In the lobby of the newly-opened Gender and Sexuality Center (GSC), adorned with rainbow ribbons and filled with people wearing buttons stating their pronouns, students and community members gathered for the center’s grand opening on Wednesday, Oct.15. The ceremony celebrated the one-year anniversary of the center’s founding and fell during National Coming Out Week. The GSC is affiliated with the Intercultural Center (ICC), though it is located near the Rape Crisis Center (RCC) and the Queer Resources Center (QRC) in Usdan.
Felix Tunador is the current gender and sexuality coordinator at the ICC, working alongside four student administrative assistants to create a space filled with resources about gender and sexuality. Tunador is the one professional in charge of the GSC.
As a sophomore, Molly Gimbel ’16, one of the student administrative assistants for the center, served on the task force that proposed creating a center and hiring a full-time professional to manage the center. They saw a need for a full-time position, instead of the part-time position often held by graduate students, to give students the time and resources they needed to discuss gender and sexuality. Finding time to meet with the program coordinator at the ICC was, before the creation of the GSC, much too difficult.
“We recognized that there was a real lack of time in this person’s day,” Gimbel said of the gender and sexuality coordinator at the ICC. “It was really hard to get very many things accomplished because there wasn’t a lot of time that [they] could spend with … students,” they said.
The GSC is separate from the QRC, which serves more as a counseling center, with students trained by outside professionals to advise other students on matters of gender and sexuality, and the GSC is designed as a community meeting space. “The Gender and Sexuality Center is a center. It’s a space for people to come and hang out. There’s a library in the space, and you’re able to take books out of there. A lot of clubs meet in these spaces.” Gimbel explained.
Before the GSC was formed, it was just a space with white walls and old carpeting. Now, as Gimbel described, it has been transformed into a dynamic and welcoming space for all members of the Brandeis community.
“It’s almost unreal to see this space,” Gimbel said.“It’s filled with people, it’s filled with life, it feels like it’s breathed in. It’s just such an amazing thing to see because it wasn’t this when we started. It wasn’t this space. It’s really evolved, and I think it’s something that so special and so important.”
Julian Kal Rasku, a new employee at the Brandeis mailroom, went to the GSC opening after being referred by a member of the Women, Gender and Sexuality department. He believes that having a center like the GSC will be eye-opening for the Brandeis campus “I think it will be a good milestone, a good place to start, to gain an understanding as a campus” he said. “The fact that it does state gender and sexuality, both of those, is pretty huge I think.”
The GSC is currently workshopping a program that would be similar to the allies training the ICC offers. Allies training focuses on the support and awareness that allies can provide the LGBT community in a three-hour program offered several times each year. The GSC is calling their program “Safe Zone” training, though they have no specifics at this point yet.
