A Glimpse of Casual Queerness: The Radical Progress of Queer Visibility in Weimar Film and the Inevitable Backlash That Followed

In looking back at German history, the Weimar Era and the 1920s, in particular, are often regarded as a time of unrestricted frivolity and the catharsis of post-war anxiety. In retrospect, it can be temptingly easy to credit the changing political landscape and liberalization of German society between 1918 and 1933 as a brief but inherently doomed moment of progressivism that necessarily would give way to a strident, reactionary backlash. Often, the increased visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ individuals during this time is regarded as a symptom of the “anything goes” attitude for which the Weimar Era has been famous. Dismissing the Weimar Republic as frivolous experiment in this way is an oversimplification that overlooks the important progress achieved in the fields of psychology and sexology during this time. In reality, the research performed by scientists like psychologist Magnus Hirschfeld proves that the progress being made for queer Germans during the Weimar years was meaningful and anything but frivolous. In the years following World War II, policymakers of East and West Germany attempted to regain stability, and in doing so adopted a more conservative approach to the issue of homosexuality than their Weimar Republic predecessors. The reactionary movement helped to confirm the sweeping dismissal of the Weimar Era as a moment of chaos and confusion best left behind. This reestablishment of gender norms is clearly illustrated in both the later version of Mädchen in Uniform and Anders als du und ich, in which changing rhetoric and scientific understandings of sexuality demonstrate a significant shift in the way Germans were thinking about queerness

Recognizing, Treating, and Preventing Trauma in LGBTQ Youth

Extensive research has demonstrated that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionally affected by a variety of traumatic experiences including verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. This paper will review common traumatic experiences and their negative sequelae among LGBTQ youth including victimization directly related to youths’ gender identity and expression or sexual orientation. We will also discuss research regarding factors such as parental acceptance that may mitigate negative psychological impacts of this abuse. Guidelines for assessing and treating LGBTQ youth who have experienced trauma will be reviewed. A case example of a queer-identified youth with a history of trauma prior to and while in government care will be provided to illustrate the complexity of the impact of trauma on multiple domains of functioning and how this is exacerbated for LGBTQ youth who often face further discrimination and victimization based on their status

People, Land, Arts, Culture and Engagement: Taking Stock of the Place Initiative

This report serves as a point of entry into creative placemaking as defined and supported by the Tucson Pima Arts Council's PLACE Initiative. To assess how and to what degree the PLACE projects were helping to transform communities, TPAC was asked by the Kresge Foundation to undertake a comprehensive evaluation. This involved discussion with stakeholders about support mechanisms, professional development, investment, and impact of the PLACE Initiative in Tucson, Arizona, and the Southwest regionally and the gathering of qualitative and quantitative data to develop indicators and method for evaluating the social impact of the arts in TPAC's grantmaking. The report documents one year of observations and research by the PLACE research team, outside researchers and reviewers, local and regional working groups, TPAC staff, and TPAC constituency. It considers data from the first four years of PLACE Initiative funding, including learning exchanges, focus groups, individual interviews, grantmaking, and all reporting. It is also informed by evaluation and assessment that occurred in the development of the PLACE Initiative, in particular, Maribel Alvarez's Two-Way Mirror: Ethnography as a Way to Assess Civic Impact of Arts-Based Engagement in Tucson, Arizona (2009), and Mark Stern and Susan Seifert's Documenting Civic Engagement: A Plan for the Tucson Pima Arts Council (2009). Both of these publications were supported by Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts, that promotes arts and culture as potent contributors to community, civic, and social change. Both publications describe how TPAC approaches evaluation strategies associated with social impact of the arts in Tucson and Pima County. This report outlines the local context and historical antecedents of the PLACE Initiative in the region with an emphasis on the concept of "belonging" as a primary characteristic of PLACE projects and policy. It describes PLACE projects as well as the role of TPAC in creating and facilitating the Initiative. Based on the collective understanding of the research team, impacts of the PLACE Initiative are organized into three main realms -- institutions, artists, and communities. These realms are further addressed in case studies from select grantees, whose narratives offer rich, detailed perspectives about PLACE projects in context, with all their successes, rewards, and challenges for artists, communities, and institutions. Lastly, the report offers preliminary research findings on PLACE by TPAC in collaboration with Dr. James Roebuck, codirector of the University of Arizona's ERAD (Evaluation Research and Development) Program

Authentic Youth and Young Adult Partnerships: Broadening the Narrative of LGBTQ Youth Homelessness

Lived experience generates knowledge not available through formal education and training. If lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and young adults (YYA) experiencing homelessness are to be effectively engaged, their needs met, and their successful transition out of homelessness facilitated, they must be partners in the creation of solutions meant to help them. That means that everyone working to address LGBTQ YYA homelessness – including policymakers, government officials, advocates, researchers, and service providers – need to understand how to partner authentically with YYA experiencing homelessness. This article will introduce a framework for authentic YYA partnerships, describe the philosophy and values underlying the True Colors Fund’s successful partnerships with YYA, and provide examples of how YYA partnerships have informed our work, and as a result the communities we work with. It will discuss how, through the organization’s partnerships with YYA, we have recognized the importance of (1) broadening the narrative about LGBTQ youth homelessness to include the various intersecting reasons LGBTQ youth become homeless and (2) moving beyond a single paradigm of risk/victimization to include resilience and possibility

They’re Crying in the All-Gender Bathroom: Navigating Belonging in Higher Education While First Generation and Nonbinary

Maintaining the sociocultural and interpersonal supports needed to succeed in higher education as a first-generation student can be very difficult due to a lack of familiarity with what brings success. When this identity intersects with a nonbinary gender identity, it further complicates higher education’s challenges and may make solutions impossible to come by. My experience sits at the intersection of these two identities and their gradual collision and connection with success in higher education. Through this narrative, I seek to unpack potential difficulties and nuances for the increasingly diverse body of first generation students and bring attention to the barriers in our social systems which may be blocking current and future students from achieving their full potential

From A Service-Learning to A Social-Change Model

Tutor education courses that prepare students to serve as peer writing consultants often include service learning; a typical servicelearning tutor education course involves sending students to tutor in local schools, usually in underserved neighborhoods. Existing writing center scholarship on service learning tends to overlook the limitations of this model. This article advances a radically different approach for tutor education where the course acts as an incubator for social change on campus. Informed by the principles advanced by the critical service learning movement, the course described here invites students to design and implement campus-based community building projects. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that a course focused on community building, rather than tutoring theory and strategies, can effectively prepare students to serve as peer writing consultants while imparting a heightened awareness of social inequities and a deep investment in the campus community.University Writing Cente

Los Angeles County Arts Commission Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative Literature Review

This literature review is intended to investigate and provide background information on how others have addressed the question of improving "diversity in cultural organizations, in the areas of their leadership, staffing, programming and audience composition", both through academic research and practitioner experience. The literature lends these concepts into a division by slightly different categories, as follows: Boards of Directors in Arts and Culture Organizations The Arts and Culture Workforce Audiences and ProgrammingAudiences and programming are closely intertwined in the literature, and thus are combined in this report. Culturally specific arts organizations and their potential contribution to diversity, cultural equity and inclusion in the arts ecology emerged as a potentially powerful but not yet fully understood set of actors, so this topic was added as a fourth section in this report: Culturally Specific Arts OrganizationsThe report begins with a background discussion on diversity, cultural equity and inclusion in arts and culture, and it concludes with a series of broad lessons that emerged from the literature that apply to all four of the areas identified by the Board of Supervisors in their motion