Revecca Millan, a fourth-year biology student, has always been
supportive of her sister’s bisexuality, attending lectures
and speeches at various lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
conferences, including the Los Angeles Queer Studies Conference on
Friday and Saturday.
What she got out of the conference was more insight into her
sister’s obstacles and a perspective into the realm of human
sexuality.
“Listening to my sister talk about discrimination opens up
another view, myself being not only a female but a lower-class,
Hispanic minority, and then seeing all those things in my sister
and her being bisexual on top of that,” Millan said.
The conference, held at Royce Hall on Saturday and the USC
Center for Feminist Research on Friday, targeted issues regarding
different types of sexuality.
It aimed to showcase both local issues about bodies, space and
sexuality in Los Angeles, as well as topics within a global
frame.
More than 60 speakers, composed of university professors and
graduate students, came to speak about various subjects concerning
LGBT studies, ranging from human sexuality in the 1950s to
“coming out” on top of being an ethnic minority, to
visual art promoting non-heterosexual lifestyles.
David Eng, an English literature professor at Rutgers University
and a speaker at the conference, discussed the influence of
Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck
down a Texas anti-sodomy statute as unconstitutional.
“The case is … an unmitigated victory for gays’
and lesbians’ freedoms, rights to privacy and
liberation,” Eng said.
Though UCLA has held LGBT conferences for the past six years,
they were aimed specifically toward graduate student speakers,
coining the name QGrad.
Last year, however, a separate event at USC called QFac for
professors was added in association with the UCLA event.
This year was the first time both professors and graduate
students were invited to speak at both campuses to “create a
conversation between two different generations to talk to one
another concerning their work,” said James Schultz, German
professor and director of the UCLA LGBT Studies Program.
As one of the organizers for the event, Schultz believes what
separates this event from other academic conferences is its
emphasis on LGBT studies, a topic he believes is rarely
discussed.
“The study of sexuality and gender is an important part of
human life in almost every aspect of human culture and that’s
why we study it, because we want to know about human culture and
history,” Schultz said.
Stacy MacÃas, the LGBT studies program assistant, hopes the
curriculum and the conference is able to bring to the community
updates and innovations in the field and stimulate interest in the
subject.
“It offers the community at large opportunities to hear
what’s new, interesting and of critical importance to the
field of queer studies ““ to hear what people are writing on,
what research people are pursuing, what sort of new ideas and
critiques are emerging, what professors and students are molding to
help the field continue to build,” MacÃas said.
The Saturday events at UCLA were co-sponsored by the UCLA
Graduate Division, the Division of Humanities, the Division of
Social Sciences, the Chicano Studies Research Center and the Center
for Women & Men, and was open to the public.
Anayvette Martinez, a UCLA alumnus in Chicana/o studies and
graduate student at San Francisco State University, attended the
weekend events.
She said that because the field is so marginalized, being a
“queer woman of color,” there’s a gap to be
filled, and that she has a responsibility and obligation to speak
through her story to help women of color and the queer
community.
“Hearing the lecturers, I feel like there’s someone
up there who feels like me, which is really empowering to me and to
my work.
“What you gain from going to the conference is you leave
with a large body of knowledge of the queer community ““
what’s happening in our streets, in our homes. We’re
talking about those issues and sending it to the academy and saying
this is important to talk about,” Martinez said.