Happy BirthGay CASCADE [Extended Version]

CASCADE Says Happy Birthday (originally published in The Hilltop)

LGBTQA Student Group at Howard University celebrates another year as a succesful campus organization.

by Bree Gant, Photo Editor

The gay community at Howard has flourished throughout the history of the university - both in and out of the closet - and has bloomed into a strong support network of open student activists.

This Coalition of Activist Students Celebrating the Acceptance of Diversity and Equality (CASCADE) honored the “birthday” of the organization with a panel discussion on being gay at Howard over the past few decades.

“You asking me to do this has made me think about things that I haven’t thought about before,” said James Foster, Howard alumnus from class of 1973. Foster relayed his own closeted experience at Howard referencing organizations like the gospel choir, new to the campus during his matriculation, with several gay and lesbian student members.

Britney Bennett, a lifestlye event coordinator and more recent Howard alumna mentioned another campus organization and their LGBT membership saying “every gay person in Campus Pals had to try out twice, some even three times.” Bennett came out to friends and family at 16, but still there were rough times at home because of her sexuality, so when she got to Howard she said “I wasn’t going to have any ‘coming out’ moments. I was just going to be me, all the time.”

Sterling Washington, a founder of the LGBT group that became CASCADE, was also on the panel, and said “I was in Fine Arts, so even before BLAGOSAH [currently CASCADE] was around, it felt like we had a student group.”

The panel included men and women of the black gay community at Howard from Foster’s time in the early 1970’s to today with current CASCADE President Amari Ice.

Even couple Kareem Murphy and Dwayne Davis, who met here at Howard in the 1990’s and are now married, shared their stories of violence and harassment on campus. Murphy said, “This is beyond what we could imagine,” referencing the campus climate for those who identified as homosexual at Howard. Murphy was attacked on campus while a student here. And Davis’ welcome to campus was no better. His freshman year, a young male student was beaten up and tossed out of a freshmen male dormitory with the warning “We don’t want any faggots.”

Foster noted, along with the agreement of Blackburn Student Director Roberta McLeod, that “when we went to Howard, you didn’t go there to beat anybody up.”

Contrary to popular belief, administration was not the largest obstacle in gay student activism on campus. “The movement on this campus, the torture, came form the students, not the administration,” said McLeod. She went on to explain how students stopped the first attempt at the formation of a gay student group on campus.

The panel challenged the current students of CASCADE to step outside themselves. It is no longer enough to merely be open.

“The real gay community don’t look like this,” said Aiyi’nah Ford, a radical grassroots activist, artist and radio personality. She was referencing the lack of ethnic diversity on the gay scene outside of Howard. Ford confessed during the event to McLeod that she was her Howard crush.

Ford closed with a charge to everyone in the room, gay or allied, saying “We talkin,’ we rappin.’ But what are y’all going to do?”