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Velvet Park Magazine
Winter/Spring Issue 2006
From Surviving to Thriving to Leading the Way: Point Scholars are Hard at work Cultivating Community [excerpts]
By Khadijah Britton
Though it has been a few years since I was in school, the sensation hits me just the same way every fall: cool autumn winds pitch my heart rate up a beat, hasten my steps a moment, and fill my head with excited plans for the new year. Yes, I am still living on Back-to-School time, still dazzled by visions of ivory towers, paid healthcare, and a safe place to pursue knowledge and, perchance, understanding. I am also thrown headlong into memories of a time in my own life when school was the only safe place, when the air at home was poisoned with abusive words and I worked multiple jobs to afford an escape into my mind for those few hours a day. That is why it was so easy to skip into conversation with Point Foundation Scholarship recipients (Point Scholars) Julie Schell and Marcie Fisher-Borne—and so hard to stop. Julie, Marcie, and 45 fellow scholars are living the campus life with the generous support of The Point Foundation whose full scholarships were designed to enable students such as them to be able to concentrate on greater pursuits than paying the rent or avoiding harassment. Their expected contribution is merely to create the scholarship that will define and protect the LGBT community for future generations.
Point Foundation Executive Director Vance Lancaster and the Board of Directors explain it bit more broadly in the foundation’s mission statement: “The Point Foundation attempts to identify students who are physically, intellectually, and morally capable of leadership to play in influential part of the betterment of society…By identifying and supporting these scholars, The Point Foundation hopes to provide a greater level of acceptance, respect, and tolerance within future generations for all persons, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
In other words, they are funding the next generation of queer leadership whose responsibility it will be to protect our rights and communicate our identities. If Julie and Marcie are a decent indication, the foundation is doing its job. These two women are the poster children for all that is good about academia: smart, caring, focused individuals with a plan and purpose utilizing the university environs to pursue risky, history-making, and future definition research and action. They are incredible women who are using their harrowing coming-out experience as inspiration to be the leaders they wish they had known growing up, working to create the world of acceptance and safety they wish they’d faced.
……..
“My coming out was very similar to a lot of others—painful and traumatic.” Julie Schell is telling me her story over southern grub at Spoon II near Columbia University, where she is now pursuing her ED.D (PhD in Education). I listen silently as she brings me through the obstacles she overcame to get here. “The gist was that my mother found a lover letter, opened it, read it, and then knew at that point. I come home to see the letter open on the counter, my dad in the chair crying, and my mom standing with a very upset look on her face…From that point on , the relationship was strained….
Here she pauses, fidgeting in her chair. Her eyes cast downward and her voices takes on a recognizable hardness; she’s put on her brave face—the same one that I’m sure she used to survive those years. “So, I ended up working as a cashier at Office Depot, then customer service at Wells Fargo, then as a surgical scrub tech and a foot doctor—the person who brings the tools in, washes them. I paid my way through college, made it through okay. Slowly but surely people started noticing I was different.”
……..
My conversation with Marcie Fisher-Borne, Point Scholar and candidate for the PhD in Social Work at UNC Chapel Hill, resonates with Julie’s experience, but Marcie quickly contextualizes her history within the strength it has provided—or, as I see it, proved. “When I was 18, I lived on my own, worked three jobs, put myself through college, my master’s in social work, master’s in public health. I grew up in Mississippi and dealt with the pain of coming out. It’s a huge burden. So, of course I have a kind of emotional soft spot for those coming in at 18 that don’t have support from their families. It’s really hard to be 18 and on your own.” Marcie goes quickly from acknowledging the struggle queer youth face to championing the result of surviving and overcoming these struggles: “Well, we are success stories, not sad and pitiful by any means. We are incredibly strong, incredibly resilient people that use everything---including the rocky stuff. We have all our gifts and experiences to transform not only our lives, but other people’s.”
Marcie credits The Point Foundation with her freedom to focus on this goal, which is very personal for her. “What’s been so powerful since getting the Point scholarship is knowing that some of the work I am doing…if my individual program doesn’t support LGBT work, it doesn’t matter; I have funding for four years. To know I have the freedom to do this work—that I’m not dependent on my institution to support me, that we can craft and fund work—that is empowering to the LGBT community, is immensely empowering.”
When I asked each scholar to explain her scholarship and its relevance to the broader queer community, I expected the kind of uncomfortable hemming and hawing I would give were you to corner me at a party and ask me to defend the thesis of this article, for example. With her reply, Julie proves (to me, at least) that she is ready to defend her dissertation. “My current interest are focused on risk-takers in higher education—people who break through the social constraints of academia to do work that’s deeply personal and important to them. I am particularly interested in trans researchers who were living most of their lives as one sex and transitioned mid-career. Big names at big-name schools. I’m looking at how that affected them and their work.” Here, she seamlessly blends in her personal experience to explain her motive for her intellectual work: “This issue is personal to me. Higher education saved me. It allowed me to be who I am. It’s rarely championed. The main focus is on negative things. There’s major criticism of professional schools that people are coming out with too much theory and too little ability to practice. There’s little attention placed on how higher education protects people’s intellectual welfare. The university has the ability to change the world by changing how we view the world, and risk-takers do that. They are great examples of courage.”
Marcie’s research is similar fascinating and relevant: “I wanted to do LGBT research that no only looked at sexuality, but connected a lot of other identities in ways that were useful and meaningful to us as a community. I’m a bit of an intellectual dork, so I felt like this was a place where I could some really good work and ask deep questions from inside the community. In terms of LGBT research, there’s still so much stigma, so much pathology around it. As we begin families of choice, there are so many unknowns, so many aspects are not really on our terms. I felt I could continue, as an educator to challenge people around ideas of identity, gay-straight-white…to dissect those identities and see how they function all the time. I hoped I could do some really practical stuff with it. Now my focus is on the merging issues for female couples having families by choice. It’s not new that lesbian women are having families by choice, but there’s still so much isolation, so much stigma. But each time is new for each couple, people still feel like they’re the first. There are so few resources, especially outside urban areas.”
With each scholar dedicating her life to this hard work, more than monetary support is needed. A mentor is chosen by The Point Foundation to support each scholar’s personal and professional development. This is intended to be a life-long relationship and is really what sets Point apart from other scholarship programs. Julie, herself, is responsible for the development of the mentorship program, of which she is Program Coordinator. To be considered as a Point Mentor, she requires a completed application, authorization for a routine background check, and a minimum donation of $250.00 to The Point Foundation (though Julie points out that there is definitely flexibility for potential mentors working in low-income fields—the $250, which covers the expense of the background check, can be paid in small installments). Typically, mentors and scholars talk or email at least once a week, and meet when time and travel permit. Each pair is expected to establish a yearly set of goals and objectives, and the mentor serves as both taskmaster and cheerleader in helping his or her ‘mentee’ to achieve these goals. “As a Point Scholar, my relationship with my mentor has been vital to my continued academic success and future career path,” said Julie, whose mentor is one of three out gay college Presidents, Charles Middleton of Roosevelt University. Julie is serious about the role mentors have in ensuring scholars’ development into LGBT leaders and has been reaching out far and wide to recruit those she feels will most benefit from this type of relationship.
One of these was Marcie’s mentor Caitlyn Ryan, a significant researcher, writer, and activist for queer youth whose Family Acceptance Project (FAP) studies the impact of family acceptance and rejection on the health and development of LGBT youth. This relationship developed when Marcie expressed enthusiasm for Ryan’s work to Point Foundation Publicist Cathy Renna who gave her a call—they are friends. Marcie says that this relationship has helped her focus on the key questions she has for any research she undertakes: “How can we begin to be mentors for each other? What kind of leaders are we looking to create in ourselves? What kind of leadership do we need to have a movement? And this is a pivotal time to have LGBT rights in this country: What will we, as a community, do? Who will do it?”
When I ask Julie how she feels about her role as a mentor and leader, now experiencing extreme visibility as one of the main spokespeople for Point, she got exited explaining how it connects her life now back full-circle with her experience as a teen. “I’m so grateful. A shift occurred where I started to realize that what happened to me with my parents and college was an abnormal experience…It doesn’t need to bet hat way. Kids from Nevada don’t have to live in that pain and rejection. They can look at me and see another person from Nevada who is out and living their live as a successful person in a successful relationship at a place like Columbia—maybe that’ll expand their imagination to believe that there’s a place like that for them and they won’t crawl back into the closet. I don’t want young people to have no alternative comparisons to put up against the messages they get.”
Julie goes silent again, obviously question whether or no to share the story on her mind. I press her forth. ‘Well it’s just that…often when I speak, people are amazed by the scholars’ stories. They ask, ‘Is it that bad now? Is it that bad in NYC? We’re a supportive community and there are a lot of gay people.” I immediately understand her point—not all LGBT youth grow up in supportive gay meccas!
“Some people here”—she waves her arms, indicating New York—“might think it’s so liberal here, so accepting. Why do you need The Point Foundation when gay youth don’t have anything to work about? They’re much more resilient and don’t face the same problems we did.” Her sarcastic tone mimicking the imaginary speaker reminds me of opinions I faced fighting for the extension of protection from harm to LGBT youth years ago in Massachusetts. It sends a shiver: “But this undermines the devastation and damage of rejection from your peer group, your parents, and broader society. It’s a daily experience for most of us. Still is.” That is why The Point Foundations support has always been so important. Still is.