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By Diego Higuera
America’s LGBTQ citizens have made considerable progress in the 21st century. PRISM is working hard to make sure LGBTQ employees of Southwestern College enjoy similar progress.
PRISM is an advocacy group for LGBTQIA+ employees and students. PRISM co-chair Ryan Lennon, faculty coordinator for the SC Assessment and Prerequisites Office, said the college is generally a good place for LGBTQ employees, but challenges remain. Fear is a lingering problem.
Among issues that still cause anxiety, Lennon said, are the unintentional outing of students during roll call, outing employees on the college website and the lack of a campus Pride Center. PRISM is working to change those things.
“PRISM was created to be a place for employees to gather socially and to talk about issues we face as LGBTQ employees,” he said. “We want to try to make this a better place for all of us to work and to help support students and their communities.”
Lennon said the Southwestern College administration is very supportive of LGBTQ issues, but work remains. He said cases of harassment based on sexual orientation have stung LGBTQ employees in the recent past, but the college is more proactive than colleges and universities in other parts of the nation.
PRISM’s founders had to take care when forming the group, Lennon said. Some members are allies and attend general meetings open to everyone. Other meetings are exclusively for people who identified with the LGBTQ community.
“We want our leadership to be gender balanced and balanced among people of different identities,” he said. “We try to be as representative as we can in race and ethnicity to be as balanced as we can in our leadership.”
One of the expressed goals of PRISM is to actively support and integrate people from communities of color and communities that may not feel included. Safe spaces are a priority, Lennon said.
Earlier efforts by a previous Southwestern College LGBTQ advocacy organization to establish a safe space for LGBTQ students and employees were rejected by former college presidents Melinda Nish and Kindred Murillo. Nish said there was no place on campus to house such a space and Murillo said it was “not healthy” for segments of the campus community to “split into their own little groups.” Murillo said all members of the Southwestern College campus need to blend.
Lennon disagreed.
“There are times issues need to be discussed within communities,” he said. “There needs to be a space where people know that there are only members of their (interest group) community there.”
PRISM holds meetings in person and hybrid using Zoom. Hybrid and remote meetings allow a degree of privacy for people who would like to attend but fear being seen walking into a meeting of LGBTQ people and potentially outing themselves.
Lennon said PRISM pushed for the raising of the Pride flag last summer and a college declaration supporting LGBTQIA+ History Month in October. PRISM continues to work updating the SC admissions and enrollment system to allow students to use their preferred names while maintaining their legal name in the system when needed for grades and transfer.
A recent accomplishment was bittersweet, Lennon said. PRISM was successful establishing a page on the college website, but it had to be careful deciding what photographs to use because some members feared being outed. Lennon said an LGBTQ person’s decision to out themselves or not is private and needs to be made on their own terms for their own reasons.
“Outing can be dangerous for some people,” he said. “Some people do not feel safe letting others know their identities as members of the (LGBTQ) community.”
Despite the South Bay’s reputation as a generally progressive region, pockets of hate and intolerance linger, Lennon said.
“We are a governmental organization and there are some people (in the college district) that get mad that members of (the LGBTQ) community (work at Southwestern College),” he said. “(LGBTQ employees) may get harassing emails on (our) work email if our face is on this page. So putting your face and information on that page is accepting the risk. It needs to be a choice.”
PRISM launched with about 20 people and has grown to about 40, said Lennon.
“Our community has a lot of support on campus and there’s a lot of people that want to know what’s going on and how to support (LGBTQ) faculty and students,” he said.
