Delfin Bautista, after a semester of transition, is ready to go into Spring Semester as director of Ohio University’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center.
Bautista, who moved to Ohio from Miami, has taken this past semester to adjust and adapt to OU. Getting the word out has been a priority, Bautista said, so that people in Athens know that the LGBT Center is there as a resource, whether physically, in newsletters or through events.
“This past semester being my first semester on the job was a learning experience, settling into the university, settling into the job, learning about the community, learning campus culture and then finding ways for the Center to plug in, to continue to do the work that [the Center] had been doing, and then to find new ways and new things that the Center could do,” Bautista said.
Bautista said the Center is going to be plugging into different resources on campus, adding that coming out, and the process and support behind it, will also be a focus in the semester’s programming.
“I’m all for not reinventing the wheel and over-programming,” Bautista said. “My hope for this semester is to see what’s happening on campus and how the Center can support and plug into efforts that (different programs) are doing, and finding ways that we can partner with them in order to expand the audience that they engage and to provide a more inclusive perspective.”
Spreading the word and pride about LGBT life on campus is one goal the Center hopes it can accomplish, Bautista said, and is excited for “the spring and for the adventure that it will be.”
“My hope is that the impact that we’re having is showing that LGBT people do not exist in a bubble or in a vacuum, that we are everywhere,” Bautista said. “We are in the School of Medicine, we’re in School of Business and we’re in the STEM fields. We are everywhere and we bring who we are, our LGBT identities, to those fields and find ways to queer them up, wanting to show that our identities intersect with other parts of who we are. We are not only LGBT people.”
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