The Pride Center: Serving SDSU's LGBTQ Community

As a former SDU student, I am particularly aware of the importance of having "safe places" for LGBT students. So it is with great pleasure that I begin an article dedicated to celebrating the newly inaugurated pride center at SDSU!

I was able to speak with Anthony Keen, the new director of the Pride Center, to find out what he had to say about this momentous event. He gave a brief history of the work it took, "Efforts to create a LGBTQ center at SDSU have been ongoing since at least the 1990s, with a few official proposals for a center being presented at different times. Through the collective effort of SDSU's LGBTQ Advisory Board made up of students, staff and faculty - as well as our very supportive university president, Dr. Elliot Hirshman, The Pride Center launched. It is important to note that the center would not be in existence without the work of this group, as well as the extensive efforts of various individuals on campus doing LGBTQ work for many years."

Having never gone to a school with a LGBT/Pride Center, I was curious about what the students could expect from this new resource. Keen offered this: "We've only been open for about a month now and are still in the process of getting things up on the walls and moving furniture. Despite having just opened, we already have a strong programming schedule; discussion groups, community connecting points, educational opportunities and other types of community building. A five-part implementation process has been ongoing and has proven a successful way to carry out our mission: programming, staffing, campus and community collaborations, campus climate survey, the physical space and branding.

"Since I was hired in October we have opened our physical space, completed a space identity with logo and website, hired graduate and undergraduate student staff and are moving full steam ahead with various programmatic and community building efforts." An impressive array of services for a Center that has only been open for a month!

Keen spoke beautifully of the continuing need for these types of Centers. "I could go on and on about why community centers are such an essential component of college campuses - and indeed our communities more broadly. What it boils down to is the need for people within specific communities (in our case lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, allies and the other variety of sexual orientation and gender identity communities that exist) to find a place where they can be fully themselves.

"Being fully oneself involves a feeling of safety and a place where someone feels a sense of normalcy. So many of our students rarely feel that way during any other part of their daily lives, we can literally be the difference between someone thriving as a human being and someone leaving the University, or worse. With many of the advances that our communities have experienced, there's still so much work to be done - prejudice never rests, so we must never rest. I would like to point out that transgender communities around the world experience some of the highest levels of invisibility and often violence. Centers like ours help to relate the experience of such a marginalized community while building people up."

I wanted to know how Keen saw the Pride Center in years to come. "Given that so many other rich LGBTQ-related resources exist on campus and in the San Diego community, The Pride Center will continue to develop into a resource for the SDSU community. Efforts like our hosting of the Y.E.S. Conference - a high school and young adult conference at SDSU - are exactly the type of connecting point that we hope to be. We will continue to focus on the interconnected and intersecting identities of our communities - individuals are not just LGTBQ, each is a whole person who we hope to connect with the aforementioned resources to better serve - race, gender, socioeconomic status, immigration status, religion and all the other beautiful ways that we are the people we are."

For more information on the SDSU Pride Center feel free to contact Coordinator Anthony Keen at [email protected] or go to pridecenter.sdsu.edu