The Griffon News

When you’re hanging out with your friends and making fun of each other, it’s easy to let things get carried away. It’s easy to call each other names that some people might find offensive. It’s easy for a guy to call another guy “gay” or “faggot” in jest. It’s a part of society that is celebrated in Hollywood with films like the comedy “Forty Year Old Virgin” in the infamous “know how I know you’re gay” scene, but members of the Pride Alliance aren’t laughing.

“I just find it absolutely distasteful,” said Brad Dixon, president of the Pride Alliance at Missouri Western, on the use of anti-gay derogatory terms.

Dixon, a 22-year-old senior majoring in communication studies, is a member of the organization on campus, which has been promoting homosexual awareness within the community since its inception in 2004. He has served as president of the alliance for the last two years.

Dixon identifies himself as a homosexual and has been called every inflammatory slur imaginable for his decision. He recalls one example of walking into the Blum Union one night last semester and being called “faggot” among other things, as he walked past a group of African- American students.

Ironically, like the NAACP, the Pride Alliance was formed to help stop discrimination. It’s because of people like Dixon and the adversity that affects his everyday life that the need for an organization like the Pride Alliance has arisen. Currently, the campus organization has around 20 members, both gay and straight, black and white.

“The alliance is for everyone, gay or straight; it doesn’t matter. Everyone is welcome because we are trying to promote acceptance,” said Mallory Hall, vice-president of Pride Alliance. Hall, a 20-year-old marketing major, is just one of many straight women that make up the membership of the organization.

Dixon and Daniel Kirk worked together in 2004 to create an organization on campus to give homosexuals a forum for meetings and an opportunity to meet other gays on campus. Over the past two years, it has grown both in numbers and objectives.

“Our main goal is to promote awareness of the gay community,” Dixon said. Most campuses in higher learning have some sort of gay-straight alliance, but unlike the Greek community, there are no chapters of a larger national entity. In fact, there isn’t any kind of program in St. Joseph for the gay community at all. The closest non-collegiate organization would be in Kansas City under the name GLSEN (gay, lesbian, straight education network).

The name for the campus alliance came from a core group of students who struggled with the task of naming their newfound organization. Dixon and others had several ideas for the name but were fearful of anything that would sound too intimidating, considering the community – not just St. Joseph but the Midwest as a whole.

The creation of the alliance came only six years after the murder of Matthew Shepard in a rural town in Wyoming. Two men, who lured him out of a campus bar under the premise that they were gay, killed Shepard. After leaving the bar, they drove him to a neighborhood east of Laramie, tied him to a fence and savagely beat him to death. Events like the one in Wyoming only reinforce the need for awareness programs and safe zones for homosexuals on campus, both of which are high on Dixon’s “to do list.”

Though there is currently neither a center nor a hotline for homosexuals or people who may be struggling with their sexuality, there are the alliance meetings and plans for the future of the organization. One such plan would be the creation of a Gay Bi Lesbian Transgender Center, which would serve as a hub for the gay community on campus. Not only would a GBLTC offer a physical place for weekly meetings to be held, but it would also offer a 24-hour hotline for students who have questions about their sexuality or for people to offer information in the event of a bias crime incident, which is the latest euphemism for hate crime. While some people at Missouri Western might argue over the need for such a system, annual reports of gay bias related crime incidents still hover in the thousands.

In 2005 there were a reported 1,985 hate crime incidents targeted specifically at homosexuals, according to the annual report from the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Program. Though this number shows a decline from recent years, it is still at an alarmingly high number, given not only the amount of incidents but also the number of offenders involved. Last year 3,245 people were listed as offenders associated with hate crimes that involved 2,306 victims. These numbers, however, only represent the crimes that were reported.

While these reports don’t necessarily reflect the incidents that happen locally, they do show that hate crimes directed toward gays make up 15.6 percent of the total single-bias motivated crimes reported, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations annual hate crime report, published in November 2005. While racially motivated crimes make up the greatest percentage, homosexuals are second only to African Americans as far as individual group classifications. That makes gays in America the second most discriminated against minority.

Arguably, the current political climate fans the flames of discrimination. Certain politicians argue that homosexuality is immoral, and that there is not a provision that allows or gay marriage in the Constitution. While it is easy enough to get wrapped up in the political side of the highly volatile argument, Dixon chooses to consider the topic of gay marriage a different way.

“It doesn’t seem right that if something were to happen to my partner, like a car accident or something, that I couldn’t see him in the intensive care unit, because I’m not family,” Dixon said.

Politics aside, Dixon, as well as others, have felt the heat of discrimination right here in St. Joseph.

“I have gone to certain gas stations and felt really uncomfortable,” Dixon said. He said he thinks that the development of the Pride Alliance is a step in the right direction, but that gays are still a long way from being treated as equal.

In the end, equality is what they all really want, but more than that, deserve. Members of the alliance aren’t going out of their way to attract attention to themselves because of the negative affects which that may bring.

Consider this year’s Homecoming theme, superheroes. The alliance is being allowed to participate with their theme, fittingly, “Saturday Night Lives: The Ambiguously Gay Duo.” To members of the Alliance, choosing these two as their representatives is enough to make the statement for the group without being overly flamboyant.

“We don’t want to do things that cause people to go ‘Oh god, here come the gay people,’” Hall said.

Hall’s statement is almost prophetic in the sense that some people in the campus community continue to relegate the idea of homosexuals to the old adage, “out of sight, out of mind.” However, they would be doing so at their own peril. Of the 20 members of the alliance, there are several that are active members on campus, some serving on the SGA and CAB, others as members of sororities and fraternities and one or two are in the Campus Crusade for Christ.

In fact, it could be argued that the Pride Alliance performs the most significant public service of all organizations on campus. Every year on December 1, the Alliance, along with the health department, offers free HIV testing. Dixon and Hall believe that it is important to keep their members both healthy and informed.

Dixon will be graduating from Western in the spring of 2008, but with the loyal members and friends that he has made during his tenure, it is a certainty that the Pride Alliance will continue to grow. He hopes to see the realization of his GBLTC idea, along with the annual Drag Show, which will be held in February 2007, continue to thrive. But more than anything, he would like to see more members, both gay and straight, at the weekly meetings. He said that the meetings help boost awareness and understanding of participants and those around them.

“You have to learn about yourself first before you have other people learn about you,” Dixon said.