Panel focuses on LGBT issues

Sharing their own personal stories and involvement in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues and its relation to the black community, four panelists answered questions about identity yesterday, in front of an audience of about 35 listeners.

"What I'd like to share is my story," said Derrick Anderson, a panelist and Eastern Michigan University student. "There was no place for me to go or even ask questions about my sexuality."

Anderson, like many of the panelists, is an HIV and AIDS activist in both the black and gay communities in the state of Michigan. After sharing his own experience with the issues of AIDS and homosexuality, he read a poem he wrote titled, "My Communi

JEREMY MENCHIK/Daily Panelists discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues and the black community yesterday at the School of Education Building.

ty Has AIDS."

"My silence will only destroy me," Anderson read. "Although I know my community would prefer I stay silent."

Panelist Kenneth Jones, an LSA senior, also began speaking by mentioning silence in his life. "I am the voice that has been made silent by my own community," he said.

Other members of the panel included N'Tanya Lee, a historian and community activist and Sharon Miles, a "heterosexual ally" of the LGBT community.

"As humans, we should be here for each other without the fear of being targeted," Miles said. "Nobody should walk the face of this earth alone."

Miles interacted with the audience to engage them in how it feels to be an ally to someone. Afterwards, many audience members shared their own personal accounts of allies in their lives.

Many of the panelists and audience members asserted how important it was to have support not just by friends or family, but also from the community at large.

"We really need to investigate what it means to be family," Jones said. "As black folks we were never born as individuals, but were born into a group.... I think that's something that we've lost."

N'Tanya Lee also expressed many similar sentiments when she spoke of the importance of both LGBT issues and history.

"History is such a precious resource. So much of who we are, what we think of ourselves, what we think is possible for ourselves, what is possible in the world," Lee said. "Where are the black gay people in History?" she asked.

The panel was organized by Advanced Graduate student Dawn Richberg who is the program associate at the American Friends Service Community. She planned the event in honor of Black History Month with the University's LGBT office and All Us, an LGBT student of color group.

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