caught in a bad romance!

I recieve approximately eight emails a day. For the past two weeks, approximately a third of these have been from various departments on campus trying to get me to register for an event.

I do things WITH the Women's & Queer Studies department but not am not actively IN it; as a Race/Culture/Power minor I am actually part of the "UNH Center For The Humanities". (Perhaps you should consider consolidating!) Though I take a lot of classes with the Women's Studies department, not-so-secretly wish I could triple-major in Women's Studies, and know a lot of the people involved with Women's studies, I AM NOT IN YOUR DEPARTMENT. Nice try.

I bring this up because today is the last day to apply for the MLK Leadership Summit, which is essentially a weekend of Social Justice, Activism and Our Campus. Because I just can't get enough when it comes to applications, I was planning to apply anyway.

I got an e-mail from the Women's Studies department recently which was titled "Looking for GLBTQAI+ students to attend the MLK student leadership summit" and reads "NO queer-identified students had applied to attend the summit. It would be a shame to not have GLBTQAI+ voices in this summit related to justice for all groups on campus, so please consider going!". Presumably everyone who was on this email, all 11 of us instead of the usual large-scale departmental email, is LGBTQ+/-/Square Root of 7, Divided by 3, etc identified.

Okay... I know that because I'm gay I am qualified to attend. But really? Do you have to single us out because of our identity and then demand that we apply because of this? I've been talking to a bunch of people about how LGBTQ issues are less of an issue on this campus than it has been in the past. Even if they are still relevant issues, it's not on the forefront of everyone's agenda.

Maybe I don't see the point here, but I'm kind of discouraged by the fact an entire department seemingly devoted to equal treatment as a human being - rather than a figure of something arbitrarily based on any number of other factors - diminished me to my sexuality in hopes of getting me to participate in something. And maybe I'm just grumpy and bitter about having to read the same email, worded a little bit differently each time for two weeks in a row. But I like to think I'm more interesting and doing more than just being A Gay Student On This Campus.