What We Want

1. An office should be designated to keep a central, public record of antigay bias incidents. Students should be made aware that they can enter complaints anonymously.

2. Orientation Week must include programming which reaches all incoming first-years and explicitly tells them that homophobic violence, threats, and harassment are not tolerated in this community. We have been told that the administration is planning a video for Orientation Week featuring interviews with students from various minority populations, including queer students, talking about their experiences on campus. This sounds like a potentially excellent move, but it must be accompanied by some training for the Orientation Aides in leading discussions around those issues. Furthermore, the Residence Assistants and Residence Heads who supervise dormitory life currently get no training on issues of queer sensitivity. They should be taught not only how to respond to bias incidents, but also how to create a supportive climate from the start for gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, and questioning students.

3. In Autumn 2003, the University should fund and help promote a broadly attended lecture designed to raise consciousness around the issues of homophobia. We recommend the speaker Jackson Katz, a specialist in "gender violence prevention education." He has spoken at many colleges and universities, including Duke, Cornell, and Michigan, and is willing to tailor a talk to the needs of the University of Chicago community, addressing the roots of homophobia and its function in macho culture. The community of queer and allied students will certainly attend his lecture in large numbers, but that is not the audience where the impact will be greatest. Here are several suggestions for the logistics of the lecture.
   1. publicize it widely and trust that word-of-mouth will produce a large and open-minded audience;
   2. hold it in a central place and require that fraternities and other student groups be represented in attendance;
   3. if all parties agree: break the event into three smaller pieces, to be held at Alpha Delta, Psi Upsilon (the two largest fraternities), and at Mandel Hall. All three talks should be open to the public. The spirit of this suggestion is that, rather than asking the fraternities to send their members to the speaker, Mr. Katz can go to them.

Taking these actions will serve several purposes. It will provide early warning of what behaviors will not be tolerated by the University and simultaneously indicate to queer students that respect for their rights and dignity is an integral part of our community standards.

These requests are being made because the status quo, with no community conversation and a clandestine punishment system, is unacceptable. Public dialogue is the first step towards change.