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Pride Week, sponsored by the GLBT and Allies Council and Wilde Stein Alliance for Sexual Diversity, was celebrated at the University of Maine from April 11-16.
At noon on Tuesday, Carey Nason, coordinator of UMaine’s Safe Campus Project, gave a workshop she called “Find Your Voice: How to Help Your Friend Who Has a Crazy Ex.” Nason made it clear at the beginning that this sort of thing can happen to anyone, gay or straight.
The workshop began with a scenario: “Jordan” and “Casey” just broke up and Jordan has started to stalk Casey. Jordan now leaves messages on Casey’s Facebook wall and texts Casey nonstop.
“What should you do?” Nason asked.
“Maybe if it’s all right with Casey, talk to Jordan and say, ‘You’re making Casey uncomfortable,’” an audience member suggested.
Then Nason asked what one should do if Jordan continued to text.
“I have a friend who had to get a restraining order,” another audience member said, adding that could be an option.
Nason continued asking “what if” questions.
“What if Casey likes the attention? What if you’re friends with both of them? What would you do?” asked Nason.
She listed the warning signs of an unhealthy or abusive relationship, including jealousy, not accepting ‘no’ for an answer, pressuring or manipulating, and constantly texting or calling someone.
“Monitoring and checking up on someone are the warning signs of stalking,” Nason said. “I think physical abuse and stalking are beyond the warning signs.”
The conversation continued as Nason described relationship pitfalls that are sometimes overlooked.
“It can be hard for someone to assess what’s normal … when they haven’t had a relationship before,” she said. “That’s where friends come in. Sometimes people get so accustomed to abuse that they don’t see it.”
Carey mentioned her own experience with an abused friend.
“If I didn’t speak up, I was allowing it to happen,” she said.
If legal action is necessary in an abusive situation, there are Protection from Abuse and Protection from Harassment orders. A PFA is available to victims of sexual assault, victims of stalking and dating partners regardless of sexual orientation.
A PFA orders an abuser to stop threatening, abusing or harming, or contacting the victim, as well as ordering him or her to stay away from the home or work place of the victim. On the other hand, a PFA is an option for someone who has been harassed by any other person, such as a neighbor.
On Thursday of Pride Week, UMaine welcomed Jennifer Finney Boylan — an author, a Colby College professor and a transgender woman.
Boylan shared the message that while life is difficult in the beginning, “things usually get better.”
“There’s the problem people have when being our allies … transgender doesn’t refer to any one [type of person]. Twelve people may disagree who all identify as transgendered,” Boylan said.
Boylan described the four main types of transgendered people, the first being transsexual people, like herself.
“Transsexual people are born physically as one sex and have the sense of being the other,” she said. “In some people, the brain sex doesn’t match the physical sex. [Brain sex] has a neurological, medical basis. Anybody could be born with it — even you.
“When you’re a little kid, you’d feel like something was wrong with you. It hurts in a way you can’t express,” she elaborated. “If you tell people, they will laugh.”
The second type of person who would fall under the category of transgendered would be a drag queen or king, such as “a gay man who dresses like Cher.”
“A drag makes a theatrical show out of genders for us to enjoy,” she said.
Boylan clarified, though, that a drag queen does not necessarily want to be a woman.
Cross-dressers are another type of transgendered person. They are usually a “heterosexual guy who dresses up as a woman for a variety of reasons, [because] it’s fun or sometimes [as] a sexual fetish.”
“Cross-dressers get no respect, by the way,” she said.
The fourth type of transgendered person, according to Boylan, is gender-queer people who do not necessarily identify with one gender or the other.
“Gender-queer people are saying that we should all be able to be more fluid — to change our expression based on our emotion,” Boylan said.
As a child, Boylan always had a sense of being in the wrong body. She remembers being little and watching her mother iron her father’s shirt.
“Someday you’ll wear shirts like this,” Boylan recalled her mother saying.
“I didn’t understand what she was getting at. She never wore shirts like that,” Boylan read from her book, “She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.”
“Why would I ever be wearing shirts like my father’s? Since then, the awareness that I was in the wrong body … was never out of my conscious mind.
“I didn’t want to be a freak,” Boylan said. “I just wanted to be a woman and move on with my life.”
Pride Week activities continued on Thursday night. “A Jihad for Love,” a documentary on Islam and homosexuality showing several gay men and lesbian women who are struggling between two of the most important aspects of their lives, was shown in Room 100 of the Donald P. Corbett Business Building.
As an audience member put it during the discussion after the film, “Religion comes before everything else” for Muslims. Living in the Middle East, there is a constant reminder of Allah and faith. The faithful are called to prayer five times a day and even greetings mention Allah.
This creates an inner struggle that every person in the documentary dealt with. They all wanted to know why Allah made them the way they are. The Quran has only two verses referring to homosexuality; they say acting on it — not simply being gay — is forbidden.
“Islam has a big problem acknowledging homosexuality. It will take a Jihad,” said one man in the film.
The people in the documentary all lived in fear that they would be discovered. One man received 100 lashes in one hour after his sexuality was discovered. When his mother saw his back, she cried. For that reason, he left the country.
The man in the beginning of the film was asked to leave his community, and at the end he was asked to return to speak about homosexuality. The people with whom he spoke were open and receptive to what he was saying, which made one audience member happy that there was a give-and-take conversation about it.
“We have to use independent reasoning to find space for us in Islam,” he said.
Pride Week had many different events in hopes of appealing to everyone in UMaine’s diverse population.
As Boylan put it, “The human experience can come in many flavors. Nature is abundant in variety. There are cactuses, and platypuses, and blue potatoes. And lobsters. And humans … including me.”
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