely easier by her nine years at Wingspan. She also might direct research into LGBTQ issues (the Q stands for “questioning,” she says.)
And she’s hoping to reach out to LGBT alumni. Juan Herrera, the disaffected New York alum, has already spoken to Busha on the phone.
“The fact that she was hired is a big step in the right direction,” says Herrera, who’s begun to warm up to the UA again. He joined the MetroCats Alumni Club in New York, from which he may develop an LGBT chapter.
“The MetroCats have a great board,” he says. “They’re very welcoming.”
That kind of change should be instructive to the students now at the UA, Busha says, one reason she’d like to get LGBT alums back on campus.
“It will be great for current students to see professionals who are out,” she notes. “They can tell students what the climate was like 18 years ago. They can show the students that things do change.”
For more information, please contact: Eithne Luibhéid at eithne@email.arizona.edu or 520-626-0029, or Cathy Busha at LGBTQ Affairs, cbusha@email.arizona.edu or 520-626-1996. Cathy is also interested in hearing from alumni interested in a LGBTQ alumni group.
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