This month a GALAEI-sponsored LGBT student group at a local alternative high school has launched a great new quarterly newsletter featuring work by queer Latino students.
The El Centro Hotspot is a publication of the Home for Queers and Allies (HQ&A), an after-school gay-straight-alliance-like program for students at El Centro de Estudiantes, an alternative high school in Northeast Philly.
“GALAEI helped the students form HQ&A,” said GALAEI youth development coordinator Fransisco Zavala. “The small group very quickly thought to start a newspaper-magazine type thing and the El Centro Hotspot was born.”
Topics relate to various happenings in and around the school and contain LGBT-focused articles, though the publication is not exclusively LGBT. The love-themed February issue contains: a 101-style introduction to reading sheet music, top-five artists and songs of the week, a Dear Abby-styled column, staff highlights, and — thanks to GALAEI — an article on the 10 steps to properly put on a condom.
“We had several students ask us about proper condom usage,” said Zavala. “Since the February edition was about love, and International Condom Day was the day before Valentine’s Day, we thought it would be a great fit for the Hotspot.”
One student in particular, Emmanual Coreano, has taken the lead on the project, said Zavala.
“It’s important for me to mention that Emmanual has really been an extraordinary leader in both HQ&A and the newsletter,” Zavala said. “As a student of El Centro, he went out of his way to seek the needs and interest of his classmates for the newsletter and wrote most of the publication.”
Here’s an excerpt from Coreano’s introduction in the newsletter:
“Welcome to the very first issue of the El Centro Hotspot. In this issue we are revolving around the theme of love and acceptance. It has been such a long way coming to the creation of this newsletter. We want it to go far and reach the hands of youth all around Philadelphia.”
Currently, the newsletter is published quarterly, but if there is enough demand, the students will publish more often, said Zavala.
For more information, visit www.galaei.org.