Happy Monday, Saddleback Students!
This week at Saddleback, we’re celebrating LGBTQIA+ Pride, as 90% of you won’t be on campus during traditional Pride Month. It’s Gaypril! I hope I’ll see you at some of the activities that ASG has planned this week to get us in the Pride spirit early this year.
If you identify as LGBTQIA+, as I do, I want you to know that Saddleback embraces you (not “tolerates” you) for who you are. It is the differences among us that make us so interesting and create community. What makes you different makes you all the more beautiful to us. No matter what is happening in the world, you are loved here.
For everyone else (also loved!), please know how much your embrace and support of your LGBTQIA+ friends and peers means to them in their ability to explore their identity, in their desire to be one authentic person and in their physical and emotional safety. Without allies, we walk through the world polarized and in search only of those who are like us, marching toward nihilism. With allies, we are, each and every one of us, supported in our journeys and marching toward a better world.
No matter who you are, there are things about you that make you different and unique. For most of you, this is the most common time of life (and college is the place) to explore and celebrate what makes you different and unique, to own and embrace everything that is part of your identify…with Pride.
We are united as a community in our differences and in our sameness—for underneath all the differences that make up our identities, the same red blood courses through our veins and the same love for one another lives in our hearts.
This is Saddleback. You are beautiful, loved and precious…exactly as you are. So be you.
Elliot
Dr. Elliot Stern
President, Saddleback College