LGBT Community Finds a Safe Space at Bowling Green State University

Despite its small town college vibe, Ohio’s Bowling Green State University is home to roughly 15,000 undergraduates: nothing small about that! A majority of those students do come from in state, though there are Falcons who represent all 50 states and 70 foreign countries. Needless to say, it’s a diverse combination of people all sharing the same space and learning together. That’s exactly how it should be, isn’t it? And LGBT communities are starting to thrive on college campuses like never before. With university-sponsored groups, full-time staff members and even designated buildings for socializing or meeting, schools want to make sure that all of their student body, without exception, feel as though they’re in a safe environment.

We dug around online, and discovered that BGSU is consistently rated one of the best college campuses for students from the LGBT community based on their program and involvement. If you’re still not convinced, we promise you will be by the end of this article.

From our past article about safety at BGSU, you learned that administrators take the well-being of their pupils very seriously. In fact, an overwhelming amount of our findings was positive: rare for many public schools these days that have conflict based on headcount alone.

The university has refined this focus for LGBT groups with something called the Safe Zone Program, an initiative that launched in the fall of 2012. This two-hour workshop educates people about LGBT issues, with the main goal of building a strong support system on campus.

Students, faculty, staff and community members all come together to reduce instances of homophobia around BGSU. Once completed, you receive a special card and button to show that you’re one of the individuals working to make a more accepting place for current and future Falcons.

The Dream Program builds upon these concepts by allowing LGBT students to mentor or be mentees, leading everyone involved to explore personal values, build relationships and follow a specialized curriculum for the program. We love to see interactive affairs like this at college campuses, because there’s simply nothing more illuminating than face-to-face dialogue.

Are you quite the reader? Then you’ll probably find the “QueerQuery” of interest. This LGBT newsletter puts out several volumes each semester, and is the creative product of multiple interns working together. Of course, there are plenty of articles by guest writers included. One of the best parts about this publication is its comprehensive list of upcoming LGBT events.

It’s true: many advancements have been made in the acceptance and visibility of LGBT student groups at BGSU, but it wasn’t always that way. Go back to 2002, when then-Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs Dr. Bettina Shuford put together a task force to see what LGBT students were in need of.

The findings weren’t overly positive. A majority of LGBT students said that they didn’t feel comfortable being “out” on campus, lacked administrative support and feared for their physical safety.

The initiatives you’ve read about above are just a handful of things that have been done in the past decade to remedy the situation. Like anywhere with an eclectic mix of people, there will be adversity toward what’s perceived as different.

For example, BGSU students say that the fraternity culture is still a great source of discrimination. Overall, though, BGSU has all of the support an LGBT student could ask for when making the big step of going away to college for the first time.

Ryan James is a ’13 alumnus of Ohio University’s College of Arts & Sciences with a bachelor’s degree in writing and media. He currently works as a copywriter for a Fortune 500 e-commerce corporation based in Columbus, OH.