How two LGBTQ Penn grads have used their degrees to help the LGBTQ community

Penn alumni who identify as LGBTQ pursue careers in a diverse array of fields. The Daily Pennsylvanian caught up with two alumni who have used their Penn education to work toward improving conditions for the LGBTQ community.

Kelly Kroehle, 2010 School of Social Policy & Practice graduate

Kelly Kroehle grew up in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, and attended the University of Wisconsin in their undergraduate years. During college, they worked at a homeless shelter, which in part drove them to major in social work, as well as women’s studies with a certificate in LGBTQ studies.

The homeless shelter that Kroehle worked at showed a “lack of interest on behalf of the institution to actually curb homelessness,” they said. “Like I find in a lot of nonprofits, they rely on the problem to continue funding streams; they don’t actually engage in any structural change or any self-reflection because they need homeless people to keep happening.

“It’s a sickness that I see all over the place,” they remarked.

Kroehle decided to apply to graduate school for social work in order to participate in the “systems-level conversation” instead of remaining in direct-service work, which led them to attend Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice.

Currently, Kroehle works as the director of The Bryson Institute at The Attic Youth Center. The Attic is based in Philadelphia and “is in large part a social-services community space for queer young people,” Kroehle said. Services include support groups, a counseling program and the provision of activism internships.

The Bryson Institute aims to train individuals, groups and organizations on how to create and maintain more inclusive spaces for the LGBTQ community and, in particular, LGBTQ youth.

“What I’ve been able to do at The Attic is work directly with the young people who come there — to collaborate with them on how to fix the sickness of the institutions that serve them,” Kroehle said. “So looking at embedded heterosexism, cissexism, racism and adultism in schools, child welfare and juvenile justice.”

Kroehle conducts two to three training sessions in an average week. “It’s interesting because I didn’t come to The Attic anticipating or thinking that I would be doing public speaking, and now I can talk to 250 homophobes and feel okay,” they said.

In addition to their work at The Bryson Institute, Kroehle writes for Everyday Feminism. They are also working with Senior Associate Director of Penn’s LGBT Center Erin Cross, along with a number of other organizations such as SP2, to “begin to think about the role of gender and sexuality in Penn education and graduate programs. How does Penn as an institution — particularly its grad schools — really reflect its verbalized commitment to [diversity of] gender and sexuality?”

“The goal of any diversity initiative should be to eliminate the need for diversity as, otherwise, control is never ceded,” Kroehle said.

Chris Nguyen, 2001 Perelman School of Medicine graduate

Chris Nguyen, who immigrated to the United States at six, grew up in Orange County, Calif.

Nguyen wasn’t out in high school. “For me, high school was a really difficult time because I was struggling with my own sexuality. And I just didn’t want to think about my sexuality because to think about my sexuality, I’d have to think about why I was so attracted to my male friends,” he said.

After high school, he attended UCLA, where he majored in molecular, cell and developmental biology. He came out in his last year, noting, “I was 22, and I think you can only hide who you are for so long before it just doesn’t hold in anymore.”

He recalled how his friends dropped hints questioning his sexuality and now says he was in a glass closet. “You feel safe behind the barrier but everyone can look in,” he said. “That’s a statement that many gay people experience because they think they’re hiding, but they’re really only hiding from themselves.”

Once he moved to Philadelphia for medical school, he was able to more fully explore his sexuality, especially with the support of the LGBT Center, Penn Medicine and the vibrant LGBT community present on campus. Nguyen noted that a surprising number of students in his year at the medical school were queer, as well as within the medical school as a whole.

After completing his medical residency in San Francisco, Nguyen began working for the San Francisco Department of Public Health and currently serves as the Medical Director for the Castro Mission Health Center. “Most of our patients come from one of two neighborhoods — the Castro or the Mission. In the Castro, we have a huge LGBT community, so that’s a huge bulk of our patients,” Nguyen said. “We also have a large number of monolingual Spanish-speaking Latino patients from the Mission district.”

Despite the bureaucratic tendencies associated with public healthcare and the slow rate of change, Nguyen said he embraces the chance to help the Castro Mission Health Clinic provide care for his own community — the LGBTQ community — as well as other disadvantaged, often ignored groups.

Before arriving at the Castro Mission Health Center, Nguyen worked at the Tom Waddell Urban Health Clinic, which serves a large homeless population. “I don’t know that I could ever work in a private practice because I would miss the level of complexity that comes with working with that patient population and the feeling that you’re actually doing good for a segment of the patient population that is frankly ignored,” he said.

Nguyen emphasized how grateful he is for the environment he experienced at Penn. “Penn was such a formative time for me. I could not be more grateful for the LGBT Center, Bob Schoenberg and the support I got from the medical school and the administration and faculty there,” he said.

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