Every other week, a group of St. Peter students gather together after school to socialize, learn, and support each other. Though this is a common experience for high school students, this particular group isn’t so common: it’s the inaugural year for the St. Peter High School LGBT group. LGBT students and their straight allies come together to openly discuss and share the experience of being lesbian, gay, bisxual, or trans* in St. Peter, something that would have been unheard of not so long ago.
Jennifer Koehler, special education teacher and co-advisor to the group, explains that the students approached her with a desire to start the group. She reached out to the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) program to discover whether any Gustavus students would be interested co-facilitating the group. “This was a stellar opportunity for a committed and well-prepared student to apply their education toward making a real impact in our community,” said Martin Lang, director of GWSS and associate professor of Communication Studies. He knew just the right candidate for the job, and Katlyn Alm ’16 jumped at the opportunity. “I’ve always sought out positions to teach others specifically through workshops, and it was a topic I’m really passionate about,” she said. “I really got into workshop development when I co-created Happy, Healthy, Hot, a comprehensive sex education workshop, as a Peer Assistant. Then being a GWSS minor and taking classes and just being immersed in Queer and feminist theories really struck me in a way that my other education didn’t. I’ve really appreciated getting this opportunity to apply the information that I’ve gotten here at Gustavus to a real life situation with students.”
Each meeting, Katlynn brings a new topic for the group to learn about and discuss. Katlynn explains, “I don’t want it to feel like it’s a class that they have to come to, so we always do something interactive. Usually I’ll give them some information and then they’ll get time to talk to a friend about it and do an activity. For example, when we did sex vs. gender, we did an activity about pronouns. We had the students partner up and introduce their partner with the wrong pronoun just to get an idea of what it feels like to be mis-gendered or to have the wrong pronoun used.”
Not only do students spend time after school discussing these issues during their meetings, but they also meet with mentors. Katlynn has connected the students with mentors Queers and Allies student group at Gustavus, and the high school students would like to begin mentoring middle school students soon as well.
The group and mentorship program have created spaces for the participants to be themselves, something hard to do in the hallways where they might hear “that’s so gay,” or at home, where their families might not accept their sexuality or gender identity. However, with support from Katlynn, Jen and their peers, the students have found a space to feel comfortable in their identities, to learn and to grow.