Bless Y’all’s Hearts: 
Creating a GSA & Safe Zones 
at a Catholic University

On 30 March 2019, I presented a talk by this title at the Florida Collegiate Pride Coalition. Now that I’m leaving the institution featured in this conversation, I feel it’s time to commit these ideas to a post.

When I announced my acceptance of a new job back in 2014, one characteristic of the school stood out and caught a lot of people’s attention: It’s Catholic. I am very much not. Raised Protestant — Presbyterian PCA, then ARP, if you like the gory details — I’m now openly atheist, much to my parents’ chagrin (Hi, mom!). How would that work at a Catholic school? Didn’t they have something like a statement of faith I had to write for my application?

First, the application called for a Values Statement, not a statement of faith. I agreed and aligned with the stated values of the institution — which was why I felt comfortable applying in the first place — and was able to speak to each of their values by merely omitting the parts about Jesus. For instance, I too would “value all individuals’ unique talents, respect their dignity, and strive to foster their commitment to excellence,” but I do it because I value equity and universal human dignity, not because I’m “animated in the spirit of Jesus Christ,” as the school’s value statement decrees. I made it through the interview process relying on a sense of mutual respect: I was applying to teach students, not prosthelytize; they could address students’ souls while I addressed their minds. Deal? Deal.

My extensive experience in an academically minded youth group and Sunday school really helped. When I was in high school, my youth pastor was in seminary. He used our Sunday and Wednesday classes as opportunities to teach us what he was learning in his courses. What better way to make sure he knew the material than to teach it to others? To this day, I remember conversations I had with friends at school where I discovered how little they were taught about theology in their respective classes/groups. Going in to a Catholic school, I thought I had a basic background of theology sufficient to understand the differences between my upbringing and the Catholic tradition, and to help me navigate a Catholic institution as an openly identified atheist.

Boy was I wrong.

The vast majority of folks at the institution cared less about theology than I did. They wouldn’t engage in discussions about Catholicism versus atheism because they weren’t interested in the issue, and the institution was merely a school — the school’s acceptance, not its identity, mattered to them. The exceptions on campus were deeply Catholic and showed just how ignorant I was of Catholic teachings, practices, and priorities. It only took a couple casual conversations in a faculty trivia team for me to feel completely out of my element. But that mutual respect I mentioned above? That remained, and it helped keep things functional.

Creating a GSA at a Catholic School

This is a story of the creation of Saint Leo University’s Gay-Straight Alliance, which we called Prism. Our work building a GSA took time, effort, and tons of diplomacy. But it was ultimately successful. Prism, the student organization we created, was most noteworthy for these milestones:

• Initiation — Deciding to create the club
• Recognition — Getting administrative (faculty and student gov’t) authorization
• Education — Building a religion-aware
 Safe Zone Allies program
• Maturation — Establishing guidelines for student leadership roles

Initiation: Recognizing a Need

Fast-forward to a year or so into my work at that school, and I got an email from someone off-campus. A prospective student noticed some of my activity on Twitter and knew I was gay and on faculty at the school. This student wanted to know what the environment was like at the school for LGBTQ+ folks, as nothing on the website so much as mentioned the issue.

That email struck a chord with me. When I got the phone call initially offering me job, I called a friend who already worked there before I made my decision.  I had previously decided that I refused to work anywhere that I couldn’t be myself, so I had a single question to ask: Could I be openly gay and accepted in the faculty? My concern as prospective faculty aligned with the concern of a prospective student. Obviously, the school needed more clarity about its acceptance for queer folks. People wanted to know how the school would treat them, and nobody had answers available.

After some conversation, the student who wrote me that out-of-the-blue email ended up attending the institution. She came to chat with me in person, and we agreed that the school needed a gay-straight alliance (GSA) to create visibility for other folks in our situation. There was just one problem with our plan: Folks at this school had tried three times before, and each time, the paperwork died on an administrator’s desk. No actual rejection (which could look bad), but also no GSA (which could irritate the conservative base). How could we make this work?

Recognition: Making Things Official

Our opportunity came in the Fall 2015 semester: Our school got a new president. We had a new Director of Student Ministries as of the year prior. And the Vatican had a new Pope as of 2013 — a Pope who gained attention for saying “who am I to judge” about LGBTQ+ Catholics. We saw this as almost a political clean slate, and certainly an environment far more conducive to supporting and welcoming a GSA on campus.

We knew that everything had to be official, or it would be worthless. Without official recognition, we would be seen as second-class, unimportant, or even fake. What we really needed was official acknowledgement that we existed so that we could more publicly show support for LGBTQ+ community members and address the concerns that led us to create the group in the first place. Either the administration and student government both recognized the organization, or it wasn’t worth having one. That meant we needed to apply for a student group and then student-government recognition — because of course they were two separate processes.

When an institution takes public pride in its identity as a Benedictine Catholic school, and when that school asks all employees to identify how their values align with those of the school, those values also become the basis of rationale for establishing a GSA. Traditionalists might balk at extending an olive branch to the LGBTQ+ community, but they can’t very well reject the fundamental values of the institution. So that’s where we started.

One of the school’s core values is respect, and that became the bedrock of our approach and argument. Our GSA would work to build respect for our LGBTQ+ students and employees, we would respect the teachings of the Church, and respect was all we asked of administration.

I can’t overstate the importance of a respectful approach in our negotiations with administration. We acknowledged that we were asking a lot of a religious organization, and that it presented a challenge for them. At the same time, we made sure to show that we knew how Benedictine teachings (most notably a call to hospitality), school values (specifically respect for all people), and Church teachings (especially Francis’s “Who am I to judge?”) supported our assertion that the school should offer a GSA.

The Logo

I also wanted to make sure our club was visible. I knew before we started that we needed Safe Zones, and those need recognizable graphics for people to post on their doors. I wanted a meaningful design that helped support the argument we made that a GSA supported the work of the school, rather than conflicting with it. After a lot of work and revision, I created this:

There’s a story here. Every aspect of this logo holds meaning for this club’s context. Jesus said that he was “the light of the world” (John 8:12; 9:5), and he is thought of as pure—like white light. If a white light shines through a prism, it creates a rainbow, which is the standard designator for gay Pride. That’s where the club’s name came from and why I used the rainbow colors around the outside.

That white triangle of negative space in the center of this logo in a nod to the pink triangles used to mark gay people in Nazi Germany—a tribute to persecution and labeling in our history, poignantly presented by absence.

And the green and gold in that logo’s rainbow? Those are the official shades of Saint Leo green and gold used in their branding. This logo should always be presented with those colors at the bottom because Prism is built on a foundation of Saint Leo—the school is our base.

I’m proud of that logo and all the representation included in such a simple image. I got administrative approval to use the logo at the same time as we got approval to have the club in the first place—to me, it was that important. And I wanted to make sure they knew I was going to plaster rainbow stickers around campus. Their okay gave me confidence. That logo gave the club instant recognition, visibility, and legitimacy.

It’s all about timing

Prism’s first meeting took place a few days after a special student-activities trip: The Broadway musical RENT was showing in Tampa, and two busses of students went to see the show. After the show, when everyone climbed back aboard the busses, the student organizer and I handed out flyers notifying students of Prism’s first meeting. We ended up with standing room only, amazing support for an organization we had to fight to create.

Education: Broadcast and Balance

Prism’s education and outreach efforts also required strategy, patience, and an emphasis on respect. For our students, we coordinated a carpool (nothing official or with campus vehicles) to get anyone who wanted to attend down to Tampa Pride in March 2018. We made a banner to show who we were, and students enjoyed both seeing others and being seen as a legitimate group.

I also created a three-hour Safe Zone training for faculty or students, based on work from The Safe Zone Project and Safe Zone training at my alma mater, UCF. Our training included explicit discussion of the Church’s position, which boils down to accepting individuals despite the individuals’ actions. For the purposes of our training, that meant we discussed who people in the LGBTQ+ community are while completely avoiding discussion of what they do in the bedroom. And because our intention the whole time has been for respect, identity was all we needed.

We also managed to show Love, Simon on campus on Valentine’s Day one year, though local politics made us hold the showing indoors, rather than out on a very public lawn as we initially planned. While the change disappointed us, we still knew we had accomplished something.

Maturation: Growth for the Future

What started out as a one-person show — one faculty member and one student doing all the paperwork and arguing and pushing — within two years became a full-fledged student organization, recognized by student government, offering a variety of leadership positions that reflect the nature of our group:

• President (decisions; mgmt)
• Vice Pres. (event plans)
• Secretary (notes, messages)
• Treasurer (tracking & paperwork)
• Social Media Guru (publicity)
• Member at Large (checks & balances)

Everyone had a voice, and everyone contributed equally. While the president might elsewhere “run the show”, in Prism that student was expected merely to make final decisions where consensus didn’t occur and to manage discussion and debate. We kept our leadership meetings collegial and collaborative, rather than hierarchal or competitive.

What We Learned

Our experiences over the years taught us a number of valuable lessons, most notably that we needed to:

• Insist — Recognize importance of a visible GSA, even to those off campus or unenrolled
• Resist — Rely on shared values to gain respect, align perspectives, & build trust
• Persist — Draw constant attention through small-scale publicity; become integral
• Assist — Divide responsibilities to improve engagement and broaden perspectives

Research shows that students at schools with active GSA organizations are less likely to consider or attempt suicide. A GSA creates community and a sense of belonging, and it can literally save lives. Forming a GSA at a conservative religious school seemed like a near-impossible task, but a combination of timing, strategy, and intention paid off.