The Scripps Voice

By Lindsey Cook ’11
Guest Writer

Caustic, tense, bitter, painful, nonexistent. What do these words have in common? They might be used to describe the traditional relationship between the queer community and the Christian community. However, tradition is being challenged at the 5Cs.  Family, Scripps’ Queer/Straight Alliance, and 3C InterVarsity, a Christian group at CMS, partnered to facilitate a Queer/Faith ally training on December 4. Leadership from Family and InterVarsity developed the ally training together, which included discussion, education about language specific to each group and comparisons between communities. The atmosphere of cautious optimism gave way to excited interest as the training moved along.

Students from each community shared experiences and asked thoughtful and genuine questions. The training ended on a poignant note of recognizing the similarities between both communities: that love and support are foundational to each but that both groups struggle to maintain equality and loving attitudes at times.

Berenice Villela (’12), co-president of Family, shared, “This is only the first step in what Family sees as a series of events addressing the intersections between queerness and faith. This training was completely customized to the needs of IV and Family, and it was so exciting to see a group of students engaged for an hour and a half. It felt revolutionary.”

An additional collaborative ally training and movie screening are being planned for next semester. Email familyintervarsity@gmail.com for more information. To access the training manual used, please visit community.scrippscollege.edu/family.

The Queer Resource Center, FAMILY, and other queer and allied groups on campus recognized and celebrated National Coming Out Day (NCOD). Although the official date is Oct. 11, NCOD was celebrated with a week of programming. As Lowell Reade (HMC ’12) said, “Coming out is one of the most powerful ways to make change… by personally being exposed to queer people, [people] have a closer connection to the queer rights movement.” The diverse events reflected the myriad ways to be out.

On Oct. 6, Sister Spit, a group of seven radical queer feminist artists, performed in Balch Auditorium. The evening began with Sara Seinberg introducing Sister Spit with her brilliant slide show of photographs from their tour. Her photos depicted things she saw—they weren’t fabricated or staged. Sister Spit’s acts were similarly raw and honestly queer.

Queer and allied students alike laughed to Beth Lisick’s failed attempt at bisexuality, Ariel Shrag’s story of a high school lesbian hoping to lose her “real” virginity to a boy and Rhiannon Argo’s story of an aspiring stripper’s encounter with a Brazilian wax job. An excited round of applause followed Ben McCoy’s lip-syncing to a recording of her powerful and poignant condemnation of typical trans and drag politics and stereotypes. Michelle Tea, the host of the evening, shared an article commenting on the Gossip’s performance at a Fendi event during fashion week in Paris, an ironic and paradoxical testament to queer mainstream acceptance.

The Sister Spit performance impacted the 5C community beyond the walls of Balch. Kyria Traber’s poem on body hair and the expectation on women to mutilate and pluck away at their bodies inspired the following week’s MESA (Middle Eastern and South Asian)/ FAMILY talk on the politics of hair.

National Coming Out Day events were designed to encourage 5C students and the public to come “out” as their true selves. Adriana di Bartolo, Coordinator of the QRC, led student and faculty/staff ally trainings that recognized the prejudice and rejection allies face when they come out. The coming out panel in Mudd’s dining hall featured the mother of a gay son, who shared her touching experience as a supportive ally to her son. Amina Simmons (PO ’12), a lesbian Christian, shared how her identities are complementary but are deemed mutually exclusive by society. She said, “It seems like I can’t win…at home they don’t accept my sexuality and here they don’t accept my belief, the two most essential characteristics of who I am.”

National Coming Out Day festivities, culminating in the bright pink painting of Walker Wall, attempted to at least recognize the boundaries we all place, and make the QRC, queer and allied groups more inclusive. Communities set limitations, whether intentionally or not.

That exclusion harms those who do not fit within the policed boundaries. Di Bartolo said that the purpose of NCOD is to work “toward a campus climate in which LGBTQ folks and our allies can come out in a safe, welcoming, and supportive environment…We are creating visibility around an invisible and often forgotten student population.” By celebrating and recognizing queers of faith, allies, gender nonconformists and all other manifestations of queer, the 5Cs and the community can learn to be not just tolerant, but accepting of non-normative ways of being.

How many times have you Googled yourself? I can’t count the times I’ve typed “Allison Lockwood” into the Google search box to investigate the lives of my numerous namesakes. Having spent my summer researching potential donors for EMILY’s List, a political action committee in Washington, D.C., I am impressed at the extent of the information I can learn about people I don’t know and may never meet.

My grandfather died last week. I never really knew him, and after his death I developed a belated curiosity about his life and his accomplishments. Today, for the very first time, I Googled my late grandfather’s name.

The last remarkable memory I have of my grandfather, my Sampapa, is of him excusing himself from the Thanksgiving table and shuffling to the kitchen, audibly farting with each step. Neither he nor the rest of the family acknowledged the flatulence, though the younger cousins—myself included—stifled giggles through our mashed yams. Perhaps his hearing aids didn’t pick up the fart frequency, or, equally likely, he was maintaining decorum when faced with
the endless indignities of old age.

This is the memory I retain of my grandpapa, a distinguished lawyer, priest and humanitarian. I can count among the vestiges of our relationship multiple birthday gifts including: 10 annual subscriptions to National Geographic, one patch of rainforest protected in my name, one star adopted in my name and one donation of an unspecified amount to Save the Whales. My meager stock of memories and keepsakes exposes our underdeveloped bond as grandfather
and granddaughter, especially compared with the wealth of information available about him online.

The rudiments of our family mythology—an unconfirmed connection with the invention of Dixie Cups, my great-grandmother’s absurdly opulent home modeled on Mount Vernon and my uncles’ mischievous misuse of the dumbwaiter—were all I inherited through our malfunctioning oral tradition. Despite our comparatively unlimited access to information, my generation lacks the historical grounding and context that comes with knowing the who, what,
when, where and why of our heritage.

I didn’t really know my grandfather. We were relatives, not friends. By simply Googling his biography, memoirs and interviews I now recognize the tremendous affinity of our personalities, interests and weaknesses. The 3,000-odd miles separating Oregon, where I grew up, and New England, where my grandfather spent his final years, had nullified these commonalities.

Even our annual reunions provided little remedy to the barrier of distance. Given that I knew my pet hermit crabs better than I knew my grandfather, I suppose my inability to feel loss or remorse over his death is understandable. That said, I now question whether I want to follow in my parents’ footsteps, moving plane rides away from their families.