Just in time for LGBT History Month, Penn alumni and authors Audrey Beth Stein and Tom Mendicino — who write lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender-genre literature — held a book reading and discussion at the Penn Bookstore Monday night.
Stein and Mendicino’s discussion represented a capstone to this past weekend’s Penn Spectrum diversity conference which featured Asian, black and Latino forums and speakers. The conference was unique in its inclusion of the LGBT community, according to Bob Schoenberg, event moderator and director of Penn’s LGBT Center, which joined with the Spectrum conference in sponsoring the event.
“There have been other diversity conferences at Ivy League colleges that have not included LGBT,” Schoenberg said. “It’s another measure of how progressive Penn is.”
Nestled in an upstairs corner of the bookstore, the gathering began with readings and discussion of Stein’s autobiographical memoir Map and Mendicino’s novel Probation. Formality quickly dissolved as the question-and-answer session became an open discussion between the authors and the few but very vocal attendees.
Stein and Mendicino, 1997 and 1976 College graduates, respectively, voiced their opinions on the ever-evolving LGBT community at Penn. Both alumni said that while students may seem out and proud today, they remember very different experiences.
For Mendicino, “there really wasn’t a community.” He added that even in “the era of David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust,” when bisexuality was an open topic, “you didn’t want to cross that boundary and say you were gay.”
Even in the late 1990s, Stein said, Penn’s LGBT community consisted of “a handful of maybe 10 very-out people.”
“It was very political,” Stein said. “I didn’t feel connected to that.”
By contrast, Penn now has several LGBT student organizations — some broad, others very specific — such as a group exclusively for Wharton graduate students.
Schoenberg even described the class of 2014 as the most happily inclusive and integrated group of students he’s seen thus far.
The event was deemed an overall success by both the organizers and the featured authors.
“Every opportunity there is for impressionable young gay men and women to feel they are a part of something larger than themselves is important,” Mendicino said. “I think it’s terrific.”
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