GSA Mondays: A New School Year Is Time For An AGENDA!

Hi, and welcome back to this school-year weekly blog feature, GSA Mondays! We're going to be doing a lot of different things with this Gay-Straight Alliance Club Monday slot, but to start us off, I'd suggest that every group take a meeting to discuss what kind of club you want to be.

There are many options:

A Safe Space Support Group - a tight group of GLBTQ students and their allies, focused more internally and on helping each other through life's (and school's) ups and downs.

An Advocacy Group - reaching out about gay equality issues to other communities in the school and beyond, trying to change hearts and minds. (Like papering campus with a Famous-Gay-Person-From-History-A-Day flyer campaign.)

A Performative Group - staging events that focus attention on GLBTQ achievements and highlighting the talents within the club. (Like a poetry slam.)

A Discussion Group - watching movies, youtube videos, everyone reading the same book, and having great discussions about it. (Like a new millenium Gay Teen Book Club.)

A Current Events Analysis Group - taking stories from the news, things in our culture (like reality TV shows and how they treat Gay contestants, see here) and talking about them.

A Contest-Generating Group - launch a poetry comptetition, or a logo contest, and make it school-wide.

An Allies-Standing-Up Roundup Group - focusing on getting as many Allies as possible to pledge their support for the GSA in your school. (Signatures on a petition statement?)

A Mentoring Group - where you go in teams to make presentations to kids in other schools (maybe the middle school you went to?) about there being a GSA in your school, why that's important, and what it means to you.

A Party Group - from pot-luck lunches to pizza and music, plan gatherings to celebrate being together and being free to be ourselves. Is there a GSA Prom you can organize or participate in?



... Or some combination of these.

Perhaps you'll opt for a monthly movie screening/pizza party, with the balance of the meetings being a safe space support group, and you want to organize one big Allies-standing up roundup project for October's Gay History Month celebration.

It's kind of like a menu, where you get to make your GSA agenda what YOU want it to be.

So sit down with your GSA Club, and talk about all the options.

As always, if you don't have a real-world GSA that you're part of, you can treat this blog community as your virtual GSA (we have over 8,000 "members" a month!). So, tell me in comments - what do YOU want this GSA Club - Our GSA Monday Group - to be?


ps- I found the Gay Uncle Sam Image here!