Coming Out
May 9, 2004 10:29 pm US/Central

CHICAGO (CBS 2) In 7th grade, Sarah Shelander realized she is gay. She didn't tell until last year. She's now a senior.

"I always had to be in hiding,” said Shelander. “I was living two lives, one in school and one outside of school"

Coming out made her feel free. It also made her a target.

"I've had things written on my locker, things on my ca, things thrown at me."

"It's time to make a change. It's time to make a change."

Gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgendered and straight teens rallied against discrimination at the Thompson Center. They shouted out for people like Sarah, who stay silent for so long.


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owell and Feinberg:
'Same-sex marriage struggle challenges the system'

By Brenda Sandburg
San Francisco

LeiLani Dowell and Leslie Feinberg, both members of Workers World Party, spoke here on May 2 at a forum entitled "Same-sex marriage and LGBT liberation: What we are fighting for." Together they connected the struggle for the civil right of same-sex marriage to battles against racism, poverty and imperialist war.

The meeting drew activists from the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities in the Bay Area.

Dowell, an African American and Hawai ian lesbian anti-war activist, is a Congressional candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. She stressed that lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people don't have some of the most basic civil rights that non-LGBT people take for granted. She said violence is one of the biggest problems lesbian, gay, bi and trans people face.

The more the U.S. government legitimizes discrimination against any group of people, the more violence against those people becomes acceptable, Dowell explained. She pointed to the post-9/11 roundups and increased violence against Muslim, Arab and South Asian immigrants as examples.

Dowell said the equal marriage rights struggle offers an opportunity to make alliances and change the political climate in this country. "LGBT people have been at the forefront of every single struggle in history," she recalled. "Now we must stand with the people of Iraq. We must stand with the people of Haiti and whoever the U.S. sets its sights on."


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Gay issue group rejection sparks ire at Berry College

By NORMAN AREY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ROME — Last year, Berry College's theater company staged "The Laramie Project," a play about the murder of a gay college student in Wyoming. Several students, moved by the play and the discussions it inspired, decided to organize a campus club to talk about issues involving homosexuality.

Their group, called Listen, won approval from the Student Life Council, a student-faculty group that oversees campus activities. Listen was the first gay issue group to win the council's endorsement.

But the school's Board of Trustees rejected Listen, saying they felt it was an advocacy group for homosexuality.

That angered some students.

"Listen is not an alliance of gay/lesbian people. In fact, all of the founders are heterosexual," said sophomore Chris Duke, a founder of the proposed club. "It's a group that was formed to hold discussions about sexuality and specifically homosexuality and gay/lesbian issues."