Rob Smith challenged students to seek different perspectives, create change and improve campus environments with examples of his life as an LGBT person.
Smith, an Iraq war veteran, author and journalist, planned to speak about his experiences as an LGBT person in the U.S. Army April 8, sponsored by the Patricia A. Doyle Center for Gender and Sexuality. Instead, Smith said that upon hearing that an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, was shot in the back in South Carolina while fleeing from a white police officer, he realized he wanted to take the lecture in a slightly different direction.
“The first step is to realize how those issues affect us right here and right now. Not in South Carolina, not in Ferguson, Missouri, not in New York City, but right here in Wisconsin,” Smith said.
Smith also read an excerpt from his book “Closets, Combats, and Coming Out,” and integrated some of those experiences into the lecture, but kept the focus on challenging the audience members.
“What I liked is that he talked about a lot of elements of identity and how they come together.” Clare Forstie, University Fellow at the Doyle Center for Gender and Sexuality said. “I think it is too easy to say this is the LGBTQ piece or this is the race piece, or keep them separate but I like that he brought a lot of different things together.”
At one point during the lecture Smith asked the audience to stand up if they had ever heard a racial slur. He then asked audience members to stay standing if they had immediately addressed that slur.
“It seems like when we have these conversations, they are always a problem for somebody else and not ourselves,” Smith said.
Smith asked the audience to repeat the exercise with slurs based on sexual orientation.
“I loved the fact that he made us do those exercises,” Layne Jackson junior graphic design major said. “I definitely was one of those people that when he asked if you say something, if you stand up against it, I don’t. It was kind of shocking to see there were some people still standing up and then there was me.”
Smith stressed the importance of college as a time to consider the big issues and meet new people from different backgrounds.
“One of the things that I found interesting was when he said that college is a place where you don’t have to conform to people who are like you,” Katelyn Winther sophomore criminal justice major said. “It’s a place where you need to search out people who are different and get their perspective and understand where they are coming from.”
Smith encouraged the audience to ask questions at the conclusion of the lecture and remained in the Nohr Gallery afterward to talk with students and discuss his book, which has been nominated for the 2015 Lambda Literary Award in the category of Biography/Memoir.