These LGBTQ Students Say Their School Treats Them Like Second-Class Citizens

For years, students say they’ve faced harassment for their sexuality. At the very least, they want their club for LGBTQ students to have official status on campus.

The Nation | Mary Retta | December 2, 2019

One night in 2018, senior Kyle Deserosiers was walking across campus with his boyfriend. They were holding hands. Another student, seeing them, turned and yelled, “Faggot!”

It was hardly the first time Deserosiers was ridiculed for his sexuality at Baylor University, a private Christian university in Waco, Texas. Administrators, students, and even professors, he said, have made lewd comments and jokes about queer and trans people in front of him, both in and outside of class, during his four years at the school.

Students have gone further to say that this kind of discrimination against the LGBT community is built into the very foundation of the university. Until 2015, same-sex displays of affection were a violation of the student handbook and considered a punishable offense. All residence halls are separated by binary gender. Many students, including Deserosiers, have heard rumors that the school has accepted sponsorships from homophobic companies that support conversion therapy. Students like Desrosiers feel that the school operates in a way that only recognizes the humanity of the cisgender and heterosexual student body. “I have had experiences that make me feel like I don’t belong here, like I’m an outsider, and that this is not the community for me,” Deserosiers said. “This discrimination needs to be investigated.”

One frustrating aspect of this has been that since 2011, the university’s administration has refused to officially recognize Gamma Alpha Upsilon, the school’s unofficial LGBTQ club. According to Anna Conner, a senior at Baylor and the vice president of Gamma Alpha Upsilon, the organization applies every year to be officially chartered; each year, it is rejected. Official recognition would grant the group funding and the ability to officially rent out spaces or bring speakers to campus, among other privileges. “They’ll tell us that something is wrong with the application, or that the organization doesn’t coincide with the student code of conduct,” Conner said. “We’ve reached out to the regents and various faculty and administration, but we haven’t had any luck meeting with anyone about it.”

In July, the club leadership board contacted the Big 12 Conference and the NCAA, asking them to examine the university’s discriminatory policies. As Baylor consistently ranks as one of the top schools in the conference, students believed this would be the best way to garner a large audience for the issues they were facing on campus. The students argued that Baylor’s treatment of LGBTQ students is not compliant with Title IX laws, and that other universities in the Power 5 Athletic Conferences have better resources, protections, and spaces for queer students on campus.

“We write to you as current LGBTQ+ and allied Baylor University students and recent graduates who have been engaged in efforts to ensure that Baylor University’s campus is safe, secure, and hospitable to LGBTQ+ students,” wrote the students. “Having appealed to Baylor University’s leadership on multiple occasions only to still be faced with an unfair, unsafe, and discriminatory campus environment, we now see no other option than to appeal to the broader community of which Baylor is a part, including its athletic association.”

In response, Conner and Hayden Evans, another leader of Gamma Alpha Upsilon, received a letter saying that while the Big 12 stood in solidarity with the club, there was little that representatives from the conference could do to help.

On paper, Baylor’s Title IX mandate reads that the university “does not tolerate discrimination or harassment on the basis of sex or gender,” defining gender-based harassment as “harassment based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” According to Lori Fogelman, assistant vice president of media and public relations at Baylor, the university works to maintain those standards. “Baylor is committed to providing a loving and caring community for all students, including those who identify as LGBTQ,” she said. “Baylor is fully compliant with Title IX in its approach to LGBTQ issues.”

Students, however, say that the school’s actions toward the members of Gamma Alpha Upsilon signal otherwise. In August, Desrosiers penned an op-ed on the subject for the local newspaper, the Waco Tribune-Herald. “Besides enduring overt harassment and fearing violence, LGBTQ students at Baylor face second-class citizen status as a result of the university policies prohibiting us from forming student organizations and being fully recognized in the campus community,” he wrote. “While some who discriminate against LGBTQ people may seek to justify their discrimination through reference to religious belief, Baylor tellingly has not in recent years sought a religious exemption to the nation’s civil rights laws.”

According to Conner, Baylor administrators have told members of Gamma Alpha Upsilon that because the organization is “not biblical,” it is not in line with the university’s mission. Yet several students have argued that other nonreligious campus groups—such as the Campus Democrats and Campus Republicans—have gained official status from the university.

Religious universities like Baylor are allowed to claim exemption from Title IX regulations if they believe that following Title IX would violate their religious beliefs, a policy that many have found can encourage discrimination against the LGBTQ community. However, as a member of the Big 12 Athletic Conference, Baylor is unable to claim these exemptions. (In 2017, the Trump administration rescinded guidelines that allowed Title IX to apply to discrimination based on “gender identity”—that is, against transgender students.)

According to Conner, however, the university has found other ways to discriminate against queer students, such as upholding traditional heterosexual and cisgendered views of marriage in its human sexuality statement, a part of the campus’s sexual conduct policy. “The University affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God,” it reads. “It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”

Conner’s response: “We are not an advocacy group, and we work very hard to not be considered an advocacy group, but the university still says that we are,” she said on behalf of Gamma Alpha Upsilon. “That way they don’t have to deal with us.”

This is not the only recent incident of Baylor’s attitude toward its queer students. In July 2019, after members of Gamma Alpha Upsilon and progressive Baylor alumni pushed for the university to bring in a speaker to discuss LGBTQ issues to alleviate tensions between queer students and the administration, the university chose to bring in Dr. Janet Dean, who had previously spoken at the college in February. She was asked to perform LGBTQ competency training for the board of regents.

Dean is the author of Listening to Sexual Minorities, a book that discusses three frameworks for how to treat queer students at Christian universities: an “integrity” model that focuses on changing sexual orientation; a “disability” model that treats LGBTQ identities as a health condition; and a “diversity” framework that emphasizes the importance of integrating queer youth into heteronormative society. Although the book does not directly mention conversion therapy, it does make repeated references to “healing” queer sexual orientation through prayer.

After word of this private meeting spread to the student body, Desrosiers sent a six-page letter to the Baylor chairwoman and the Board of Regents arguing that the university chose the wrong person to conduct the training and that her thoughts would contribute to the emotional and spiritual trauma of queer students at Baylor. “I got a response from the chairwoman saying she received my letter and would take it into consideration alongside other perspectives,” Desrosiers recalls. However, that week the university published a press release congratulating the board members for completing Title IX and NCAA sensitivity training. “This reflects the Board’s personal commitment to strengthening the University’s culture of compliance as we continue to do the right thing,” Chair Clements said in the press release.

Similarly, Baylor faced backlash last spring after an on-campus organization, Baylor Young Americans For Freedom—one of the four chartered conservative groups on campus—brought Matt Walsh, a conservative columnist for The Daily Wire, to speak on campus in April. In the weeks leading up to the lecture, a petition was created in opposition of Walsh’s presence on campus that received almost 3,000 signatures from Baylor students, faculty, and alumni. Although the petition did not stop Walsh from speaking at Baylor, this mobilization encouraged members of Gamma Alpha Upsilon to set up a meeting with the university’s board of regents to discuss the organization’s approval. The students quickly received a response from the school saying that as a private institution, Baylor “does not allow outside groups” to address the regents.

“We are literally students at the university,” said Jazz Aurora, a black transgender senior at Baylor who uses they and she pronouns. “We should not be considered an outside organization. That was the moment when we all sort of realized, ‘Oh, they are really not hearing us.’”

“Students have said hateful things about the queer community to my face, and I’ve been harassed while out with my boyfriend on campus,” Desrosiers said. “But I also think it’s important to recognize that there are students of color and transgender and gender nonconforming students who cannot ‘pass’ the way I can, and who have faced experiences that completely erase their humanity at Baylor.”

“Baylor has its own issues with race,” Aurora confirmed. “Being queer and a person of color at Baylor, it’s really hard to find people to connect with or relate to. A lot of times I find myself on the outside of both groups.”

Despite resistance from the university, members of Gamma Alpha Upsilon continue to fight for the club’s official status on campus. The organization applied once more for official status in March and is currently waiting on a response from the school, which can take up to 200 days. Members of Gamma Alpha Upsilon are also continuing to petition and organize, and have recently met with a lawyer to discuss their rights in the matter.

According to Aurora, even if Gamma Alpha Upsilon were to become officially chartered, there is still much work to be done in order for LGBTQ students to feel safe on campus. “We need sensitivity training,” they said. “I’m so tired of having to clarify that I’m transgender and have professors misgender me. If you’re the person at the front of the classroom, I would really appreciate it if you could address me in a way that doesn’t make me super uncomfortable.”

Gaining acceptance for Gamma Alpha Upsilon has been a struggle for almost a decade now, but students are determined to keep fighting. “Recognition would just mean that we exist,” Conner said. “It’s taken a long time for Baylor to recognize that LGBTQ students exist on campus. For them to say that it’s OK for us to be here and that there is a space for us to meet openly—that’s really all we’re looking for.”

OU Law's Queer Advocacy Group Supports Baylor LGBTQ Students

For Immediate Release:

“To all the rights of one person to be violated puts at risk the rights and liberties of all.”

These poignant words are etched into the foundation of the OU College of Law, reminding us that every day we must make a commitment to protecting those who need our advocate-voice. As the University of Oklahoma prepares to play Baylor University, all eyes turn to Waco, where the national spotlight will be centered on these two historic schools. As these two teams prepare to battle it out on the field, we are reminded of the battle going on behind closed doors.

Baylor remains the only school in the Big 12 Conference to deny equal rights and recognition to queer students. Further, Baylor is the only school in the all “Power 5” conferences to permit this treatment against the queer community. The pain experience by queer students on the Baylor campus cannot easily be summarized.

The time has come for us to unite in solidarity and denounce this dangerous policy.

Earlier this year, OUtlaw (OU Law’s queer advocacy group) began a grass-roots movement to join voices together across all campuses in the Big 12. It has become a common goal for students on every campus in the Big 12 Conference to let thousands of fans, students, and athletes know who we are. We ask that the Big 12 Conference devote resources to this conversation, and that it make a clear statement denouncing bigotry, racism, and intolerance.

Great rivalry must be paired with decency and community. We ask that the entire Sooner Nation join us in solidarity, supporting our friends at Baylor University. Show your pride in Waco this Saturday, as these two incredible institutions meet in primetime lights.

Respectfully, 

Trae Havens
Outlaw President
The University of Oklahoma College of Law

Baylor Student Activists Appeal to NCAA

LGBTQ advocates want the association to intervene and help break what they call a long-standing pattern of discrimination at one of the nation's most prominent religious institutions.

Inside Higher Ed | Jeremy Bauer-Wolf | August 7, 2019

Students and recent graduates of Baylor University, one of the country’s most prominent Baptist colleges, want the National Collegiate Athletic Association to examine the institution’s treatment of gay, transgender and queer students who say they have long faced discrimination on campus and in university policies.

These advocates wrote last month to Mark Emmert, the NCAA president, imploring the NCAA to investigate the university’s policies on LGBTQ issues. Most of those who signed the letter are officers of Gamma Alpha Upsilon (which spells out "GAY" in Greek letters), an LGBTQ student group that has sought official recognition from the university for eight years. Formally known as the Sexuality Identity Forum, the organization has been continually denied formal recognition, though the university has never publicly explained why.

The students assert in their letter that Baylor is the only member institution of the Big 12 Conference, one of the NCAA’s “Power 5” conferences, the most affluent and prestigious of the association's leagues, that “prohibits LGBTQ+ students from being officially recognized as part of the campus community.” Other major religious institutions in the Power 5 include University of Notre Dame and Boston College, both in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

A similar letter was sent to Big 12 Conference officials.

The authors of the letter to the NCAA also question whether Baylor complies with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law barring sex discrimination on college campuses, which also provides protections for gay or gender-nonconforming students. The Trump administration more than two years ago withdrew guidance issued by the Obama administration that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms and other facilities that matched their gender identities.

Religious institutions can apply for exemptions from Title IX if they believe following the law would violate their religious beliefs. But, as the students note in the letter, Baylor has not sought such an exclusion from the law.

“On Baylor’s campus, LGBTQ+ students regularly face harassment and discrimination whether it consists of being called inflammatory names during walks to class or being physically unsafe and threatened,” the students wrote.

It is unclear how the NCAA could intervene in Baylor’s practices. The association has previously condemned laws that are prejudicial against LGBTQ people and said it would not hold playoff games in states with such laws on the books. But it has not gone as far as to cut ties with religious institutions that have Title IX waivers, as was demanded by gay rights groups several years ago.

Baylor spokeswoman Lori Fogleman provided a written statement on the university's behalf: "Baylor is committed to providing a loving and caring community for all students, including those who identify as LGBTQ. We believe that Baylor is in a unique position to meet the needs of our LGBTQ students because of our Christian mission and the significant campuswide support we already provide to all students."

The NCAA did not respond to a request for comment. A Big 12 Conference representative declined to comment.

Baylor in 2015 removed references from its conduct code that explicitly forbade “homosexual acts,” as well as eliminated parts of the code that deemed same-sex acts as “misuses of God’s gift.”

But the university maintains a “statement on human sexuality” that discourages students from participating in advocacy groups that “promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.” This would include “homosexual behavior,” according to the statement.

Gay rights advocates believe this statement is why Gamma Alpha Upsilon has not been accepted as an affiliated organization. Baylor’s rules on sexual conduct, which cite Baptist doctrine from 1963, also state that sexual intimacy must be “in the context of marital fidelity.”

A petition urging the Baylor administration to reconsider its refusal to formally recognize LGBTQ groups has gained more than 3,200 signatures since April. An opposing petition, advocating for Baylor to preserve its “traditions,” has also circulated on campus.

The opposition letter states that if Baylor officially chartered gay-friendly groups, it risked jeopardizing its long-standing affiliation with Baptist General Convention of Texas, the state representatives of the Baptist Church, from which the university receives millions of dollars in funding. The convention only recognizes heterosexual relationships.

Baylor’s Board of Trustees has declined to let Gamma Alpha Upsilon representatives speak during board meetings. Last month, board members heard a presentation by Janet B. Dean, an associate professor of psychology at Asbury University, a Christian institution in Kentucky, who has written about queer students’ experiences at religious colleges and universities, The Waco Tribune-Herald reported. Baylor president Linda Livingstone said that Dean’s appearance was beneficial for the board.

Activists remain frustrated that the trustees will not hear from them directly.

Tensions flared in April when a conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, invited Matt Walsh, a right-wing blogger for The Daily Wire who holds antigay views, to campus. In promoting Walsh's appearance on campus, YAF, which the university granted formal recognition, posted fliers with an image of a hammer and sickle on a rainbow flag. The title of Walsh’s talk was “Why the Left Has Set Out to Redefine Life, Gender and Marriage.”

The Texas Tribune reported that the leader of the group said he did not intend to offend students and removed the posters, but by then many on campus were already enraged. A copy of the flier, the posting of which the university approved, was included in the letters to the NCAA and the Big 12.

“Baylor University officials approved inflammatory fliers … targeting LGBTQ+ people. This flier was posted throughout campus. Yet LGBTQ+ students are denied the ability to advertise or organize in any recognized way,” the students wrote.

Kyle Desrosiers, a rising senior at Baylor who identifies as gay, wrote in a column in the Tribune-Herald that the administration’s failure to protect him and students like him was “cruel.”

He described being harassed on campus for holding hands with his boyfriend and hearing classmates and professors make jokes about his sexuality in class.

“My experience is not unique,” he wrote. “This pain is shared among a sizable population at Baylor University. Trans and gender-nonconforming students face a far greater level of harassment and exclusion on campus. For many of us, experiences of alienation and marginalization result in a strain on our mental health. Worse, we are often afraid to turn to the Baylor Counseling Service or Title IX [office] for fear of losing academic and professional opportunities at Baylor.”

Baylor regents meet with LGBTQ student group

Waco Tribune | Rhiannon Saegert | November 10, 2019

While the unofficial LGBTQ student group at Baylor University remains unofficial, a few things have changed.

Members of Gamma Alpha Upsilon got a chance to address the Baylor Board of Regents during the regents’ meeting last week, a first in the school’s history. The students requested a meeting with the regents in a letter sent in July. Vice President Anna Conner addressed the board, along with fellow GAY members Kyle Desrosiers and Charis Merchant. They discussed their own experiences, as well as the experiences of other LGBTQ students on campus.

“We got pretty personal with those stories, and it caused emotions to run high in the room,” Conner said.

The board took no action and the group will continue to seek a charter making it an official student organization, but Conner said the regents seemed receptive. In previous semesters, requests to speak to the regents had been turned down because of the group’s unofficial status.

“I think we really made an impact with them,” Conner said. “It was a panel, so it was just the three of us. We talked for an hour.”

Regents had discussed LGBTQ students during a retreat this summer, and Baylor President Linda Livingstone announced the university’s intentions to better support LGBTQ students in a statement in August. Livingstone also announced a discussion series focused on having civil conversations about difficult topics. The announcements came after a group of students and alumni emailed the Big 12 Conference and the NCAA in August, asking the organizations to re-examine the university’s treatment of LGBTQ students.

A more recent incident drew more criticism. A guest speaker in American sign language senior lecturer Lewis Lummer’s class, Jari Saavalainen with New Life Deaf Community Church, gave a presentation that veered off-course. When a student asked about Saavalainen’s work, he pulled up a website for a conversion therapy organization that specifically targets deaf Christians. Saavalainen continued to present in ASL for about 10 minutes.

Celia Scrivener, a nursing major from Marshall who is taking ASL as a foreign language, snapped a photo and posted about the incident on Twitter. Coincidentally, Scrivener is a GAY officer.

“My jaw dropped,” Scrivener said. “No one in the class seemed comfortable with it at all. I’m very stereotypical looking, it’s not a secret to anyone that I am gay. It kind of singled me out in front of that group of people. It was a lot of uncomfortable-looking faces, especially mine.”

She said she does not blame Baylor for the incident and has not experienced anything comparable in her time as a student there.

“If anything I think it was a lapse in judgment on the part of Dr. Lummer,” Scrivener said. “Baylor didn’t even know until the internet knew.”

Lummer apologized in an email to students the next day and explained he had not known what the guest was going to talk about ahead of time.

“I grew up going to Christian schools. … I’ve never been in a class where, all of the sudden, conversion therapy is on the board,” Scrivener said. “Especially not in an ASL class, where that doesn’t have anything to do with my understanding of a language.”

A Baylor spokesperson said the incident “does not align with the institution’s stance regarding conversion therapy.”

“Throughout the fall semester, President Linda Livingstone has had a focus on civil discourse in which we all strive to understand and be respectful of differing opinions,” according to the university’s statement. “The university does have a policy for students who believe a faculty member has treated him or her unfairly with respect to a course for which the student was registered. We encourage students in the class to exercise the appropriate procedures.”

Now, a faculty member anonymously provides GAY with a room on campus to use for meetings. One of the reasons the group continues to seek official chartered status is so it will be allowed to rent meeting spaces on campus.

“The group has worked hard to offer the kind of relationships and care they hope others will provide,” said Jon Singletary, who is dean of Baylor’s Diana R. Garland School of Social Work and describes himself as a friend and ally of the students. “This organization has worked hard to show the kind of respect for others that we hope to receive.”

Conner said the room provides an extra layer of safety that has allowed students who were uncomfortable with the group’s public meetings to join.

“It’s nice to see people who didn’t usually come,” President Elizabeth Benton said. “There’s a lot of new people here.”

The first meeting of the semester had about 40 people.

“It was a lot of people who didn’t know we existed came, a lot of people who wanted to show they supported us, and also new students as well,” Conner said. “It’s pretty well-known now.”

Conner said the most common refrain they hear from critics, “Why come to Baylor if you’re gay?” is one they are all tired of.

“There’s people who were forced to come here. There’s people who are legacies. There’s people who didn’t know about their identity until they came here,” Conner said. “Then, there’s people who say ‘This is the best school and they gave me the most money. It’s the highest ranking, and I’m not going to sacrifice my academic future because they say I shouldn’t exist.’ ”

Baylor professor apologizes after guest speaker promotes conversion therapy

The incident is just the latest at the Christian university to highlight an unwelcoming environment for LGBTQ people, some students say.

by Liam Knox | NBC NEWS

An American Sign Language professor at Baylor University apologized to his students this week after a guest speaker he invited promoted conversion therapy during his presentation.

The Rev. Jari Saavalainen, a pastor at a deaf church in Chicago, was asked to talk Tuesday about missionary work with deaf people, and professor Lewis Lummer said he did not anticipate the presentation would include any mention of conversion therapy.

Having the subject broached in a sign language class made it all the more shocking, students said.

Celia Scrivener, who heard the talk, said she wasn’t even paying attention, but as the only gay student in class, her peers looked to see her reaction.

“[Saavalainen] pulled up this website and I was looking away at the time ... but a friend of mine who sits right next to me grabbed the edge of my desk,” she said. “I looked up and my jaw just dropped.”

Lummer has since apologized.

Lori Fogleman, the university’s vice president of media relations, wrote in an email to NBC News that Baylor “does not practice or condone” conversion therapy.

She also linked to an August statement from President Linda Livingstone, who said the Christian university in Waco, Texas, is “committed to providing a loving and caring community” for LGBTQ students.

While Scrivener doesn’t blame Baylor for the guest speaker’s surprise endorsement of conversion therapy, she said the university has a lot of work to do if it wants to live up to its purported commitments.

Scrivener, a junior, is in charge of social media for one of the university’s only LGBTQ student groups, Gamma Alpha Upsilon (or GAY, as it looks spelled out in Greek). The organization was

formed in 2011, when homosexuality was still listed as a punishable offense in Baylor’s code of conduct. The clause was removed in 2015.

But the group’s main purpose — to provide a space for LGBTQ students on a campus where they are often discriminated against, by the institution and fellow students — is as relevant as ever, Scrivener said.

Even so, the university has denied Gamma’s application for a student group charter every year since its founding, in accordance with university policy against recognizing LGBTQ-affirming student groups.

The group only just recently secured a room on campus to hold meetings, and even that’s only because an anonymous faculty member registered it for them, Scrivener said.

“They can go on and say that ‘we want our own students to feel loved and accepted and welcomed on campus’ and all of that, but then they just don't really do anything about it,” she said. “They just say, ‘We're having these conversations.’ And, you know, we're getting a little tired of conversations that don't lead to anything.”

Anna Conner, Gamma’s vice president, said Baylor’s official position affirming “the Biblical understanding of sexuality” emboldens students and community members to harass LGBTQ students, and erases the identities of the students themselves.

“A lot of people who are against the LGBT community feel that they are allowed to say and do things without facing any punishment by the school,” Conner said. “So we exist to have this group where people can be open about their identities.”

Conner, a senior, said the group had been wary of stirring controversy over the last eight years. But this year, after a public conflict with conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom, that’s changing.

“We thought that if we damaged our relationship with [Baylor], then we might not even be allowed to do the very small things that we can do,” she said. “Baylor doesn't openly accept LGBT people. But it's just now starting to change because we've been so public about this issue.”

Scrivener added: “We just kind of stopped being so silent and decided to let them have it.”

The students have support from alumni, as well. Skye Perryman, who graduated in 2003, is one of a group of alums who formed BU Bears for All, which is calling on Baylor to rescind its policy against recognizing LGBTQ-affirming student groups and make the campus a more welcoming place for students of all backgrounds.

The group’s letter to university administrators in support of LGBTQ students has received over 3,200 signatures.

“There has been a groundswell of alumni support for LGBTQ students at Baylor, and in particular calling on Baylor to change its policies that marginalize and fail to recognize LGBTQ students as fully part of the campus community,” Perryman said.

Baylor’s policies have had real consequences for queer students. Conner said that despite frequent cases of homophobic harassment, including queer students being yelled at and followed home by some of their peers, the university has been ineffective at addressing their complaints.

“It's very difficult to get LGBTQ students to report actual cases of harassment or physical violence or anything like that because all the stories we have of people that went through with that are very negative,” she said. “It eventually came to a point where people just gave up or they're like, ‘It's not worth it. I'm just gonna have to deal with this trauma on my own or with my friends, because Baylor is not going to support me.’”

Conner, who identifies as both queer and Christian, said the university is caught between a false choice of affirming LGBTQ identities and holding onto its Christian beliefs.

“There's this perception that if Baylor adopts an acceptance of LGBT people, then they immediately lose some type of Christian status. And that's just not true,” she said. “You can still be affirming and be a Christian, you can still be gay and be a Christian.”

Scrivener said the school’s “biblical” understanding of sexuality is demeaning, but she loves attending Baylor and doesn’t want to let hate get in the way of her college education.

“The main response to us is, ‘Well, then why did you come to Baylor?’ Like ‘You chose to come here, deal with it,’” she said. “And all of us are in agreement, that we weren’t going to put our sexuality above getting a very good education. I love Baylor with everything in me … I am so glad and proud to go here.”

Administrators agree “there is more we can do to support our LGBTQ students,” Livingston said in his “Statement on Human Sexuality.”

Conner said she believes Baylor wants to make itself a more welcoming place for LGBTQ people. She and other Gamma members met last week with the university’s Board of Regents, and she’s “cautiously optimistic” about the future of LGBTQ equality on campus.

“If we manage to keep up the pressure and keep talking about the issues, I think something will change within the next few years,” she said.

Rice's Band Tackles Baylor's Homophobia

Inside Higher Ed | Elin Johnson | September 23, 2019

Rice University's marching band has taken a stance against Baylor University's anti-LGBTQ statements and stood in solidarity with its students.

The two Texas universities' football teams played each other Saturday; at halftime, the Marching Owl Band formed the word "pride" on the field while waving rainbow pride flags and playing "YMCA" by the Village People, reports the Waco Tribune-Herald.

Baylor, a Christian university, released a statement earlier alluding that they supported "biblical notions" of sexuality and did not support the charter of an LGBTQ organization.

Baylor went on to beat Rice 21 to 13.

This has not been the first time Rice's band has been a bit tongue-in-cheek. The weekend before they formed "2.89" in reference to the University of Texas football team's "record high" grade point average.

Rice band spells ‘pride’ at halftime to mock Baylor’s anti-LGBTQ policies

Rice’s Marching Owl Band shows its support for Baylor’s LGBTQ students, who are marginalized because of school policy.

Outsports | Jim Buzinski | September 23, 2019

Rice University’s Marching Owl Band spelled out “pride” as people ran on the field waving rainbow flags at halftime of Saturday’s Baylor at Rice football game in Houston to make a statement of support for LGBTQ students at Baylor.

The band came up with the idea after Baylor administrators refused last month to recognize an LGBTQ student group, citing the Christian school’s “human sexuality” policy that prohibits students from engaging in “heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior.”

The Baylor LGBTQ group, which wanted to adopt the name whose acronym Gamma Alpha Upsilon spells “GAY” in Greek letters, has been denied school recognition since 2011.

When the band put out the word of its idea to address the issue, people on and off campus donated 70 rainbows flags, the organizers told the Houston Chronicle.

The Rice band (@ricemob) taking a shot at Baylor’s LGBTQ policies in its halftime performance vs. the Bears.

They spelled “Pride” at the end. pic.twitter.com/C34LxxyIdM

— Glynn Hill (@RiceChron) September 22, 2019

Chad Fisher, a spokesman for the Marching Owl Band, also known as “The MOB,” said he and his bandmates decided on a “Star Wars”-themed show months ago, but after learning about Baylor LGBTQ students’ ongoing fight to get recognition for their student group, they decided to incorporate that into their performance.

“Some of us did some more digging and found how deep it went,” Fisher said.

“We just think that’s kind of ridiculous,” Fisher said. “And so we all got to our show writing meeting ... and we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is like exactly what our show needs to be about. We absolutely need to call Baylor out for this.’ From there, it just kind of happened.”

As the Texas Tribune noted, not recognizing the LGBTQ student group at Baylor marginalizes these students by barring them “from accessing student activity funds or reserving campus space for meetings.”

During the halftime show, the Marching Owl Band urged Baylor “to reconsider your policy and support all your amazing students.”

It also tweeted out its thanks to everyone after the game for their support and ended a tweet with the hashtag #SpreadLoveNotHate.”

Thanks for a great halftime everyone!

We’re so glad we got to stand up for equality with some amazing @RiceUniversity alumni and students! #SpreadLoveNotHate pic.twitter.com/JK46pS1GjD

— The MOB / Rice Bands (@ricemob) September 22, 2019

Baylor University hosts LGBTQ+ speaker for open conversation

KXXV | Erin Heft | Septemer 17, 2019

WACO, TX — Nearly a month after Baylor University clarified their stance on human sexuality, the university hosted a prominent LGBTQ+ speaker to hold "a conversation."

The renowned private Baptist university’s President Linda Livingstone clarified what the university distinguishes as human sexuality under their Student Policies and Procedures.

Nearly three weeks later, author, speaker, social activist and self-identified homosexual Christian Justin Lee was invited by the university, and hosted by the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work, to hold a conversation entitled ‘Christianity and LGBTQ+ Persons.’

Hundreds of all ages were in attendance, filling every available seat in the room, consisting of, both students and the public.

25 News sat down with Lee prior to the event to get his take on what he hoped accomplish during his time in Waco.

“I would like people to leave here feeling like they have some practical tips for having this conversation better. They can make sure that LGBTQ students at Baylor feel really loved and supported, not just in word but in deed,” explained Lee.

Explaining the dichotomy he felt from his youth, Lee said, “From a young age I knew there were certain views that christians had...certain issues that Christian’s had strong views and homosexuality was one of those things.”

When asked what led him to Baylor, he paused and said, “I get asked to speak at a lot of Christian universities really all across the spectrum on LGBTQ issues, and try to help the church to be kinder and more supportive of people even in the midst of theological disagreements.”

Lee began the two hour event lightheartedly, making a joke in reference to musicals, exclaiming jokingly that a single mention of Broadway was in his contract.

He then quickly dove into his personal journey, both the struggles and triumphs that have led him to where he is, noting time and time again his time spent in front of those in attendance was not to change their theological journey, but in short, to open pathways for conversation.

"We're talking about actual people, because God loves people more than God loves issues, I'm convinced. And I think that even with all of the theological disagreements that we many have on all kinds of issues, if we're called to do anything as Christians, its to love one another" said Lee.

Lee concluded his speech with, "I want to end with this to LGBTQ people. You have something important to add to the body of Christ. The eye cannot say to the hand "I don't need you." You are needed. Your experiences give you empathy. You have learned humility. You understand why some of our biggest critics, why some of the church's biggest critics, are our biggest critics because you have experienced that pain directly. Your faith has gotten stronger in many cases from fighting for it, and if it hasn't gotten stronger then you know why so many people struggle with their faith."

He continued, "You have credibility as a LGBTQ person that the church at large does not have in our culture today. So use your gifts and don't let anybody convince you that you are not needed in the church. Represent the church to the world, demonstrate grace and above all don't wait for somebody to welcome you into the body of Christ. You don't have to be welcomed into the body of Christ. You already are the body of Christ. If the church is going to regain its saltiness in our culture, it's going to depend in large part on you. God loves you. God wants to use you. So go be the church."

Hundreds pack into room to hear Christian LGBTQ author speak at BU

KWTX | Chris Shadrock | September 18, 2019

Nearly 500 filled into the conference room atop the Cashion Academy Center on the Baylor campus Tuesday evening to listen to an influential Christian LGBTQ author speak about faith and sexuality.

The room was so filled, several people could be seen standing in the back to listen.

Justin Lee was at the university for a two-day visit where he also spoke to student in classes.

Dr. Jon E. Singletary was named dean of the Garland School of Social Work gave opening remarks and welcomed LGBTQ students to university and says they’re welcomed.

The talk was open to students and the public, sitting in the front row was President Linda Livingstone’s husband, filling-in while the university’s leader was away on travel, and some members of the Board of Regents.

Weaving humor into his talk, Lee did not shy away confronting the serious issues facing homosexuality and Christianity saying, “When we talk about issues we need to talk about people’s stories.”

He told the audience he realized at 18 he was gay, but struggled to accept what that looked like for him.

While unlike other topics, he also addressed this conversation is not something the Church has had before.

“Where does the body of Christ go from here? This is a new conversation for the church, how to address homosexuality, bisexual and transgender people.”

The end of his talk focused on how the straight community can work to better welcome the LGBTQ community.

He said the church needs to be empathetic to people. “It’s our burden to share,” he said.

Though contrary to how some might interrerpt the Bible, Lee pointed to scripture as why the church needed to embrace everyone.

“That night sound extreme, but the Bible points to helping those in need from widows, to the hungry and the LGBTQ community,” he said. “Christ lived and died for us. We need to be shining examples.”

He ended his talk speaking directly to the LGBTQ members in attendance.

“You have something important to add to the body of Christ. Your experience has given you empathy. Your faith has gotten stronger because you fought for it … use your gifts and don’t let any one tell you aren’t welcomed. God loves you. God wants to use you. So go be the church.”

Rice band takes aim at Baylor LGBTQ stance in halftime show

Waco Tribune | Staff Reporters | September 21, 2019

The Rice Marching Owl Band (MOB), which describes itself as the university’s “infamously irreverent non-marching marching band,” took a shot at Baylor’s LGBTQ stance Saturday with its esoteric halftime show.

The band formed the outline of a Bear, performed a Star Wars-like lightsaber battle, then ended its routine by spelling out the word “Pride” while students holding rainbow flags joined in and the band played "YMCA" by the Village People. Baylor has been in the news this year for its denial of a charter for LGBTQ student groups, as it “affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality,” according to an official university statement.

It’s hardly the first time the band has poked fun at its in-state rivals. Last weekend when Rice played Texas, the MOB spelled out “2.89,” a reference to UT’s team grade point average. In Baylor’s last trip to Houston in 2016, the band formed the words “Title IX” following the fallout from the school’s sexual assault scandal.

Watch the video below and read the band's script below and read more here about the halftime performance from Brittany Britto and Glynn A. Hill of the Houston Chronicle.

Read the band’s half-time show script here!

Baylor to host discussion LGBTQ Christian author Justin Lee

Waco Tribune | Rhiannon Saegert | September 16, 2019

A leading proponent of building bridges between churches and LGBTQ Christians will speak Tuesday at Baylor University, where debates over sexuality and faith have come to the forefront.

The Baylor School of Social Work is hosting a discussion with Justin Lee, a nationally known author and founder of the Gay Christian Network.

Lee will speak at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday on the fifth floor of the Cashion Academic Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Lee, author of “Torn” and “Talking Across the Divide,” has been writing about his experiences as a gay Christian since the late ‘90s. He founded the Gay Christian Network, now called the Q Christian Fellowship, in 2001, later parting with the organization in 2017. In his Baylor appearance he aims to discuss the way the Christian churches have handled LGBTQ issues in the past and how to better address them in the present.

“I’m not coming to give a theological talk on same-sex marriage or anything like that,” Lee said in an interview Monday. “My goal is to be able to speak to Christians on all sides of the theological disagreements and just focus on how we take care of people who are, right now, not always being cared for.”

He said debates about theology can often turn abstract, but he wants to focus more on students’ tangible experiences.

“We have to stop and say ‘What does this mean for the person sitting in the pews, for the student who is here at Baylor who is LGBTQ or who is wrestling with questions?’ “ Lee said. “What does all this mean for that person, realistically? What does it mean for Christian institutions and individuals in terms of how we treat people better?”

Lee said in his experience, it’s important for LGBTQ students to have ample opportunity to discuss their lives the way anyone would. Lee said after growing up Southern Baptist, speaking with other LGBTQ students in college and realizing he wasn’t the only one was crucial to him.

“For many LGBTQ students coming from conservative Christian homes, they’re already bringing a lot of cultural baggage and loneliness from growing up in the church,” Lee said. “It can be very difficult to work through all of that in a place like Baylor.”

Lee said there’s been rapid culture shifts in the way people think about and understand gender and sexuality within the last decade.

“It’s made people realize there’s a lot of people going through things they never knew they were going through who haven’t been well-served by the church in these areas,” Lee said. “That has really set off a lot of questions for Christians and Christian institutions that we haven’t really been focusing on for much of the church’s history.”

He said in his experience, Christian institutions can best navigate those questions when LGBTQ people whose lives will be impacted are involved in every level of the discussion.

“Those are not easy questions to work through, but I think it’s going to be really important that we not treat this as an issue to be resolved in the absence of human beings, but that we recognize that all of these conversations are ultimately about the lives of these LGBTQ students,” Lee said.

Lee’s appearance is part of Baylor’s 2019-2020 Conversation Series, which focuses on civil conversation about difficult topics. Diana R. Garland School of Social Work Dean Jon Singletary said Lee is not the first LGBTQ speaker at Baylor, but he may be the first to speak in an open venue rather than as part of a single class’ curriculum.

“This is the first time we’ve had someone with his profile at an event that is university-wide and really community-wide to promote a much larger conversation about our understandings of sexuality and as a way of wrestling with how to support our LGBTQ students,” Singletary said.

Singletary said the invitation was partially in recognition of LGBTQ students’ needs, which have been the subject of ongoing discussion since an open letter this spring calling for official recognition of Baylor’s unofficial LGBTQ student group, Gamma Alpha Upsilon, or GAY. The petition garnered more than 3,000 signatures, including those of Baylor alumni, donors and professors.

“It’s all part of how we talk about difficult issues, whether it’s part of our policy where there’s disagreement or part of the larger church conversation that it’s connected to, or values differences,” Singletary said.

Singletary said officials the School of Social Work have been encouraged by the support they’ve received. He said bringing in a speaker like Lee fits the school’s goal of educating future social workers who can work with people whose experiences may differ from their own.

“The university has been largely supportive of it,” Singletary said. “Now we know there’s a number of people who wouldn’t want us to be doing this, and disagreement, and we feel like there are conversations that will come about as a result of this.”

GAY Outreach Chair Hayden Evans said his group is barred from inviting speakers themselves as an unofficial student group.

“I’m hopeful that with Justin Lee coming to campus … that his talk will spur more action for others to gain a better understanding of the dynamic between Christianity and LGBTQ+ persons and understand that they’re not separate, they can be integrated and then hopefully people will be more supportive in our discussions and in our push for the university to recognize the need, in terms of safety and in terms of community, for LGBTQ + persons on campus,” he said.

Evans said the group’s charter was officially rejected by the Department of Student Life earlier this month, as it has been several times in recent years. A Baylor spokesperson confirmed that the charter had been rejected.

After Charter Denial, Baylor LGBTQ Group Pushes Forward

Dallas Observer | SILAS ALLEN | SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

For the last eight years, a group of Baylor University students has been trying to persuade the school to allow them to form an LGBTQ student group.

Earlier this month, the group got an official answer from the university. It wasn't the one they'd hoped for.

Baylor officials notified members of the student group Gamma Alpha Upsilon — or GAY — on Sept. 6 that the university was denying the group's request for a charter. A charter represents official recognition from the university, which would give the group access to student activity funds, allow them to reserve space on campus for meetings and allow them to advertise events on campus.

That notification came just days after Baylor President Linda Livingstone released a statement on human sexuality on the university's website. In it, Livingstone wrote that the university "affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God."

"Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm," Livingstone wrote. "Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior. It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching."

Despite that denial, the group will continue trying to pressure the university to give it official recognition, said Anna Conner, a Baylor senior and Gamma Alpha Upsilon president. Conner, a Houston native, thinks the university is trying to wait the group out. Most of the group's leaders will be graduating in the next year or two, and she suspects university officials hope the matter will die once those students leave campus.

"It doesn't seem like they plan on making any action, at least not while I'm here," Conner said.

In an Aug. 27 email to students, faculty and staff, Livingstone said that, although the university's policy on human sexuality remains unchanged, the university can do more to support its LGBTQ students. Livingstone said university officials began holding conversations in the summer of 2018 about how the university could better support underrepresented groups, including LGBT students.

Out of those conversations came a number of themes, she said: the need for better training on how to support LGBTQ students; the need for opportunities for civil discussions about LGBTQ issues; and the need to establish trust with LGBTQ students so that they feel comfortable seeking out the resources the university offers.

"Meanwhile, as we begin the fall semester, we pledge to continue these ongoing conversations with faculty, students, staff, alumni and members of our LGBTQ community and to provide support for all of our students in keeping with Baylor’s Christian mission," Livingstone wrote. "We are all part of the Baylor Family and are called by Christ to love one another."

Gamma Alpha Upsilon was founded in 2011 under the name Sexual Identity Forum. Since then, its leaders have been seeking official recognition from the university. But for eight years, the university has denied the group a charter.

Baylor, the world's largest Baptist university, was founded by the Dallas-based Baptist General Convention of Texas. For decades, the university's student code of conduct banned "homosexual acts," calling them "a misuse of God's gift." Then, in 2015, the Baylor Board of Regents quietly lifted that ban. LGBTQ rights advocates celebrated the change, calling it a step in the right direction.

A flyer for a campus speech by conservative commentator Matt Walsh featured an LGBTQ flag with a hammer and sickle superimposed over it.

But Conner, 21, said unequal treatment of LGBTQ students has persisted since then. In April, Baylor Young Americans for Freedom, a university-approved conservative student group, hosted a lecture by Matt Walsh, a commentator for the conservative website The Daily Wire. Walsh's speech was titled "Why the Left Has Set Out to Redefine Life, Gender and Marriage." The group posted promotional flyers on campus bearing the LGBTQ rainbow flag with a hammer and sickle superimposed over it.

Last week, the group announced it will host a guest lecture from Daily Wire editor in chief Ben Shapiro in November. An opponent of LGBTQ rights, Shapiro has warned that “the gay marriage caucus” is “utilizing the law as a baton to club wrong-thinking religious people into acceptance of homosexuality." He is especially hostile to transgender people, who he says are suffering from mental illness.

Conner said the group doesn't object in principle to people like Shapiro and Walsh being able to speak on campus. But if those views are allowed an audience at Baylor, she thinks Gamma Alpha Upsilon deserves equal treatment and an equal platform.

"It seems reasonable, but apparently it's not," she said.

Lori Fogleman, a Baylor spokeswoman, noted that the university is hosting a conversation series during the fall semester focusing on civil discourse. On Tuesday, Christian LGBTQ author Justin Lee will give a speech at Baylor's Cashion Academic Center titled "Christianity and LGBTQ+ Persons."

Last April, more than 3,000 people signed a petition asking the university to recognize Gamma Alpha Upsilon. Among the signatories were current students, alumni and current and former faculty members. Conner said most of the faculty, including religion professors, have been openly supportive of the organization. A few university officials whose positions precluded them from signing the petition contacted members of the group to offer their support, she said.

But there's also an outspoken minority on campus that's hostile to the organization, she said. Mostly those people just shout ugly slurs, she said. But some of the group's members have been threatened on campus and told not to go to group meetings, she said. In one case, one of the group's members was walking to her car after finishing a late-night shift at a campus job when she noticed someone was following her, Conner said.

Incidents like those are examples of why an LGBTQ group is needed at Baylor, Conner said. The university can be an uncomfortable place for LGBTQ students, she said. Many of them feel isolated and alone, nervous about having come to Baylor in the first place. Having a recognized student group that can make those students know they're welcome would help allay some of those feelings.

Although the group still doesn't have the official recognition it had hoped for, Conner said it's been encouraging to see the support LGBTQ students have received on campus — even if that support hasn't come from the university's administration.

"For the most part," she said, "Baylor is very welcoming."

New semester, same frustrations for LGBTQ students at Baylor

Houston Chronicle | Brittany Britto | September 5, 2019

It may be the start of a new semester, but frustrations largely remain the same for many LGBTQ students at Baylor University.

After months of putting pressure on Baylor administration and its Board of Regents to meet with and formally recognize its LGBTQ student group, Gamma Alpha Upsilon, the students finally received a response from University President Linda Livingstone, but it wasn’t the one that they had hoped for, according to Hayden Evans, a second-year graduate student, outreach chair and treasurer for the group.

In a letter addressed to the university community on Aug. 27, Livingstone stated that “Baylor is committed to providing a loving and caring community for all students — including our LGBTQ students.”

But Livingstone pointed to the university’s newly launched webpage, which includes its human sexuality statement and sexual conduct policy in the hope of conveying the “university’s values and expectations.”

On HoustonChronicle.com: More than 3,000 petition for Baylor to recognize LGBTQ student group

The statement notes that “the university affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God” and that “Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm.” Its sexual conduct policy also states that it is “expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching,” which include “heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior.”

Livingstone further emphasized that the university is in compliance with Title IX as well as state and federal regulations in terms of the services and support it provides for LGBTQ students.

She also pointed to multiple resources provided for LGBTQ students through school organizations, including the Title IX office, the Chaplain’s Office and Spiritual Life, and its Counseling Center, which Livingstone noted does not practice or condone conversion therapy. The president also noted that students are not disciplined or expelled for same-sex attraction.

“With this said, we understand that we must do more to demonstrate love and support for our students who identify as LGBTQ,” Livingstone wrote, adding that it has been suggested that the university provide “more robust and more specific training” for students, faculty and staff in regard to LGBTQ students, and more opportunities for civil dialogue.

“And, perhaps most importantly,” she wrote, “we need to establish trust with our LGBTQ students so that, among other things, they might seek out the resources provided by Baylor — all of which must be done as a faithful expression of our Christian mission.”

Despite the lengthy letter, many LGBTQ students and alumni said they found Livingstone’s statement disingenuous.

“I’m appreciative of her that she made the statement at all and so publicly,” Evans said. Livingstone’s letter, he said, has allowed people to see some of the fight Gamma Alpha Upsilon has gone through to be recognized and included as a group on campus since its inception in 2011 as the Sexuality Identity Forum.

“But,” Evans added, “I also think it’s a hollow response.”

Justin Davis from Washington state graduated from Baylor in 2009 and agreed with Evans. He said little has changed from his time at the university a decade ago.

“To me, it indicates when these policies become more targeted, but less specific, they’re basically meant to discourage dissent, protest or advocacy,” Davis said.

“I think they’re soft-pedaling this ‘loving and caring community’ thing without taking actual steps.”

On HoustonChronicle.com: Baylor drops longstanding ban on ‘homosexual acts’

The private Baptist university’s refusal to recognize Gamma Alpha Upsilon, or “GAY” in Greek letters, as an official student group has prevented them from receiving certain privileges, including the opportunity to advertise events on campus, reserve university spaces for meetings, and to receive funding through the student government.

In May, more than 3,000 Baylor University alumni, students, staff and former faculty signed a petition addressed to university officials supporting the group’s fight to be recognized. Since then, Gamma Alpha Upsilon has requested to meet with the university’s Board of Regents — the entity that Livingstone said established its human sexuality policy. That request was declined.

Rumors of the school’s alleged loose ties to conversion therapy — treatments that are supposed to turn gay people straight — have also floated around among Baylor’s LGBTQ community. They involve links between Dennis Wiles, a member of the university’s Board of Regents, vice chair of the student life committee, and pastor of First Baptist Church in Arlington, and his partner church Living Hope Ministries.

Living Hope Ministries, described on its website as “a Christ-centered, Biblical world-view of sexual expression rooted in one man and one woman in a committed, monogamous, heterosexual marriage for life.” hosts a 20-week “intensive, discipleship program” designed to “assist those who have sexual and relational struggles of any kind in their life.”

Late last year, Apple pulled a Living Hope Ministries app from its online store, NBC News reported at the time. And in March, Google shut down a Living Hope Ministries app that promoted conversion therapy, according to reports by Business Insider.

But Jason Cook, a spokesman at Baylor, said “Dr. Wiles has indicated Living Hope Ministries does not do conversion therapy,” adding that the church is a “discipleship, peer-based ministry.”

Cook also emphasized that although Wiles, one of 41 members of Baylor’s Board of Regents, is vice chair of the university’s student life division, Wiles still has to consult and work with the rest of the board to make decisions.

“It’s unfair to cherry-pick an alleged belief of motive, and then ascribe them to the entire board,” Cook said, adding that there are many diverse-points of views on the board, some of which are LGBTQ-affirming.

“There’s a lot of misinformation that is intentionally being spread regarding this issue. We’re trying to be very clear and keep this on a factual-based discussion,” Cook said. “We’re trying to provide clarity regarding the university’s practices and we have demonstrated that we are willing to discuss the issues that our LGBTQ students face. That’s significant progress.”

Evans, the outreach chair and treasurer of the campus group, countered that saying Baylor’s administration is “doing minimal, if any, changes here at the university.”

In July, Evans attempted to “(go) up the chain of commands” by emailing the Big 12 and NCAA organizations in hopes that they could push Baylor to be more inclusive and have a conversation, but Evans said both organizations have said that the university is in compliance with their standards. A spokesman for the Big 12 conference declined to comment in response to Houston Chronicle’s requests, and the NCAA never responded to inquiries.

Since then, there have been some new developments.

Evans said that an open discussion — likely the first to ever take place between university administration and Gamma Alpha Upsilon — will happen soon. And on Sept. 17, Justin Lee, an author and founder of a Christian LGBTQ organization, will speak at the university’s Cashion Academic Center — in an event hosted by the university’s School of Social Work.

Still, Skye Perryman, Jackie Baugh Moore, and Tracy Teaff, the Baylor alumni who authored the letter that received 3,000 signatures calling for Baylor’s inclusion of LGBTQ students, said in a statement that though dialogue is a part of academic life and can be useful, “this is an effort about real people who are in the Baylor family living their lives as dialogue about their civil rights is happening around them.”

“Until all members of the Baylor family, including LGBTQ+ people, are afforded equal opportunities to participate fully in campus life, our work is not done,” the alumni group told the Chronicle.

“We and thousands of others look forward to helping Baylor move forward and urge it to adopt policies that are in line with its academic and athletic peers.”

Baylor president's statement on LGBTQ issues stops short of student demands

Baylor University President Linda Livingstone announced this week that the university will take steps to better support LGBTQ students, but recognizing unofficial LGBTQ student groups is not part of the plan. 

In an email Tuesday to students, faculty and staff, Livingstone stated Baylor students will not face disciplinary action for their sexual identity, and said that Baylor counselors do not practice or condone so-called conversion or reparative therapy to change their orientation.

Baylor officials have faced pressure in recent months from students and alumni who have petitioned them to recognize LGBTQ student organizations, and Baylor regents discussed related issues at a retreat this summer.

“During the course of these conversations, it has become evident to us that there are many misperceptions regarding Baylor’s stance on human sexuality and that there is more we can do to support our LGBTQ students,” Livingstone said in the statement Tuesday.

Baylor’s website now contains a page stating the university's LGBTQ resources are  compliant with Title IX, the federal law that bars gender discrimination on campus. The page states that students are not expelled or disciplined for same-sex attraction. In a frequently asked questions section, the site reiterates Baylor's official statement on human sexuality, which reads:

“The University affirms the biblical understanding of sexuality as a gift from God. Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm.” 

The page also states LGBTQ students seeking community support can find it through Baylor's counseling center, Baylor's Bias Response Team or the Department of Spiritual Life. 

“With this said, we understand that we must do more to demonstrate love and support for our students who identify as LGBTQ,” Livingstone's statement continues. “A common theme emerging from all of the aforementioned conversations is the need for us to provide more robust and more specific training for students, faculty and staff in loving, caring for and supporting our LGBTQ students.”

The unofficial student group Gamma Alpha Upsilon, formerly known as SIF, said in a statement that their members appreciate the university's efforts, but that Baylor still has not addressed issues they raised during the previous semester.

"We wish to point out that they have continued to ignore our requests and refuse to talk with us about the issues we face as LGBTQ+ students," they stated. "We have clearly outlined what issues we have found, in the petition written in April, that we wish to be addressed. In the email, the president has expressed interest in continuing the conversation and we would greatly appreciate the ability to establish this dialogue with her and other Baylor administration."

Kyle Desrosiers, a Baylor student who wrote about the issue in a Tribune-Herald guest column, called the statement a “callous lack of action.”

“Though President Livingstone and the Baylor administration think that current resources, which most LGBTQ students don't currently trust to meet their needs, are enough, LGBTQ students are constantly faced with harassment and hatred at Baylor in many ways small and great,” Desrosiers said. “Additionally, LGBTQ persons cannot and have never been able to participate in the Baylor community as fully as straight students.”

BU Bears for All founders Skye Perryman, Jackie Baugh Moore, and Tracy Teaff, who authored an open letter calling for recognition of Baylor’s unofficial LGBT student groups that gained more than 3,000 signatures, released a statement in response.

“Dialogue is part of academic life and can be useful," they stated. "At the end of the day, this is an effort about real people who are in the Baylor family living their lives as dialogue about their civil rights is happening around them.

“Until all members of the Baylor family, including LGBTQ+ people, are afforded equal opportunities to participate fully in campus life, our work is not done. We and thousands of others look forward to helping Baylor move forward and urge it to adopt policies that are in line with its academic and athletic peers.”

New web page affirms university stance on sexuality

Baylor Lariat | Matthew Muir | August 27, 2019

Baylor University President Linda Livingstone voiced Baylor’s support for LGBTQ students but left university policy unchanged in a statement reaffirming the university’s views on human sexuality on Tuesday.

Baylor’s official stance affirms the school’s biblical view on human sexuality, including the view of both “heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior” as deviations from the norm. In the statement sent via email to students, faculty and staff yesterday, Livingstone responded to “an increased number of questions” regarding Baylor’s positions on sexuality and LGBTQ issues with a new web page on the Baylor website answering frequently-asked questions.

In her statement, Livingstone also said Baylor “must do more to demonstrate love and support for our students who identify as LGBTQ,” though no policy changes were announced.

Among the Baylor LGBTQ community, reactions were mixed. Hayden Evans, a Master’s student from Searcy, Ark. said he saw the statement as a sign of progress.

“I’m very thankful for Dr. Livingstone, for at least [contributing] to this conversation and sending this email,” Evans said. “[The administration seems] very willing to continue the conversation.”

Evans also said a conversation alone wasn’t enough and called for real change.

“You can only say that you’re loving and caring so many times,” Evans said. “You’re still not allowing equal representation or equal voice or equal platform at the university.”

Others disagreed with Baylor’s biblical reasoning for its stance on sexuality. Plano senior Elizabeth Benton, president of the unofficial LGBTQ group Gamma Alpha Upsilon, said Baylor’s Baptist faith and acceptance of LGBTQ students should not be mutually exclusive.

“I grew up in the Baptist church, and I still consider myself a Baptist. But I also consider myself a part of the LGBTQ community, and I have never felt more in-tune with my faith,” Benton said.

For more information, view Baylor’s web page on the topic.

LGBTQ group sets sights on official charter

Baylor Lariat | Carson Lewis | August 23, 2019

The group is composed of Baylor students, has a president and officer positions and meets weekly for group activities. It functions in the same way as many Baylor clubs with activities like discussions and bowling nights. But this group of students can’t claim to have what other organizations have: an official charter from the university. That’s what they want to change.

Gamma Alpha Upsilon (ΓAY), an unofficial LGBTQ group on campus, is looking to the new semester with hopes of becoming an official chartered organization. Formerly known as SIF (Sexual Identity Forum), Gamma has functioned on campus since 2011 as an independent group with the purpose of giving a home to LGBTQ Baylor students and allies.

Members in the group expressed their appreciation and surprise last year from the support given to a letter sent by three Baylor alumni to administration which proposed acceptance for LGBTQ groups on campus.

“We ask that the university reconsider its exclusion of student organizations that are designed to provide a community for individuals in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (“LGBTQ”) and allied community,” part of the letter read. The letter accumulated over 3,200 signatures from Baylor students, faculty, alumni and supporters who agreed with the message.

Plano senior Elizabeth Benton, president of Gamma, described the group’s positive reaction to the news last semester.

“It’s nice to know that even people outside of Baylor support us… I honestly didn’t think anybody would care about this, really, besides LGBT people,” Benton said. “It’s so gratifying to hear people talk about that and to meet alumni that were LGBT at Baylor and want to help out. It’s absolutely amazing.”

The group used to meet weekly at 8 p.m. Thursdays at Bill Daniel Student Union Building but will meet away from their usual spot this semester, choosing instead Seventh and James Baptist Church.

Despite having a functional home for the group in the SUB next to Common Grounds, several members of Gamma said they’ve found reasons to move their meetings off campus while the group is unchartered.

Searcy, Ark., grad student Hayden Evans, Gamma’s treasurer, described some of the problems that the group had with the location.

“It’s very, very loud. They typically play music, and of course there’s tons of students all around talking and going about their day. It’s very distracting for us the whole meeting, especially when we invite people from outside the university to speak,” Evans said. “Also, people are uncertain about how they will be perceived… some people don’t come because they are afraid of the repercussions of them being seen there. We’re trying to move to a more private area.”

Benton echoed the statement made by Evans, saying that some prospective members of Gamma felt that the location wasn’t as private as they would have liked.

“I’ve talked to some people who have been threatened if they go to Gamma meetings,” Benton said. “There are people I know, people I talked to, who would come to our meetings and they just stopped coming. I asked, ‘Why don’t you come anymore?’ [They] would be threatened. They seemed scared. This happens a lot actually.”

As an official chartered organization at Baylor, Gamma would be able to rent rooms from the SUB for their meetings and events and advertise on campus to prospective members during events like fall semester’s Late Night.

Houston senior Anna Conner, vice president of Gamma, and other group members insist that being official would greatly help them in their mission to provide a safe space for members of the LGBTQ community on Baylor’s campus.

“People have a perception of what we’re trying to do. They think that we’re trying to go in and rip up this tradition that Baylor has and say, ‘No, we’re no longer a Christian university, you have to accept us because it’s 2019 and everyone needs to change,’” Conner said. “What we’re trying to do is create a space where people can have a conversation, maybe learn a few things and meet new people that have different viewpoints. The biggest challenge [this year] will be to get people to understand that.”

In a July 24 Office of the President email, Jerry K. Clements, chair of the Board of Regents, and president Dr. Linda Livingstone expressed that the board seeks to continue discussion about how to best include and provide support for LGBTQ students.

“The Board continued discussions that began at last summer’s retreat about providing a loving and caring community for all students, including those who identify as LGBTQ,” the email read. “This is an issue with which many faith-based colleges and universities – and our churches – struggle. We believe that Baylor is in a unique position to meet the needs of our LGBTQ students because of our Christian mission and the significant campus-wide support we already provide all students.”

Students ask Big 12, NCAA to examine Baylor's LGBT policies

Waco Tribune | Rhiannon Saegert | August 2, 2019

Baylor students have written letters to both the Big 12 Conference and the NCAA, asking the organizations to evaluate the university’s treatment of LGBTQ students.

“We write to you as current LGBTQ+ and allied Baylor University students and recent graduates who have been engaged in efforts to ensure that Baylor University’s campus is safe, secure, and hospitable to LGBTQ+ students,” both letters begin.

The authors of the letters include members of Gamma Alpha Upsilon, an unofficial student group that has been seeking recognition from the university since last year, as well as other current students and recent graduates.

“In recent months, LGBTQ+ students have faced particular targeting and harassment on Baylor’s campus, leading thousands of people with connections to Baylor University — alumni, students, parents, current and former faculty members, former trustees, ministers, and faith leaders — to ask that the university reverse its course of discrimination against LGBTQ+ students,” the letters state.

Both letters request that the entities assess Baylor for Title IX compliance in reference to LGBTQ students and closely examine Baylor’s treatment of them as a whole. A Baylor spokesperson said the university is fully compliant with Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination by educational institutions on the basis of sex.

“Baylor is committed to providing a loving and caring community for all students, including those who identify as LGBTQ,” the spokesperson said. “We believe that Baylor is in a unique position to meet the needs of our LGBTQ students because of our Christian mission and the significant campuswide support we already provide to all students.”

The letters come just on the heels of Baylor’s Board of Regents’ meeting with psychologist Janet B. Dean on the subject of LGBTQ students. During a press conference after the meeting, university President Linda Livingstone said Dean was picked because she has spoken at Baylor before and has studied the experiences of LGBTQ students on Christian college campuses for years.

Dean did not respond to requests for comment for this article. “Listening to Sexual Minorities,” a book Dean co-authored, summarizes years of research on the topic and personal accounts from gay, lesbian and bisexual students at Christian colleges.

The book discusses three frameworks for examining the topic: an “integrity” model focused on changing sexual orientation, a “disability” model treating LGBTQ identities as a condition to be managed, or an affirming “diversity” framework. The book does not directly mention so-called conversion therapy, which has been discredited, but makes repeated references to “healing” sexual orientation through prayer.

“Perhaps Christian Communities would do well to reflect on ways to integrate the best of each of these three lenses for healthy, holistic identity development,” the book states. “We haven’t yet seen too many examples of such an integration of frameworks, but we see the need.”

Kyle Desrosiers, a senior in Baylor’s Honors College, wrote Regent Chairwoman Jerry Clements and Livingstone a letter criticizing the decision to bring in Dean two days before the meeting she attended. By chance, he had attended a presentation she gave at Baylor earlier this year and said he found Dean’s perspective disturbing.

“Her anecdotal evidence was stories about people who were queer on Christian campuses, but because of pressure from the church or what they call Christianity, had chosen to give up their sexual orientation and gender identity,” Desrosiers said. “It was very disturbing, because that was the only time I’d heard of any kind of LGBTQ event at Baylor.”

In the meantime, conversations continue far from Baylor campus. BU Bears For All, an organization formed by the authors of an open letter pushing for recognition of LGBTQ student groups at Baylor, is seeking nonprofit status with the goal of pursuing policy changes at Baylor.

The authors of the open letter, Baylor alumni Skye Perryman, Jackie Baugh Moore and Tracy Teaff, said to end discrimination on campus, the university would have to make tangible policy changes.

“It means encouraging (as opposed to discouraging) faculty and others on campus to be vocal in their support of LGBTQ+ students,” they said in a statement. “It means allowing LGBTQ+ students to organize officially and to participate in the life of the campus in all ways that other students are permitted to and to ensure that no student is deprived of any opportunity as a result of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Emerging Voices | Baylor Loves LGBTQ+ Students – To a Point

Ethics Daily | Madeline Sneed | July 11, 2019

The Baylor University community is divided over inclusion for LGBTQ+ students on campus.

Two petitions have come out of the conflict: one favors preserving Baylor’s nonaffirming stance of LGBTQ student groups with 110 signatures; the other asks Baylor to recognize LGBTQ student groups and to allow them to meet on campus with more than 3,200 signatures.

In response to the outpouring of support from the Baylor community for LGBTQ students, the Texas Tribune reported that Lori Fogleman, assistant vice president for media and public relations, said “the 3,200 signatures represent about 2% of the school’s students, faculty, staff and living alumni.”

The 110 signatures were given neither a percentage nor a dismissive comment.

KWTX-TV reported that Baylor issued an official statement regarding Baylor’s nonaffirming policies for LGBTQ+ students, which said Baylor is “focused on how we love and care for all our students so they have a healthy, safe and nurturing learning environment” and that they “believe this can be done both inside and outside of officially recognized student organizations.”

Baylor’s Statement on Human Sexuality reads, in part, “Temptations to deviate from this [biblical] norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior. It is thus expected that Baylor students will not participate in advocacy groups which promote understandings of sexuality that are contrary to biblical teaching.”

Essentially, Baylor believes they can support and love LGBTQ+ students while separating them from student life.

With this response, Baylor is saying to their queer students, “We love you – to a point. We would love you more if you could clone yourselves to be like us, think like us, love like us. We will love you as long as you don’t seek community. We will love you from a distance. We will love you if we cannot see you.”

As I interpret it, the love of Christ does not have conditions. As it stands now, Baylor is presenting love to their queer students with an asterisk.

In a personal essay I published with The Salve, I detailed how harmful the nonaffirming policies were for me as a closeted lesbian at Baylor.

The most damaging part of such policies? They made me feel like I was incapable of loving and being loved.

The most important commandments of Christ – to love God and love others – seemed fundamentally impossible to me because institutions like Baylor made me feel like I was broken. Like I was undeserving. Like I could never be enough.

Their commitment to tradition, to being perceived as righteous, made me feel like everything in me was wrong.

I’ve grown a lot since I left Baylor. I’ve had to learn to be brave, to be vulnerable, to stop hiding a fundamental part of who I am.

Yet, in so many ways, I learned how to love at Baylor. So much of who I am is because of the community at the university: the people, the classes, the place.

But a key part of me, the part wired for romantic love, could never come out of hiding there. The policies in place instilled in me a deep sense of shame for how I was born. For how I was created to love.

When I look back at my memories of Baylor, they are tinted with a perpetual shadow of shame, anger and darkness knowing that I wasn’t allowed to be fully myself. That, in the name of Jesus, I was not fully loved because I was different.

To hear Baylor say they want to love their LGBTQ+ students while preventing them from creating their own student groups is almost laughable. Love cannot live alongside such rejection.

It’s impossible to love someone when you’re not listening to them. And Baylor LGBTQ+ students are speaking very clearly: They want to be seen, to be given official community status on their campus.

But Baylor isn’t listening. When they say that LGBTQ+ students can have their own separate committees and groups outside of campus life, they are isolating those students.

It is a “separate but equal” policy – an expressed equal love for all students that keeps LGBTQ+ groups separate through lack of recognition – grounded in discrimination.

How can Baylor hope to break through to that next plane of achievement, the one that is so dependent upon their students growing, discovering and prospering at their university, if they don’t allow all of their students to be seen and loved and supported?

Baylor may insist on moving forward with their “separate but equal” stance when it comes to their LGBTQ+ students.

If they do, they are sending a clear message: It is more important to be traditional than it is to be loving. To protect policies instead of people. To promote conformity instead of accepting individuality.

I cannot think of anything less in keeping with the teachings of Jesus Christ, who listened to, wept with and healed those on the outskirts of society.

His message has always been about love, compassion, softness, listening; changing when it’s easier to stay the same, abandoning wealth when it feels necessary to maintain funding, and waking up when it’s so much more comfortable to stay sleeping.

If Baylor loses sight of this calling, they have lost sight of Christ.