Three Pennsylvania college students will continue their education with the help of the Point Foundation, a national scholarship organization for LGBT students. The recipients were among 52 students selected from more than 2,000 applicants across the country. While they are at different steps in their education journey, all of them have made it a point to protect marginalized voices.
Taking that first step
Felipe Gomez emigrated from Colombia to the United States with his mother in 2004. While he was still young at the time, the 18-year-old noted that his culture shaped the way his family viewed him.
“Growing up feeling different was hard,” said Gomez, who is gay. “Obviously there’s no gay life in Colombia specifically where I’m from. It was hard not knowing that what I was feeling was actually a thing, [that] being attracted to the same sex was not abnormal. When I was growing up, I never had a figure to look at because of my family and their religious tendencies.”
Gomez ultimately created a gay-straight alliance at his school in Hialeah, Fla., and graduated in June summa cum laude. He will continue his education at the University of Pennsylvania, which he said has an “amazing” LGBT center.
“I visited a lot of schools last fall,” Gomez said. “I visited like six and, by far, the best LGBT center and the most prominent queer society was at Penn, so that definitely drew me in.”
While Gomez isn’t sure what he wants to do as a career, he said Penn would allow him to explore his interests. He added he would ideally like to start a nonprofit and has a strong interest in community service.
“Where I’m from here in Hialeah, which is close to Miami, there is not a lot of community service particularly serving to LGBT people,” Gomez said. “So I really want to dive into that in Philly because I really want to support that side of me.”
Finding validation
Valerie Weisler already has one year at Muhlenberg College under her belt and said her freshman year “transformed” her.
During her first six months of being out, the West Nyack, N.Y., native said she wore her gym clothes to school so she would not have to deal with rumors about “checking out” girls in the locker room. However, Weisler also said she became the school’s “token gay kid” and “symbol of diversity.”
Now, the 19-year-old said the majority of her friends at Muhlenberg are LGBT.
“That was an incredible feeling to be in an academic space where I knew I didn’t have to darken part of myself because the only part that was prominent was my identity,” Weisler said.
She noted a similar experience while attending a Point Foundation ceremony with other award recipients. She said it was “gratifying” to look around, knowing that every single person in the room was LGBT.
“To feel at home for the first time and to walk into a room and know, I don’t have to come out and I don’t have to be someone’s signature gay person; I get to just be Val, was a really incredible feeling and gave me this rare opportunity to focus on who Val is for the first time,” she said.
Weisler runs the Validation Project, an international social-justice organization, and plans to bring the project to the Allentown School District to let students know about opportunities outside of the classroom.
“Our main goal is to prove to my generation that they have worth at a time when most people tell them that they don’t have worth,” Weisler said of the organization’s goal. “[I want] to teach them how to use that worth to go out there and solve problems that they’re passionate about.”
Continuing the journey
The Point Foundation scholarship will help Adil Mansoor go back to school to receive his master in fine arts in directing at Carnegie Mellon University.
“I feel like Carnegie Mellon is just very critically and intelligently thinking about the future of theater and I feel like the program is aware that many of our current models aren’t working,” the 31-year-old said. “The current models in theater very much set up barriers that prevent marginalized people from being a part of the conversation, be it as audience members or as artists.”
Mansoor, who identifies as queer, said he grew up in a single-family, low-income home and it prevented him from participating in unpaid internships within the theater realm. He noted that most internships are 40 hours a week and are often required for entry-level positions, closing the doors to marginalized people.
As the founder of Hatch Arts Collective, a group creating socially engaged theater, and as the artistic director of LGBT-youth arts group Dreams of Hope, Mansoor is not a stranger to centering the voices of marginalized communities. He said Carnegie Mellon will help him continue this mission.
“One of the questions I was asked in my interview at Carnegie was, ‘What is the future of theater and how are you a part of that?’ That department knows that things have to change.”
Mansoor said the scholarship will empower him to achieve his goals.
“It makes it possible for me to go to school and have a sustainable life and impact the work I am able to do,” he said. “It reduces my student loans. It reduces my dependency on working all the time every minute of my graduate-school experience. It makes it so I get to be an artist, a thinker and a person I want to be.”