On the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 22, the Elizabethtown College Gender-Sexuality Alliance (GSA) and Stonewall Community hosted a rock painting event for Bisexuality Awareness Week. The event, which took place in the Bird Cage from 5-6 p.m., was attended by many Etown students, both members and allies of the LGBTQIA+ community. GSA Vice President junior Mackenzie Pollachek attended the event, and when asked about the planning of the event had this to say: “Last year [the GSA] wanted to do more for Bi[sexuality] Awareness Week. This year, we’re doing rock painting, and the rocks will be used in a treasure hunt we’ll be holding later this month.”
When asked why the event this year was rock painting, Pollachek elaborated further on the benefits seen of rock painting as an event, such as being a proven destressor activity. “Everybody loves rock painting,” she said, “A lot of people in the queer community face far more stress than their CisHet peers because of the stigmas that surround them.” When asked if there was anything else she would like to share with the students of Etown, Pollachek wished for Etown students to educate themselves on issues surrounding the queer community and to support in any way they can.
The energy in the rock painting event was extremely welcoming, with each student happily working on painting their own rock, but not so engrossed as to be unwilling to greet any newcomers. People painted rocks not only as a means of preparing for the Treasure Hunt on Sept. 29, but also simply to destress, as Pollachek had suggested would be the case, with such personal designs ranging from strawberries to snowmen.
I was able to get ahold of GSA President Samhar Almomani, another member of the queer community at Etown and the Resident Assistant to the Stonewall floor of Myer Hall, to ask him some questions regarding the event. “I think bi[sexual] visibility is often overlooked,” Almomani said on the subject of why this event was important. “It helps to clarify misconceptions.”
We then discussed many misconceptions that bisexual individuals face, even within the LGBTQIA+ community. Many of these issues are well documented and supported by studies done by both the Movement Advancement Project and by Pew Research Center which suggested that on account of a few factors, that most bisexual members of the queer community are either overlooked or simply misrepresented. According to the Pew Research study, only 9% of bisexual adults living in America are part of same-sex relationships, whereas 84% are part of opposite-sex relationships, a figure that when combined with a tendency of people to only look at surface level characteristics, and it is understandable how many misconceptions of bisexual people arise. Further confounding things is that in the study conducted by Pew Research, wherein members of the LGBTQIA+ community were asked how important their orientation is to their identity, only 45% of bisexual people responded that their orientation was somewhat important or more to their identity, compared to 74% of gay respondents and 79% of lesbian respondents to provide the same level of importance. With these factors, it’s easy to understand why two of the most prominent stigmas surrounding the bisexual community is “gay but unwilling to commit” and “actually just straight.”
As Pollachek wished for the students of Etown to do, the most important thing you can do to support the queer community in our endeavors is to educate yourself on the issues that we face on a day-to-day basis. Hopefully, one day all members of the LGBTQIA+ community will be given their due representation.
