LGBT Center leaves Friday to go to the Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference, or MBLGTACC.
It’s not everyday more than 2,000 individuals gather to learn and celebrate LGBTQIA identities.
The LGBT Center is headed out on Friday morning to the Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference, or MBLGTACC, with about 25 students, faculty and staff from Ohio University’s Athens campus as well as the university’s Zanesville campus.
The conference features speakers, workshops and networking opportunities for people from all around the country. This year the conference will be held at Illinois State University and will feature speakers such as Laverne Cox, transgender activist and cast member of the show Orange is the New Black, and Kit Yan, queer and transgender slam poet who also made a visit last year to OU for the LGBT Center’s Queer Studies Conference.
Delfin Bautista, director of the LGBT Center, said some worries of everyday life for LGBT individuals change at the conferences.
“(One of the differences at MBLGTACC is) not having to worry about dynamics of restrooms, knowing that names and pronouns are not an afterthought but at the forefront,” Bautista said.
Bautista said a majority of those going on the trip are undergraduate students.
The registration fee for individuals was $100 or $60 for those who completed an “early bird registration.” For those who wanted to go who could not afford the fee, the LGBT Center raised funds through the Amateur Drag Show in January, where students could volunteer their time to earn funds toward the trip.
Daniel Warner, a senior studying psychology and a project coordinator for the LGBT Center, organized the drag show and is also helping coordinate the trip to MBLGTACC.
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Warner said the educational opportunities this trip provides could impact projects in the future. In fact, Warner said he decided the topic of his capstone project based on a workshop he attended at a past conference.
This will be the third time that Warner is attending MBLGTACC.
“This time I’m especially excited because I am going to be the most well-versed in topics,” Warner said. “I will be attending workshops that may facilitate that sort of discussion to try to utilize the research that I’m doing right now at MBLGTACC.”
For Stefan Koob, a first-year student studying film and Women’s Gender and Sexuality studies, will be attending the conference for the first time. He said he’s excited to drive one of the vans and be in a space with more perspectives to learn from.
“I do hope that people branch out and when we reconvene later that we can share with each other everything that we’ve learned from all of the different workshops that we’ve gone to,” Warner said.
Wanting to engage the regional campuses as well as students here at OU, Bautista hopes everybody can take away something from the conference to bring back to campus after the trip is over.
“It’s an opportunity to be one Bobcat family, and this case, a rainbow Bobcat family,” Bautista said.
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