UPDATED: Sept. 27 at 9:17 a.m.

The LGBT Resource Center is more than just a community for LGBT students. It is also a reminder that students and administration can work together to break down barriers and create change, said Tiffany Gray, the director of the center.

“If that’s not an example of collaboration and breaking down barriers that sometimes exist, real or not real, between administrators and students, I don’t know what is,” Gray said.

Gray spoke at the LGBT Resource Center’s 15th Anniversary Celebration, hosted in the Comstock Room at the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel and Conference Center. For two hours, current students, alumni, administrators and faculty members mingled and ate as they listened to speakers recount the center’s history.

The room, decorated with banquet tables topped with napkins in rainbow colors, was festive as colleagues reconnected and students took photos in front of the selfie wall. The walls were decorated in a visual timeline, with posters, articles and mementos recognizing each year of the center.

Along with Gray, there were four other speakers: Jordan Potash, an SU alumnus who wrote the proposal to create the Rainbow Task Force in 1997; Barry Wells, then-senior vice president for student affairs in 1997, who worked with Potash; Adrea Jaehnig, the founding director of the resource center; and Maysam Seraji, a student staff member who presented the timeline and photo slideshow of the center.

Potash and Wells spoke about how there was a need for LGBT students to be represented on campus in the late 1990s.

“During my junior year, my mother joined the allies program at a small college that she was working at outside of Philadelphia,” Potash said. “And that got me thinking, that if a small college has such a great, supportive program, why doesn’t a large institution like Syracuse University have one?”

In March 1998, a few months after Potash sent in his proposal for the task force to Wells, a University Senate ad hoc committee was created, which reported that the community needed a physical location, a staff to work there and a permanent status for the ad hoc committee.

The chancellor approved the proposal, and the center officially opened on Oct. 1, 2001. It moved to its current location at 750 Ostrom Ave. in 2002. Now, 15 years later, SU is listed as one of eight universities that received a five-star status on the LGBT Campus Climate Index, Wells said.

Robin Riley, director of the LGBT studies program, said the SU campus is much more friendly to the LGBT community compared to 15 years ago, but there are still ways to go. She said there is a tendency to put one queer person on a committee and think that represents everyone, and that’s not true.

Riley added that one issue with the resource center is that it is not accessible to people with disabilities. She said she remembered that at an opening event, a woman in a wheelchair was unable to enter the house.

“It was heartbreaking, that she can’t access the place that’s probably so important to her,” Riley said.

Kristin Knaul, a sophomore mechanical engineering major, said she just started attending a couple of the discussion groups at the center this year, but her experience has been positive so far.

“Coming from where I’m from, there wasn’t a lot of places where I could be open, so I like how we have this place where we could be open. It makes it easier, being on campus,” Knaul said.

Jaehnig said the center wasn’t created alone, and it’s not just for LGBT students. It’s a place that brings people together in all areas of society, from gender, to sexuality to race.

“Students from other universities would come to the center and say ‘We don’t have what Syracuse has,’” Jaehnig said. “And I said ‘Syracuse didn’t have what Syracuse has.’ We worked together.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, Adrea Jaehnig’s name was misspelled. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on September 27, 2016 at 12:58 am

Contact Haley: hykim100@syr.edu