Queering Greek Life and Diversity Centers
Abstract
On college campuses, extracurricular activities such as fraternity and sorority life, often find themselves with a large student body membership. On the Georgia College & State University campus, 2,012 students are involved in fraternity and sorority life. This makes up approximately 34% of the student body (Georgia College Factbook 2019). In addition to this, in the United States, approximately 4.5% of the population identifies as LGBT (Gallup 2017). To better understand how to cultivate allyship between fraternity and sorority life and the LGBTQ+ community, I completed an internship at The HUB with Georgia College LGBTQ+ Programs, which helps to put on programming, educational opportunities, as well as allyship training for the student body, staff, and faculty. During my internship I worked closely with the LGBTQ+ Programs director to help facilitate events with the Pride Alliance as well as develop programming for the LGBTQ+ Greek Life community. This paper explores the issues I observed in the process of my internship, including the necessity of allyship between the LGBTQ+ and Greek Life communities, the challenges of building that allyship, as well as the overall importance of centers such as The HUB and LGBTQ+ Programs for student integration and campus climate.
Queering Greek Life and Diversity Centers
On college campuses, extracurricular activities such as fraternity and sorority life, often find themselves with a large student body membership. On the Georgia College & State University campus, 2,012 students are involved in fraternity and sorority life. This makes up approximately 34% of the student body (Georgia College Factbook 2019). In addition to this, in the United States, approximately 4.5% of the population identifies as LGBT (Gallup 2017). To better understand how to cultivate allyship between fraternity and sorority life and the LGBTQ+ community, I completed an internship at The HUB with Georgia College LGBTQ+ Programs, which helps to put on programming, educational opportunities, as well as allyship training for the student body, staff, and faculty. During my internship I worked closely with the LGBTQ+ Programs director to help facilitate events with the Pride Alliance as well as develop programming for the LGBTQ+ Greek Life community. This paper explores the issues I observed in the process of my internship, including the necessity of allyship between the LGBTQ+ and Greek Life communities, the challenges of building that allyship, as well as the overall importance of centers such as The HUB and LGBTQ+ Programs for student integration and campus climate.