For the beginning of season 2, we continued to analyse trends from the interviews conducted. It was interesting to note that many people had very limited amounts of knowledge apart from the basics. The basics being, male x male is gay and female x female is lesbian.

I’m not too surprised though as I have many friends who are LGBT and by being part of this GC I have a more varied knowledge of this topic. However, one thing that really interested me was that there were a few people that didn’t know what bisexual meant. Although this could be due to language barriers. Some of the participants weren’t full English speakers so maybe they knew about bisexuality but in their mother tongue. 

We also noticed that most people throughout all grades (9,10,11,12) didn’t know what pansexuality was, along with polygamy. However, thats understandable since those are more rare terms that aren’t used daily. Once again, since I have friends from those communities, I know those terms.

After analysing the trends and the questions asked, we started planning out an information session which answers the questions and knowledge gaps.

We had a session where we analyzed survey results regarding ‘relationships in our school’ from my grade (11).

There was a trend in the word “gay” being used as a derogatory word. I’m a bit surprised that the word is used in a derogatory way. When I filled out the survey, this did not cross my mind possibly because I have not witnessed it enough. Or it may be that it flew over my head because I have friends who use “gay” without an overly negative connotation. 

One good thing about the survey was that there were positive mentions of focus equality as we promote acceptance in the school. I was quite happy hearing that since it feels like I haven’t done much in the group or to help the GC. After further thought, I realized that due to the large size of our group it was easier to lose track of the things that an individual does to contribute to the bigger picture/goal.

After this, we started planning and working towards our 2 events: information session and arts day. I took part in gathering information for the information session and by putting the presentation together. I focused on global statistics as I think that statistics are an effective way of delivering information to an audience.

Furthermore, we found a few of the many famous LGBTQ+ examples such as Ke$ha.

I think it was important that we did this as non-LGBT people like me don’t really realise the large scale of the community. I think it also humanises them more so that they’re not alienated in a sense (out-group homogeneity).

Unfortunately due to some communication problems we didn’t get to hold the events we were working up to in the past few weeks. Now we’re going combine these events with our biggest event of the year: Pink Dot.

Apart from knowledge, I also noticed that it’s a bit harder to work in big groups. In this GC we constantly split up into to smaller groups of 8 to 5 people. I realised it’s easier to feel as if I’m not doing much to contribute to the groups perhaps because of the overwhelming size of our groups. Working in big groups does get work done, however makes me feel a bit useless. However, if I zoom out and look at the bigger picture it takes a while to realise that with a group of almost 40 students, it’s easy to get lost.

Looking ahead, I know that there are still a few people that don’t give much respect to the LGBTQ+ community and so I think that there is a lot of work to do. Especially because if my grade is like this openly, there may be other high schoolers with this mindset both openly and secretly. This was evident when we had guest speakers who came and spoke about the LGBTQ+ community and to spread awareness. I don’t think that a lot of people really understand what it’s like to be part of the community as well as the fact that they’re people too. Meaning they have emotions as well. I hope that this mindset changes in the near future.