LGBTQ

College of Health & Social Sciences Associate Dean John Elia (left) and Professor Emeritus Jim Brogan

Please tell us about your early days in the English Department at SF State and how you became interested in gay and lesbian studies back then. What courses did you teach?

Well, I came to State in 1967. The chairman [of the English Department] was Caroline Shrodes, who was a lesbian, and we had many gay colleagues; of course, no gay courses back then. So it was a very non-threatening environment, as academic environments went in those days. The first official gay course was 1972. Now, that was after I received tenure, but before that, much happened.

One course I taught was called “Problems in American Identity,” and some people in the department have called that the first gay literature course in the country; it was 1969. “Problems in American Identity” — you could put a lot in that. But it was a comparison through literature of gay and straight lifestyles; straight and hip lifestyles also. So that kind of got the ball rolling. But of course, the strike came along in 1968 into 1969, and one of our departmental members, Senator Hayakawa, became SFSU’s president, and because he resented the young faculty in English being pro–Black studies and pro–strike, those of us who joined the union and were on strike were vulnerable to being terminated. And I was terminated. During the summer of ’69, I received a notice saying that I had one more year to teach and that’s it — pending an investigation into to what I had done. Of course, with no charges presented, one could project almost anything.

That summer, the summer of ’69, I received word that I had been reinstated. (Unfortunately, many of my colleagues weren’t that lucky and wound up being let go.) Now, those were the years of four-year tenure, so I went from terminated to tenured within the course of seven, eight months. So I found myself in the summer of ’71 looking forward to school with the possibility of teaching gay lit. And I went to the chair, and she said, “Okay, yes, wait ’til you officially have tenure,” which I got that year. And then in the fall of 1972, I started “Gay and Lesbian Love in Lit,” and it was very popular right from the beginning. No problems at all. I never had any problems. So those two courses — “Problems in American Identity” and “Gay Love in Literature” — those were the first two courses.

Tell us about your early involvement in the Human Sexuality Program [later the Sexuality Studies Department].

Well, I had been connected with John De Cecco [a psychology professor who spearheaded the founding of the Human Sexuality Program] — we had some mutual friends. John visited my class and realized that, hey, you could be out in class and talk about these issues. So I was the role model for John. [Laughs] John De Cecco just turned 91, and he’s still going strong.

As the Human Sexuality Program got going under John, the “Gay Love in Lit” course became part of that program and became double-listed. I remember our committee meetings, always on Friday. And, of course, he didn’t have much of a budget, but we did a lot with our resources and that’s how the momentum got started.

Over the years I think it was very useful to have a set of allies in Sexuality Studies. It was sort of my second department. People I could trust, people who shared my political views to treat everybody equally.

What do you believe were your most significant contributions to the students who took courses with you?

I think I was a pretty good role model. I always believed in getting to know students, helping people out, and being personally available and getting to know them. I have many students I’m still in touch with, and I learned from them. I always encouraged students to write about their lives and connect their lives with the literature, and so there was always a kind of a cross-feeding going on involving my taking from them and them taking from me. So that is one of the things I loved about this school. I’ve never used a microphone, never had one of those 200-people courses. I knew every student and did my best to get to know them. I loved that environment.

You’ve published some books on LBGTQ themes. How did you come to write them?

One of the things that happened as a result of the strike…one of the victories was that the parameters of possibilities for scholarship, tenure, promotions, was expanded. One of the possibilities you could take on was creative work. So I took them up on that, and the first book I wrote was called “Jack and Jim: A Personal Journal of the 70’s.” (My husband Jack and I are still together after 44 years.) Back then, we were brought up at a time when society told you that no gay relationship could work When this relationship started obviously working, I said, well, you know, this needs to be recorded. So that was the first book, our first 10 years together working things out to have an egalitarian relationship.

And then, two of the other books…one of my pet themes, even though I’m not bisexual, is bisexuality. I feel it’s given a very short shrift. It’s very much misunderstood. And so I wrote an almost…well, it was a young adult book, but it was a young adult book that never found its way into many high school libraries. [Laughs] “Casey the Bi-Coastal Kid,” about a kid who grew up and his parents were divorced, so he had a parent on each coast, but of course he was also exploring bisexuality. And then the most recent book I wrote was called “Vitamin Q,” and that was an attempt to show a man who is just about equally gay and straight. All the male bisexuals I’ve known have wound up married to women. I wanted to dramatize how a man can, for reasons unique to him, choose to go the more difficult route. And of course that difficult route is becoming less difficult with legalized gay marriage. One doesn’t have to give up marriage, one doesn’t have to give up having a family anymore, but there’s still the resistance on families’ parts, and so on.

I’ve written one more book called “A Time to Live,” which was really a documentary masking as a novel. Everything in it was true, except that it was from the perspective of my remained in  San Francisco and not found my husband, my long term relationship. It’s about a bachelor gay man in San Francisco — what his life is like, what his friendships are like, how he handles the AIDS crisis. He himself is HIV negative, but he loses several friends and has frustrations with romantic relationships, as many gay men do. It was published in 1995, just when AIDS no longer was so deadly, when people had a pretty good chance of surviving.

You and your husband, Jack Post, generously set up and have been funding a number of student scholarships. Can you tell us a bit about those scholarships and what you hope students will gain from them?

Well, there are three scholarships. There’s two in humanities: one for queer studies in humanities, called the Jack Post-Jim Brogan Scholarship, and one in honor of an older colleague who has passed away, so it’s called the Joel Dorius Memorial Scholarship, and that’s for a grad student doing — he was a Shakespeare scholar — doing Renaissance studies. And then the third one, the Jim Brogan Teaching Scholarship, is in Sexuality Studies, for the best teaching assistant, because I want to encourage good teaching.

What is your hope for the Sexuality Studies Department, its students and its faculty, now and into the future?

Well, I hope it just keeps thriving. Such education is still a very necessary part of culture. There’s still so much to learn, and the media is more or less saturated with sex in a way that can be extremely misleading to young people. So I think just the idea of getting the scientific truth out there is one thing. But then I think the whole idea of a humanistic multi-dimension person is closely connected with sexuality. So much of our world-view comes from sexuality in terms of perceiving life and enjoying life. There are so many ways to study and learn from the past, from new discoveries. I truly hope Sexuality Studies remains vibrant and fully funded.

SF State students march in the 2019 San Francisco Pride parade

A flood of attacks on LGBTQ rights reveals a familiar pattern, Professor of History Marc Stein and Family Acceptance Project Director Caitlin Ryan warn

As the annual celebration of Pride Month begins, state legislators across the nation have introduced a record-breaking number of bills that threaten LGBTQ rights and health. According to a June 6 statement by Human Rights Campaign, more than 525 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in 41 states since the start of 2023. Of these, 76 have been enacted into law — more than twice as many as in the entirety of 2022, which set the previous record. Among them are laws that mandate censorship of school curricula to exclude mention of LGBTQ lives or experiences, roll back LGBTQ anti-discrimination protections, outlaw drag or ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth.   

San Francisco State University Professor of History Marc Stein, who has written extensively about LGBTQ history, said politicians and pundits are employing the same strategies to target LGBTQ rights that they’ve used for decades: inciting “moral panics” and framing the issue as one of protecting children.

“In the past, cultural discourses about sexual ‘perverts’ and gender ‘deviants’ played up the innocence of youth, who were seen as vulnerable to enticement, grooming, recruitment and seduction,” Stein said. “This led, for example, to the passage of ‘sexual psychopath’ laws in many states in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s, similar dynamics led to Anita Bryant’s ‘Save Our Children’ campaign against sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws and to California’s Briggs Initiative, which targeted LGBT teachers and their allies.”

In fact, children are the most vulnerable to the messages sent by anti-LGBTQ laws, according to Caitlin Ryan, director of SF State’s Family Acceptance Project. In her work with diverse families across the country, Ryan has heard directly from LGBTQ youth and families who reported increased anxiety, feelings of hopelessness, uncertainty about the future and fear of hate-driven violence. Some of the families considered moving to other states, Ryan says, but laws have a harmful effect even across state lines.

“Hate has no borders. The impact of what the governor is doing in Florida, and what some lawmakers are doing in other states, really reverberates across the whole country. The targeted disinformation about LGBTQ lives is poisonous,” Ryan said.

Ryan and the Family Acceptance Project have conducted 22 years of research showing the impact of negative and positive messages about sexual orientation and gender identity on the health of LGBTQ youth. They found that suicide, illegal drug use and HIV infection are among the increased health risks for LGBTQ youth who receive negative messages, especially when they are reinforced by family or caregivers.

“The laws that ban even talking about LGBTQ people tell children and adults that these identities are so unspeakable, we can’t even talk about them in front of children. They spread distortions about LGBTQ identities and who LGBTQ people are, and they dehumanize our lives,” Ryan said.

Ryan points out that “don’t say gay” laws prevent LGBTQ children from discussing their identities and their lives in the very place where they do the most socializing, and this may inflict long-lasting damage. According to a Family Acceptance Project study, children who came out in school were shown to have better social adjustment and mental health as young adults than those who hid their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Anti-LGBTQ laws also endanger the providers and teachers whose support has been a lifeline to LGBTQ youth and who now must consider their own legal jeopardy. Ryan believes that culturally relevant education and guidance, such as that developed by the Family Acceptance Project, must be made available to families, caregivers, teachers and providers to help them understand the profound impact that their response to LGBTQ identity has on a child’s health and well-being.

“This is essential, especially now, in this increasingly hostile environment,” Ryan said.

Learn more about how SF State supports its LGBTQ students, faculty and staff.

Republished from SF State News

The Berkeley Film Foundation supports filmmakers from Berkeley and several other East Bay cities and has funded recent documentaries, including Sundance winner and Oscar nominee “Crip Camp,” about the disability rights movement, and “Belly of the Beast,” about forced sterilizations in the California prison system. Craig has been working for several years on a feature documentary about San Francisco State University professor and lesbian activist Sally Miller Gearhart. The Gearhart project is now in post-production, and this new grant gives the team a great injection of moral support and funding to hopefully finish a rough cut by the end of 2022.

The engaging presentation has been prepared by CHSS lecturer Deborah Craig, who is currently making a feature-length documentary about Sally. Deborah Craig earned her Master’s in Public Health at CHSS, where she was introduced to documentary filmmaking. She has been one of the College’s outstanding lecturers for more than 10 years and has produced another acclaimed short documentary, A Great Ride, about lesbian aging.

This presentation will be of broad interest to faculty, staff and students because of Sally’s tenure and influence at SF State, such as founding one of the first women’s studies programs in the country, and her historical significance as a writer and activist, including working shoulder-to-shoulder with Harvey Milk and others in pursuit of LGBTQ+ rights. We encourage you to share this presentation in your classes or with students in general. One of the purposes of Ms. Craig’s documentary is to reveal this “hidden figure” of LGBTQ+ activism, to reclaim this local hero who is not as well known as other activists of her time. See the presentation below.

John Paul De Cecco (1925-2017) was a friend and colleague of Sally Gearhart’s. He was a pioneer in the burgeoning field of sexuality studies and gay/trans/queer studies. From 1960 to 2003, he taught in the Psychology Department at SF State, where he developed his scholarship and teaching in sexuality studies, including, for many years, teaching the popular though often controversial Variations in Human Sexuality course, which drew up to 800 students per semester. Dr. De Cecco was also among the first to receive NIH funding in sexuality studies, for a study of sexual discrimination and rape in prisons. He published many influential articles and books in the new field that evolved from homosexuality to gay and lesbian studies to LGBT studies to queer studies in his lifetime. He edited the Journal of Homosexuality for 34 years. At SF State, in the early 1980s, he co-founded the Sexuality Studies Program, which initially offered a human sexuality studies minor in the 1980s, an LGBT studies minor in 1992, and later became a department with a major in sexuality studies. Dr. De Cecco’s work was nationally and internationally known and respected, and he remained an activist up until his death. CHSS was honored to receive funding for this annual lectureship in his name from his estate.

J Patterson says award will help her continue transforming lives through social work

San Francisco State University graduate student J Patterson says that during her youth, she didn’t think college was in her future. There were many obstacles — including her struggle to come to terms with her identity as a queer, transgender person — that led to mental health issues and addiction.

Patterson eventually left the area where she grew up, Del Norte County in Northern California, but returned in 2013 with a goal. “I reconnected with my community to help build the support system I wished I had had as a young, queer trans person growing up,” she said. After founding Gender Talk, a youth-centered LGBTQ and gender justice community group, she discovered a passion for social work that inspired her to rethink her future.

Fast forward to today, and higher education is very much part of Patterson’s life: This semester she received the prestigious California State University Trustee Award for Outstanding Achievement, recognizing her commitment to giving back and the challenges she’s overcome. The annual award is the CSU’s highest recognition of student achievement for those who demonstrate superior academic performance and personal accomplishments.

“This award is so much more than just a lump sum of money. It means doors opening that I dreamed of,” Patterson said. “The contributions don’t stop here because everything I’ve done is to give back to others in some way. It is such a beautiful act to give.”

Patterson, who has a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from San Francisco State and returned to the University this fall to earn a master’s degree in Social Work, says one of those dreams is to become a Bay Area social worker and provide youth services. Drawing from her experience growing up, Patterson made it her mission to work on issues around intersectionality to improve the quality of life for young people.

Another dream she has is to continue advocating for prison abolition and liberation, specifically for trans and gender nonconforming people in the school-to-prison pipeline. Patterson says the scholarship will help bring these dreams to life.

​​​​​​​Every year, the CSU honors 23 students, one from each CSU campus, with the Trustees’ Awards. Awardees have all demonstrated inspirational resolve along the path to college success, and many are the first in their families to attend college — just like Patterson.

“These 23 scholars wonderfully exemplify the ideals of the California State University,” CSU Chancellor Joseph I. Castro said. “Every year, and especially this year, our Trustees’ Award honorees demonstrate resilience, tenacity and resolve — together with a keen intellect — while making an indelible, positive impact on their families and their communities. They are truly an inspiration.”

Family Acceptance Project Releases Poster Series for American Indian Families & Communities to Help Families to Support their LGBTQ / Two Spirit Children to Reduce Risk and Increase Well-Being

Posters Show Critical Role of Family Rejecting and Accepting Behaviors on Risk for Suicide, Drug Use, HIV & Wellness

The Family Acceptance Project (FAP) at San Francisco State University, in collaboration with Council Oak Training and Evaluation, Inc. has launched new research-based Healthy Futures posters for American Indian families & communities to help parents, families and caregivers to support LGBTQ / Two Spirit (LGBTQ-2S) children and youth to reduce health risks and increase well-being. The term “Two Spirit” is used to describe diverse gender, spiritual and social identities among Native and Indigenous people that transcend binary concepts of male and female. Historically, Two Spirit people held respected roles in many tribal communities.

High levels of risk for LGBTQ-2S adolescents for suicide, substance abuse, depression and victimization call for evidence-based approaches that increase support and connectedness, and these connections start with families. Family support plays a major role in helping to buffer racism and rejection and to promote positive development. FAP’s research has identified more than 100 specific family rejecting behaviors that increase risk for suicide, depression, drug use, HIV and other health risks and are experienced as traumatic for these youth, as well as specific family accepting behaviors that promote well-being. These new posters show parents and caregivers specific ways to help reduce their LGBTQ-2S children’s risk and increase family support.

Read more on the Family Acceptance Project's website

Despite having spent her whole life in a church culture that rejects gay people, Montgomery says her first instincts as a mother were to protect her son. “I never for one minute loved him any less,” she says. And, importantly, she let him know.

The Montgomerys tell their story in “Families Are Forever,” an award-winning video produced by the Family Acceptance Project, an SF State-based research, intervention, education and policy initiative. The project educates and counsels families on how to prevent serious health risks to their LGBT children and promote their kids’ well-being by supporting them — even if they believe that being gay or transgender is wrong. The foundation of all of the project’s work is rigorous peer-reviewed research led by Family Acceptance Project Director Caitlin Ryan.

Amid tragedy, hope

“Before we did this [research] the perception was that all families rejected their LGBT children and were incapable of learning to support them,” Ryan says. She knew that wasn’t the case. In her 40 years of working with LGBT young people as a clinical social worker, program director and researcher, Ryan had observed a wide range of family reactions to their LGBT children, from very accepting to highly rejecting.

From the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when Ryan ran the first AIDS service organization in the South, she stood at the bedsides of young gay and bisexual men, supporting devastated parents as they learned for the first time that their son was gay and was dying of AIDS. She saw parents and families who realized too late the cost of pushing their child away. “I knew there had to be a way to bring LGBT young people and families together to strengthen bonds and increase acceptance and support,” Ryan says.

But the existing peer-based LGBT services excluded families, she says, and her own research documented widespread lack of family services or engagement. Until Ryan and colleague Rafael Diaz launched the Family Acceptance Project in 2002 with a major grant from The California Endowment, no one had put the two together before — studying LGBT adolescents and their families. So Ryan and her team pursued the questions: How do parents and caregivers react to their LGBT children, and how do those behaviors contribute to their children’s risk and well-being as young adults? She assembled a multilingual, multicultural research team and conducted an in-depth qualitative study across California. The study involved interviews with families, foster families and guardians from a wide range of backgrounds who were accepting, ambivalent, or rejecting of their LGBT and gender non-conforming children.

What emerged from that work, Ryan says, was “a solid empirical foundation for increasing family involvement and support.” The research team cataloged more than 100 specific ways in which caregivers responded to their child — with either accepting behaviors, such as standing up for them when others mistreat them or finding a positive role model — or rejecting behaviors, such as preventing them having an LGBT friend, physical and verbal abuse, and using religion to try to change or discourage their LGBT identity.

Ryan led a follow-up quantitative study and found that the way LGBT adolescents were treated by their families had a major impact on their health and well-being as young adults. The numbers were staggering. LGBT young people who were highly rejected by their families reported an eight times greater likelihood of attempted suicide, a six times greater likelihood of high levels of depression, and a more than three times greater likelihood of using illegal drugs or engaging in high risk sexual behavior that significantly increased their risk for HIV and STDs, compared to LGBT peers who were not rejected by their families.

A new model

Building on this research, the Family Acceptance Project developed the first family intervention model to help parents and caregivers learn to support their LGBT children. The goals were to prevent serious health risks, prevent removal or ejection from the home and reconnect fractured families when LGBT young people end up out-of-home. Ryan is now implementing the project’s family support model beyond the Bay Area in other parts of the country.

Over the years, Ryan has received many awards for her work, including the American Psychiatric Association’s John E. Fryer Award for major contributions to the mental health and well-being of LGBT people and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, Division 44, for groundbreaking research on LGBT youth and families.

A cornerstone of Ryan’s work is communicating research findings and messaging in culturally specific ways, so families struggling with a clash in values can embrace core beliefs like love, compassion and protecting their child’s health — in contexts that make sense to them. In addition to “Families Are Forever,” Ryan has produced other family education videos such as “Always My Son,” which documents the journey of a Mexican-American family who went to 15 churches before they found one to support their gay child. Ryan and her team have also developed a “Best Practice” family education booklet series in English, Spanish, and Chinese and a faith-based series that show families how to support their LGBT children. “We have to meet people where they are,” she says.

Eliminating Solomon’s Choice

When Wendy Montgomery couldn’t get answers from Mormon church-based materials that advised “it’s just a phase” and referred her to mental health providers who offered “conversion therapy,” she sought help outside her community. She reached out to Mitch Mayne, who blogs about being openly gay and Mormon, and has collaborated with Ryan on curricula and training for Mormon religious leaders. Mayne connected the two women, and Montgomery found the information she had been desperately searching for.

After Jordan came out, Montgomery learned from the Family Acceptance Project that many of the things parents do out of care and concern to help their child be accepted by others — such as trying to change their child’s sexual orientation — were experienced by their LGBT child as rejection. So it was a revelation to see the project’s research showing that such behaviors were linked with serious health consequences, like the suicidal thoughts and depression Jordan expressed as the family struggled to find its way. She wishes she’d had that information when Jordan first came out.

Montgomery says Ryan’s work removes that choice from the conversation. “That’s what the genius of the Family Acceptance Project is. It shows you a way to keep your conservatively held religious beliefs… but still love and accept and support your LGBT child.”

That’s the core of the Family Acceptance Project’s work: keeping the focus on behavior and family bonds and aligning the project’s approach with the family’s underlying values. “We’re not saying to people, ‘You have to change your doctrine.’ We’re saying that if you want to protect your child from harm, you need to change or engage in these supportive behaviors,” says Ryan. “That’s enabled us to work with families from all sorts of backgrounds, including very religiously and socially conservative families.”

Since making the video and helping to found LGBT-supportive Mormon organizations like Mama Dragons, Montgomery can barely keep up with the 100 or more messages she receives each week — many of them gut-wrenching pleas for help — from fellow church members trying to navigate similar circumstances. She always sends back the link to the project’s booklet or video. “If a Mormon parent watches that, they will see themselves reflected,’ she says. “It is giving them permission to still love their child and keep their faith,” adding, “It’s silly that we need permission, but sometimes we do.”

The real beauty of the Family Acceptance Project, Montgomery says, is that “it goes upstream.” Help the parents to understand, she says, echoing the lessons of Ryan’s work, and you save the child. “If I have to choose between helping the child and helping the parents, I’ll help the parents. Because I can help the child for a minute when I’m talking to him, but the parents can help him for his lifetime.”