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By Chris Bucoy Brown  The winner of this year's Outstanding Alumni Club award was honored at Charter Banquet in March for its involvement with current Berkeley students, impressive scholarship fundraising efforts, and ability to reach out to recent graduates and generate ongoing enthusiasm about the alumni community. The recognition is all the more impressive given that the club is UCGALA--the special interest group for gay and lesbian alumni--which faced an uphill battle even to get their club charter from a hesitant CAA Board of Directors more than a decade ago. "There were a certain number of alumni who didn't want it," says Darek DeFreece '93, current chair of UCGALA. "I think the gay and lesbian club was perceived as a political movement, rather than a social group." Despite the initial resistance, a group of persistent alums eventually convinced the Association that a gay and lesbian club was both appropriate and vital to reflecting the diversity of Berkeley's alumni, and the charter was granted in 1988. The difficulty the club experienced in gaining recognition and respect was reflective of the climate for gay students at Berkeley in the 1980s. As a CAA student employee throughout his four years at Cal, DeFreece, who now sits on the CAA Board of Directors, had a front-row seat during UCGALA's controversial beginnings. "I was answering the phones [at Alumni House] in the fall of 1989," he remembers, "and I watched the gay alumni club start to exert its influence, start to create the change that I enjoy today as a member of the CAA Board." The club's early activities were centered on a series of lectures by scholars in the new interdisciplinary field of gay and lesbian studies. "We invited important gay historians, sociologists, and psychologists," says club member Jeffrey Dickeman, Ph.D. '58, one of UCGALA's founders and himself a retired professor of anthropology. As its membership grew, the club initiated more traditional social activities, including Big Game parties, Napa wine-tasting tours, and an annual holiday party. And while UCGALA may have originally been an acronym, the club has now explicitly broadened its scope to include people of all shades of gender and sexual orientation: lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered. Until recently, openly gay students were considered to be on the fringe of the student body. "In my years, you were either very out and very 'queer' or you were very closeted," says DeFreece, who describes himself as having been "questioning" of his sexual orientation while in school. Similarly, many members of UCGALA were not out at the time they attended the University--especially the more senior members of the club, the eldest of whom is in his seventies. This is less the case for younger UCGALA members. These were students of a "queer" generation: They benefited from a decade that saw gay civil rights issues, such as the debate over gay marriage and homosexuality in the military, at the forefront of the nation's political discourse. "Coming out of the closet" became part of the country's vernacular as gay celebrities began publicly disclosing their sexuality, and network television began airing programs with prominent gay characters. Gay and lesbian students at Berkeley became much more visible, and they created a vibrant and diverse network of organizations and services for themselves. At the same time, the CAA Board began to develop a more open attitude toward gay and lesbian alumni. In 1989, Dickeman was honored with a leadership award for establishing the club's first scholarship. Dickeman, who was a lesbian woman at the time of the award but now lives as a man, broke a long-standing silence in getting the program off the ground. "I had to go to the scholarship office and ask, 'Would you accept a scholarship for gays?' I can't tell you how nervous I was," he says. "No one had ever talked about gays in that context. I was scared to death." Helping current students remains a focus of the club, and UCGALA now provides three $1,500 scholarship awards each year to student leaders in the gay and lesbian community. "Many people are here just to support the scholarship financially," DeFreece says of the club's generous donors. "We have almost 80 percent participation from members." Alumni of more closeted classes are particularly eager to contribute in order to encourage pride and leadership among today's gay and lesbian students. One of the 2002 scholarship winners, Justin Wong '03, says he had a difficult time coming to terms with his own sexuality while at Berkeley. "I wasn't out to myself," he says. "I became very depressed. I was losing a lot of weight, starving myself. I had to do a medical withdrawal one semester because I just couldn't function." After coming out to his mother and improving both his mental and physical health, Wong returned to campus and began participating in gay student organizations. In order to apply for the UCGALA scholarship, he decided to become more involved in a leadership role--and it paid off. Wong appreciated the money, he says, but the recognition was just as important: "It's always nice to have someone single you out and say, 'The work you're doing is important, and we want to help you continue to do that.'" Many UCGALA members also act as mentors to offer support and guidance to current students. Wong developed a mentoring relationship with a gay alum through CAA's Student- Alumni Mentorship Program. "He was also a teacher and, since I'm interested in education, it was a good fit," says Wong. DeFreece says that the club's informal networking also works well. "I was contacted by a student who said he was going into law," says DeFreece, himself an attorney. "I helped him find a guy who's a senior partner at an environmental law firm, and I set up an interview. That, to me, is a mentorship relationship." As successful as UCGALA has been at building ties with current students, the club still faces challenges in creating connections with other groups--namely, women and people of color. Less than ten percent of the club is made up of lesbian women, which is a cause of concern for the club's leadership. "When we award the scholarships, we find dynamic women leaders on campus," says a puzzled DeFreece. "There are powerful gay women who are graduating from Cal." But, to date, the club has failed to enlist these women as members. The club's leadership also expresses concern about the club's racial and ethnic diversity. "Most of our membership is white," says DeFreece, who notes that five out of six members on the steering committee are white men. But the club is actively pursuing members of other backgrounds. "If I were to say there was a 'growth area,' it is definitely the Asian segment. It's hugely important, because the largest [racial] group at Cal is Asian, and any alumni club should mirror what's going on on campus." In its efforts to reach out to Asian Americans and other communities of color, UCGALA has co-sponsored a social with Cal Q&A, the gay and lesbian Asian student group, which is headed by Wong. UCGALA's challenges for the future all center on one question: How does an alumni club whose membership is uniquely diverse--crossing several generations, different ethnic groups, gay men, lesbian women, and transgendered members--continue to serve its diverse needs and interests? By providing the same variety of social and service opportunities that other alumni clubs offer and by remaining one of the most dynamic, forward-looking, and gay clubs in the CAA. Chris Bucoy Brown '96 is the managing editor of Noodle, a magazine for gay Asian and Pacific Islander men. |
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