While June is dedicated as Pride Month in the United States, there is always an opportunity to reflect on the progress that has been made on LGBTQIA+ rights and the challenges that lie ahead.
LGBTQIA+ is an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, and asexual, and the + is intended to cover additional marginalized identities and orientations.
In honor of Pride Month, UMGC seeks to reaffirm the university’s commitment to supporting LGBTQIA+ community members and amplify their voices. To that end, we gathered with members of UMGC’s community who identify as LGBTQIA+ and/or as allies to host a panel discussion about Pride and allyship. The panel explored perspectives on what it means to be an ally, i.e., someone who supports and actively advocates for the rights and representation of LGBTQIA+ individuals. They offered their thoughts and ideas in a Q&A-style chat. Responses were edited for length and clarity.
Meet the Panelists
Cynthia Newcomer is a staff member at UMGC and is active in the Staff Diversity Advisory Council and the LGBTQ+ Inclusion Network. She identifies as a lesbian/queer. She has been involved in LGBTQ+ issues for over 30 years. As a white person, she is active in working for racial equity and justice, and so has thought about and practiced allyship from the perspective of someone who needs allies and someone who seeks to be a good ally.
Nitara Jefferson is a UMGC student currently working toward a bachelor’s degree in graphic communication and is also vice president of the university’s LGBTQ Student Association. She identifies as bi/pansexual/queer. As a BIPOC member of the community, she has done a lot of personal work helping other BIPOC understand how allyship can unite us all.
Sharon Spencer is a staff member at UMGC, an adjunct faculty member in the psychology department, the co-chair of the Staff Diversity Advisory Council, and a member of the university’s LGBTQIA+ Inclusion Network. She identifies as heterosexual. She practices—but certainly has not perfected—allyship to support members of all marginalized groups.
How Can Allies Best Support LGBTQIA+ Individuals and Movements?
CN: A group I’ve been involved in, Baltimore Racial Justice Action, has said: You either actively oppose, actively support, or tacitly support injustice. If you’re not speaking out and taking action, you are saying I’m OK with the way things are. Our communities are under attack so much right now, especially transgender people. There’s a lot happening right now that needs to be addressed, and we need all the allies that we can get.
On neighborhood listservs, there are all kinds of racist and anti-gay comments. Are you willing to be out to your neighbors that you don’t stand for this, that you don’t want to hear anti-gay comments, that you don’t want to hear racist comments? Are you willing to work on legislation? Are you willing to support mutual aid groups in your community? The active part of allyship, to me, is the most critical but it’s also so important to just be aware of what is happening in LGBTQ communities and pay attention to what our communities are saying and asking for.
NJ: One small thing people can do is volunteer their pronouns to normalize it. There are a lot of silent allies in the world. There is a difference between being an active ally and being a silent ally where they have certain beliefs but no actions in support of those beliefs.
SS: I think silent support is no support at all. Nobody knows what you’re thinking. Allyship includes speaking up, speaking out. I do understand, though, when people are silent because they may be at an early point in their understanding, and they don’t know what to say. I get that, but I think every human is obligated to go on that journey and get to where they are speaking up and out.
CN: And, allyship is important within LGBTQIA+ spaces, too. We need to be allies to each other on issues like racism, ableism, sexism. No one should have to leave parts of their identity at the door to be welcome into queer communities.
How Can Allies Continue to Grow in Their Allyship?
SS: I think a key part of being a human being is knowing that you do not know everything. One of the things I loved about my doctoral program is that it taught me just how much I don’t know.
NJ: Every day is a learning experience, and everyone is at a different level of their learning in their life. Every day is an opportunity to turn over a brand new leaf. It’s a brand new day to learn something, to be a different person than you were the day before.
CN: One way to do that is to actually go out and read things and figure things out on your own. I think that really demonstrates your commitment that you’re willing to do that.
NJ: Yeah, it’s that idea of active versus passive listening and learning. It takes two seconds to go into the library and type LGBT into the search bar and see what comes up, what books they have or go into the UMGC library and look at all of the articles and things that have been compiled. The passive would be relying on people around you to correct you and help you and push you through and not really taking any extra steps to be better.
CN: I think the other thing that’s been really important for me is working with other allies, so we’re not just going to the people we’re trying to be allies to and saying, you know, how can you help me understand this.
NJ: It’s also sort of like the idea of a peer review in class. You can get the information from the professor, but there are certain things you can only learn or really solidify by talking to everyone else who’s also learning and in the same space as you.
How Can Allies Ensure Their Actions Don’t Overshadow LBGTQIA+ Voices?
CN: One thing I have struggled with is knowing when to speak out as an ally and when to shut up and let the people who are actually experiencing the issue speak. I think it’s important to consider who is in the room when a topic is being discussed and whether I am the right person to speak up at a given time or should be giving others the opportunity to speak for themselves.
NJ: It’s very easy to infantilize and lose connection. Every situation is not a situation where you have to take over and take care of the person. It may just be moral support. I tend to speak up and speak my mind without thinking about how that affects people around me because I am so focused on getting the thoughts out and having my opinion out there. Even though I am a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I can’t speak for everyone who identifies as a member of that community. I can’t speak for lesbians. I can’t speak for gay men. It’s very good to do those check-ins and say “Do you need my help right now?” or “Do you need me to take this over for you?”
SS: What I think is key is to constantly ask “What do you need from me?” “Did that work for you?” “Should I have shut up?” “Should I have spoken up?” You want to be actively seeking out what that other person’s perspective is, and, if you get it wrong, you learn from that.
CN: Sometimes I have real-time communication where I send someone a chat or text to ask if they want me to raise a particular point. I want to make sure that I’m being a good ally but not speaking for someone else.
Do Questions or Uncertainties Around How to Be an Ally Become a Barrier to Allyship for Some People? If So, What Can Be Done to Help Remove that Mental Barrier?
NJ: A train of thought I’ve heard a lot is “I don’t know how to be an ally without people thinking that I am part of the LGBT community.” I think a lot of people have a hard time with that, with doing things like adding their pronouns to their accounts, doing things they wouldn’t necessarily need to do for themselves but can do to help normalize it. There can be a gap where people don’t know when to step in.
SS: I think you’re absolutely right. When I was first thinking about joining the LGBTQIA+ Inclusion Network, I was terrified of making a mistake, of doing it wrong, of hurting people rather than helping them, and you know that’s that mental barrier. I think the way that you alleviate that fear and remove that barrier is to do exactly what we’ve been doing, which is to talk about it.
NJ: People can kind of get that perfectionism frozenness where they think “If I can’t do it right, I’m not going to do it at all because I don’t want to see the negative outcome from it.” The viewpoint should more so be that every single step I take as an ally is a learning experience and with every misstep that I take it’s an opportunity for me to learn not only how to not make that misstep again but also how to use that to move into different aspects of existing as an ally.
CN: I think you both raise important points. The issue of being perceived as part of LGBTQ+ communities, if you speak out just shows how ingrained homophobia and transphobia still are, that people are afraid that they’ll be perceived that way and that needs to be addressed.
SS: And, you know, a piece of what you said, Nitara, before is the idea of making a mistake and then, you know, apologizing for it, learning from it, and growing from it. I kind of thought about DEI work as like the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm, except that isn’t possible. Once you go out into the kind of ally action that involves talking to someone who’s a member of a marginalized community or standing up for them, or backing them or whatever it may be, you are going to make mistakes, and you may even do harm. It’s like, when my son used to play football, he was a quarterback and when he would throw an interception, he would be crushed. We would always say to him, if you’re not throwing interceptions, you’re not playing quarterback. You have to accept that you cannot do this thing perfectly, and it isn’t that you have to. The key is how you deal with it.
How Can People Get Started on Their Journey as Allies?
CN: I think being aware of what the community you’re seeking to ally with is working on in your community is really important. There are often community-based groups, or state-wide groups. Or, see if there is a chapter of a national group that is active locally and then see if there’s a place that you can plug in.
NJ: I agree with what Cynthia said—being active, starting slow, starting small. One opportunity would be for people who are interested in being allies to join something like the LGBT student group that we have here at UMGC. You don’t necessarily have to go to everything that they do, but you can see a different group of people’s perspectives.
SS: I think what’s important for allies to know is that the very first action you have to take is your own personal journey of reading, watching, listening, exploring. That’s the fundamental first level. Then, I feel the top level is when you’re actually doing this kind of political or legislative or community action. But there are also tons of levels in between.
NJ: Every day is a new day to learn, and we can just hope that everyone takes the opportunity to learn something new everyday and make themselves better people.
SS: And do something new.
NJ: Do something good, do something impactful.
If you are an LGBTQ+ student, alumni, faculty member, or staff member or member of the UMGC community who is an LGBTQ+ ally/supporter and would like to get involved in the university’s LGBTQ+ Student Association, please join the LGBTQ+ Student Association Facebook group and complete and submit the membership form. Membership is free.
If you are a faculty or staff member and want to join the LGBTQIA+ Inclusion Network, email lgbtqiainclusionnetwork@umgc.edu.
Reference on this webpage to any third-party entity or product does not constitute or imply endorsement by UMGC nor does it constitute or imply endorsement of UMGC by the third party.
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