Thoughts on the Guest panel

I missed class on tuesday and forgot that we were having people come to speak to us on thursday. When I first walked into the class i thought I had walked into the wrong class. I thought the guessing game was pretty interesting, it was pretty suprising that the first things they encouraged us to ask about were the things that you are typically not supposed to ask people about when you first get to know them: religion, political views and personal feelings. Based on the reactions of the panelists it seemed like our class was more reserved in the questions we asked them than they were used to. This might have been because we were in a class or because it was 8am, as was joked about. It was interesting that the by having us try to use stereotypes about gay people to try to guess who was gay, they were able to show us that you really can't tell. It was interesting listening to their stories about the gay community here on campus, I knew there was a glbt resource center but I had always thought of it as being like an office where you could go if you were being discriminated against. I didn't know that it was also a place for people to hang out and socialize. I also didn't know that the allies was a group that exists. The guy who is a member of that group had an interesting perspective because he faces some of the stigma that gay people do when he's around homophobic people and even around his gay friends he faces some confusion at times that he presented in a comical way but I could also see as being a real issue.