Thanks for your comment. I don’t, of course, know for sure that none of them are queer. What I do know, though, is that many of their comments so far have been ignorant of queer issues, culture and identities – which to me says they’re not queer. Certainly there have been some straight folks who have been queer-friendly, such as two women I talked with this afternoon.

It sounds like your work environment is very queer-friendly, which is great. I have many queer-friendly straight friends who I adore and feel just as comfortable with as I do with my queer friends. However, so far, I’m not sure this is a queer-friendly environment. Today the guest speaker – who is a straight man who does safe space trainings and talked about diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice – said he felt that the issue of whether sexuality can be changed is debatable. This shocked me. Now, I should say, he said many other things that I thought were excellent. But in a presentation on diversity and social justice to stand in front of a class and say you think sexual orientation is a choice?!? WTF? I can’t even remember the last time I had a conversation with someone about that – it is so accepted in the circles I live in that it’s *not* a choice.

You aren’t the only queer I know who loses track of all the letters. However, I think it is different when a professor forgets the letters *while talking to a group of students who are going to be working with queer youth and kids from queer families and who don’t seem particularly queer-friendly (with exceptions, of course).* She is modeling behavior, and I don’t agree with what she modeled.

And even if they are all straight, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a great cohort with them. The grad students in my department have a fantastic community, and I feel very comfortable and at home with them despite being the only “practicing” queer (there are a couple 1-on-the-Kinsey-scale type bisexual girls). It helps that everyone is totally accepting, so hopefully that is the case with your group as well. I think personality and common interests have a lot more to do with creating community than sexual orientation. I once met up with a group of queer astronomers at a conference, and though they should technically be “my people” I was profoundly irritated by many of them and we didn’t form a good group at all. So give these folks a chance, you might be surprised.

And, a confession – sometimes *I* lose track of the letters in the acronym, especially when it starts getting so inclusive that the letter Q appears multiple times (the Q center at UW does this). Bad queer, no toaster for me.