The University of Maryland, College Park, student newspaper did a  story on  ‘out’ , foreign, students/staff on campus to catch a glimpse of the myriad issues they face.

Queering AND Browning the campus..huh?
The overall response was pretty positive. The only negativity I heard of was that one staff member in the department was overheard saying what is the need of such issues to be on the front page …. I guess the question is the answer in itself.
But without further ado, let me engage in shameless self-promotion by posting the article:

Comfort away from home

Campus an easier place to be gay for foreign students

Coming out of the closet in the United States meant more to
sixth-year graduate student Ayush Gupta than facing the social backlash
and stigmas that threaten many young gay Americans. He feared that if
his superiors opposed homosexuality, he could lose funding for his
graduate research position and have to return to his native India, and
the subsequent task of explaining to his parents that he is gay.

Talking to his parents would not be easy, as some Indian families
exert pressure on their sons and daughters to marry early and start
families, Gupta said. Though his parents were accepting of his
sexuality, Gupta said others haven’t had such a painless experience.

“It does become an act of courage to actually go in and talk,” Gupta said.

Some international students at the university find that moving to
College Park makes it easier to be openly gay. Freed from what they
consider cultural and social restraints at home, moving overseas to
attend school in this area exposes them to openly gay people and allows
them to think about their sexuality miles away from family pressure.

“It was much easier coming out in this country,” Gupta said. “I
could actually mull over a lot of things without the presence of my
family.”

A person’s family, surroundings and societal attitudes toward gays
can play a significant role in how comfortable they are with coming
out, said Luke Jensen, director of the campus’ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
and Transgender Equity Office.

“There’s this tension between sexual identity and national identity
that can really complicate the experience a person has,” Jensen said.

Different cultures have varying attitudes toward sexuality and
homosexuality that can potentially complicate a person’s coming out
experience, Jensen said. Some formerly colonized nations, including
some in Africa and South Asia, believe that homosexuality is an
unhealthy phenomenon inherited from their Western colonizers. Other
nations, such as some Latin cultures, have firm beliefs in patriarchy
where men cannot be perceived as feminine.

In India, there is technically a word that means gay but it is not
widely used, said Naresh Cuntor, a Ph.D. electrical engineering student
from Bangalore, India. The lack of terminology made it harder to talk
to his mother, he said.

“‘I don’t like girls’ is pretty much all you can say, and you really
can’t elaborate too much because it’s your mother,” he said. “It was
awkward.”

Although Cuntor realized he was gay at around age 13, he couldn’t
put a word to his feelings until he watched a gay-themed movie about
two years later.

Gupta said he had not even heard the word ‘gay’ until he got to
college. In Calcutta, India, where he grew up, there were not many
openly gay people and he was not exposed to gay culture.

For Gupta, coming to the campus for graduate studies was liberating.

“It gives you courage you to see other people who are open,” Gupta said.

However, even having the proper terms does not make embracing
homosexuality completely easy. Shiva Sivagami, coordinator of Office of
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equity, who is from India, said
when she immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, it was hard to
identify with the lesbian label.

“The labels, to me, that was very white,” Sivagami said. “None of it
reflected my experience. When I first heard the word ‘lesbian,’ the
only lesbians I knew were white women.”

“The labels are a big part of the problem,” she went on. “The labels
signify lifestyle; for a lot of people it may be a stereotyped notion
of life.”

She said that because the public LGBT community is predominately white, it can be difficult for people of color to find a niche.

“They wanted me to leave my race at the door and just be gay,”
Sivagami said. Conversely, “[The South Asian community] wanted me to
leave my sexual orientation at the door and just be Asian.”

However, increased exposure to homosexuality usually helps students,
including Gupta, Cuntor and fourth year graduate civil engineering
student Roger Chen.

Chen said he was rarely exposed to homosexuality while growing up
with his parents, who immigrated from Taiwan in the late 1960s.
Although Chen has not told his parents he is gay, he has tried to drop
hints and get them acclimated to the idea by talking about cousins who
are gay and watching Will & Grace with them.

“Will & Grace is easiest way to do it,” he said. “It would definitely help if we had some gay Asian figures out there.”

Fifth-year graduate computer science student Ruggero Morselli said
coming to campus made coming out more reassuring because he hadn’t met
an openly gay person in his native Modeno, a city in northern Italy.

“I think what actually made the difference for me when [I] moved
here on campus, there were many more openly gay students and
homosexuality seems largely accepted,” he said. “That’s why I decided
to come out of the closet. Maybe if I ended up working a job in Kansas,
that environment would not have helped,” Morselli said.

Jensen said varying prejudices among religious and ethnic
communities within the United States affect how people experience their
sexual orientation.

“It’s very important that when you talk about these global or
international terms that you not assume that coming to the U.S. is the
solution to everyone’s problems. You don’t want to suggest that
homophobia happens [only] there,” said English professor Marilee
Lindemann, director of the LGBT studies program.

Although homosexuality isn’t widely accepted in India, male bonding
is often more acceptable, Gupta said. Many people don’t blink an eye if
two men hold hands or hug.

If fifth-year engineering graduate student Ayan Roy-Chowdhury, who
is also from Calcutta, India, were to go back to India now, he might be
able to hold his partner’s hand, but not in a way “that would convey
that you are more than just friends.”

Some people in India hold the notion that homosexuality was imported
from their Western European colonizers, Gupta said. But in ancient
India, homosexuality was often accepted. There is a similar situation
in some African cultures, Jensen said.

Gupta said he is optimistic that attitudes in his country — as in
many nations all over the world — are changing for the better. While
the campus has a relatively gay-friendly atmosphere as compared with
some schools in the region, some improvements can still be made, Jensen
said. Sivagami said she is working to make LGBT groups address the
issues of minorities, including international students.

Gupta suggested that academic departments post visible gay-friendly
signs available from LGBT organizations so students won’t fear their
academic surroundings are homophobic.

“Having a supportive environment is not enough if that support is invisible,” Gupta said.

Recently there was a workshop on “Social Justice from Classroom to Community”.
One of the guest speakers was Omecongo (www.omecongo.com)
In the questions round, I asked “How can we bring activism to our daily lives?”
His reply was awesome, and something that I have felt for long.
He asked us to be aware of social justice issues by informing ourselves using a variety of
sources, books, news, articles, web-sources etc. And he said that we should confront
issues within our minute circles. Even within our small circle of friends/family we might hear
words of hate/bigotry/discrimination every once in a while. We need to confront those
and bring greater understanding to those close to us … that itself is activism.

The need for speaking up and speaking out is huge.
Here is a recent article on Washington Blade on LGBT activism by Peter Rosenstein :

Activist isn’t a
new ‘A’ word
Gay Americans enjoying their quiet lives should not forget they owe that quiet to a generation of loud activists.
Friday, December 02, 2005

I HAVE ALWAYS thought of myself as a concerned citizen, rather than a gay activist.
But I seemed to become one last year when a column I wrote for the Blade was used
in TV ads to smear a Democrat running for U.S. Senate last year in Oklahoma.

The rampant anti-gay sentiment used by the Republican in that race to distort my words
in an effort to hurt the candidate I had complimented was a useful reminder to me how
much we still need our activists.

I always cringe when I hear gay people claim they don’t understand the need for activism.

We need our activists now more than ever before. We need them to remind both those
who hate us, those who claim to love us, and even those who are us, that we cannot safely
go about pretending that we are just like everyone else, with all the same civil and human
rights.

It will be these activists about which some complain so much who will get us to that happy
day when GLBT people really can go about living our lives in quiet and ordinary ways.

I APPLAUD THE work of gay and lesbian activists for bringing to the attention of the world
the intolerance that we must still face. We cannot just turn the other cheek and pretend
the insults, large and small, don’t affect us.

Prejudice cannot simply be swept under the carpet, or back into the closet. To argue that
out and vocal GLBT activists are the problem, not the solution, is like wishing
African Americans could hide their skin color so we wouldn’t have to deal with the
reality of racism.

The world isn’t always a friendly place, and it’s the activists that hold our feet to the
fire and remind us of this every day. Let us never forget that the only reason that some
GLBT Americans can now go about living their lives quietly is because of the drag queens
at Stonewall and those courageous gays who marched in the early Gay Pride parades while
so many others, including me, stood and hid behind trees as we watched the parade go by.

I WAS 34 BEFORE I came out even though I grew up in Manhattan where gays were, of course,
rampant. I knew there was homophobia because I heard my parents’ friends talk about fags while
playing bridge every Wednesday.

Those friends were shocked years later when my mother explained to them that those nice gentlemen
from next door who for 10 years joined their bridge game were “fags” of the type they always complained
about.

Only two years ago, I worked with a principal who was threatened by some parents for allowing a
gay-straight alliance in his school. How can we allow parents to send their gay children to “ex-gay”
camps yet still feel that we need not be vocal in challenging such bigotry?

Those who would denigrate our activists lack an understanding of history. Without activists, so many
more gays would be beaten and bludgeoned, both physically and mentally, by the bullies next door.

As I found out from my experience as an accidental activist in Oklahoma, some of those bullies are
today in control of the Republican Party. These activists from the religious right don’t shy from
pushing their worldview, and neither should we. Our own activists must counter these attacks by
standing up and speaking out.

I learned from my parents about the dangers of staying quiet and fitting in. They came to the United
States to escape the Nazis. They taught me that assimilating into the American way of life does not
mean giving up our identity. Instead, we must remain vigilant, and become an activist when necessary
to fight for our civil and human rights, and the rights of others.