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Fellowship Report

II. Overview/Summary:

      I did my Stanford Pride Fellowship at the Danish National Association of Gays and Lesbians (LGBT Danmark for short), during the summer of 2006. I started on June 26th and ended on August 25th. I worked in the main office of the organization, located in the heart of Copenhagen, where most of my work was on a project-based level. My fellowship experience covered a broad range of activities: from organizing a protest and participating in the Copenhagen Pride Week events to developing study questionnaires and editing educational website content. I was able to draw heavily on my background in education and sexual health during several of my projects, which was an enriching experience. For other projects I had no special background knowledge, but I was able to be flexible and learn on the go, which was also a very positive experience. In addition to the professional work relationships I formed with colleagues, I also developed personal friendships with many colleagues that allowed me to feel like a part of the Copenhagen queer community. 

      I do not think I have ever before been able to integrate as many of my interests and passions into one experience as I have during my time as a Stanford Pride Fellow. Education, sexual health, LGBT rights, and activism were all a part of my daily work, and they are all things that I care deeply about. Furthermore, the fellowship gave me the added bonus of being able to rekindle my ties to Denmark, my native country, and to experience the queer community in Denmark, which I have never done before. It was also important to me that I had the opportunity to “try out” health-related work, as I hope to work with health-related subjects in the future, after I graduate. The fellowship experience has convinced me that there is a lot of work to be done within the LGBT community in terms of health, and I hope that I may be able to focus on LGBT-specific aspects of health in the future for my work. After the fellowship, I have also been toying with the idea of returning to my native Denmark later in life to work, at least for a while, with the LGBT community there. In retrospect, I do not think it would be too much to say that the Pride Fellowship has been one of the most personally enriching experiences I have had.

III. Report and Reflections:

      The first thing that I learned upon meeting with people from LGBT Danmark once I got to Denmark was that the leadership of the Copenhagen Youth Department had recently had a major fracture. This was a result of part of the leadership wanting to become independent from LGBT Danmark, and the other half wanting to keep things the way they were. The result was that half the leadership walked away from the organization and refused to participate any longer. Since this had happened almost right before I arrived, things in the Youth Department were a lot less organized than I had hoped for. It also meant that since their attention had been on other things, the leaders of the youth department had not given too much thought to my arrival. It quickly became clear to me that the project I had hoped to work on: integrating LGBT issues into the sexual health curriculum in Danish public schools, was probably too large to tackle given the organizational issues that were going on at the same time in the organization. Luckily, we quickly realized that there would be several other projects for me to work on over the summer that were of such a scope that they could be completed in the time I had available to me.  

      One of my first projects (which was an impromptu one) was to help organize and execute a protest against a homophobic reggae artist named Buju Banton, who was performing in Copenhagen. He has written violently homophobic lyrics and has repeatedly refused to retract them, even going as far as to say that they have a “good message,” which was the reason that LGBT Danmark was protesting. With almost three-hundred people attending the protest at its peak and several media outlets covering our activities, it was a big success. My role in the protest was to help design flyers, answer calls from the media, and develop argumentation for our protest messages (as well as translating these to English to make sure that our message would be internationally available). It was quite exciting to get to be a part of something like this, and it was amazing to see how quickly things developed from a dialogue meeting with the concert arrangers to a full-scale protest once they refused to cancel the concert.

      My next, and probably largest, project was to help design and launch a study of prostitution, with the specific target group of young men who have sex with men. While this was quite different from what I had originally proposed to do, it was actually one of the things I discussed with LGBT Danmark when I met with them during December of 2005. At that point, however, it seemed as if the sexual health education issue would be most ready for tackling during the summer, but in reality it turned out that the prostitution project was the first to be ready. When I started working on it, there was a rough draft of a questionnaire available, and my job was to get the study to the point where it could be launched. This meant that I spent a lot of time working on the study questionnaire itself. Having taking a lot of psychology, and having been a research assistant for two different psychology studies became quite useful during this time. The people who had designed the rough draft had not really done so with psychological principles in mind, I think, and that meant that I had to add a lot of answer possibilities and rephrase questions to make sure they were not leading, etc. It was really exciting to be able work on “my own” study for a change. The studies I have worked on at Stanford have all been the projects of post-docs, and I have had very specific tasks to do. With the prostitution study, I was basically given free reins to finish developing the study. Of course I had meetings to consult with the committee working on the project, but I was the person primarily responsible for getting the study ready to launch. After I completed the design of the questionnaire, it was also my job to get the study online (we decided to collect all data online). This proved to be a bit of a challenge, but once I learned how to use the questionnaire plugin for the content management system that LGBT Danmark uses to maintain their website, I was good to go. The study is now completely ready, and some gay sites are already linking to it. The last time I checked, we had close to 50 completed responses. Once the study is linked to through the main gay dating site in Denmark, though, we expect several hundred responses. I’m hoping that I’ll be “let in” on the results once they are finished, since it will be interesting to see how a study that I was primarily responsible for launching actually turns out data-wise. The online questionnaire is available at http://www.lgbt.dk/om-foreningen/kbhung-forside/spoergeskema.html, but it is in Danish, so you might not get much out of looking at it.

      After the prostitution study had been launched, my next project was to update a sexual health information website aimed at gay men. The name of the website is TidtilTjek, which means “Time for a Check-up”. It aims to provide simple, but accurate information about STI’s as relevant to gay men, with the hope that more gay men will practice safer sex and get regular check-ups. My job as a sexual health peer counselor at the SHRPC at Vaden was very useful here, as I could fall back on what I have learned about sexual health at Stanford. I had to strike a careful balance between too much and too little information, though. I probably have a tendency to give a lot of information, but for the audience of this website, it was better to use the smallest amount of information that would still get all the important messages across. For this project I also worked with a committee that oversaw the website, but I was the one responsible for implementing the changes that were eventually agreed upon. The website can be found at http://www.tidtiltjek.dk/.

      Most of the remainder of my time was spent on a web-portal meant to teach 7th to 10th graders about homosexuality. There was an important break in this work, however. During the week of August 14th, Copenhagen Pride Week was going on, and I helped LGBT Danmark during some of the days by manning their tent at City Hall Square, and by participating in a national coming out day of the 14th where people walked hand in hand in same-sex “couples” down the main walking street of Copenhagen. I even ended up on the evening news on this day with the rest of the holding-hands group (though only for a very short period of time as an introduction to a clip about a lesbian coming out story). On Saturday the 19th of August I also participated in the Pride Parade as part of LGBT Danmark’s float, which was quite the experience. Back to the web-portal, though. The site had never been officially launched when I started working on it. It was in pretty bad shape, but had to be launched because of the funding that had been given to develop it. My job was to compile a report on how to update and edit the website to get it into a “launchable” condition. For this project, my experience with education as a TA was quite useful. I’m anxious to see how many of my changes are implemented before the site is launched, because I think it is unacceptable to launch it as is. We also decided that another website for the same purpose would eventually have to be created. The existing one has to be scrapped after it’s been launched for a year, because it’s too tied down by restrictions created by the contract with the company that created it to make it a viable long term option. The site can be found at http://lbl.skolemedia.dk/wm1, but my changes will probably not be implemented for a while.

      Most of the work that I have been doing will be more or less invisible to the LGBT community in Denmark. That is to say, they will not know that I have been spent most of the summer working on these projects, because so much of my work has been “behind the scenes.” However, the community will still benefit from my efforts. For example, all of the websites I have been working on will be more usable with my changes implemented, and the prostitution study will provide important information to combat what seems to be a rising trend among young people to accept money and/or gifts to provide sexual services. For the organization, my work was of course more directly noticeable, because a lot of work got done that they would otherwise have to try go get busy activists and volunteers to do. The projects I think will have the most long-term impact are the prostitution study and the web-portal about homosexuality. The prostitution study will provide the basis for future work to be done on this important issue, and the web-portal could potentially be used by hundreds of students when they learn about homosexuality in the future.

      The thing I think that I will remember the most about the fellowship experience is getting to have such a crucial role in designing the prostitution study. Not only because it is such an interesting subject, but also because as a psychology major (and budding psychologist), working with studies is near and dear to my heart. Thus, getting to basically design a study was a really cool experience for me. And it will be even more exciting once data analysis has been done. Another thing I will remember for a long time from now is not something I have done, but someone I have met. Hanne, the office manager at LGBT Danmark, has turned out to be quite an amazing person. She has been my mentor this summer, not only in terms of work, but also in terms of life in general. She has an amazing ability to see right through people (sometimes I have a feeling she can almost read thoughts), and we have had some amazing conversations over the course of the summer. She is probably the person at LGBT Danmark that I am most excited to see once I go back to Denmark again to visit.

      One of the most important things I have learned is to become better at working independently. For most of my projects, I was simply given a goal (or a rough outline of one), and how to get there was pretty much up to me. I think that at Stanford I’m used to having a lot more guidance along the way about how to get to an end goal, but it’s been nice to have to work more by myself, since that’s probably more like how it’ll be in the “real world.” It was difficult at times because I often had to figure out for myself where to go next, and it can be harder to motivate yourself when the process is unclear, but it was also an enriching experience to work in this way. As I mentioned earlier, I have also realized that it would be a really interesting possibility to try to work with LGBT-related health issues in the future. The work I have done seems to indicate that such a niche actually exists, though whether or not I’ll be able to fill it in the future remains to be seen. I have also learned (and re-learned) a lot of things about Danish culture that I had forgotten in the time I have spent in the US. Being in Denmark for 10 weeks was the closest to actually “living” in Denmark that I have gotten since I moved to the U.S. Normally, I’m there for only a few weeks on vacation, and everything is a mad rush to see as many family members as possible before time runs out. This time, things were way more relaxed in that regard, and I got to experience a more or less “normal” day to day life as just another person living in Denmark. This has been really important for me in terms of getting more in touch with my Danish heritage.

      The most difficult part of the fellowship was also one of the most enriching. Working independently was quite hard at times (as mentioned above), but it was an important experience nonetheless. Figuring out what to do and finding motivation to do it was at times more difficult than I would have liked, but it was also important that I did not have the projects handed to me on a silver platter so that the only thing left for me to do would have been to follow instructions. While at times I felt like the balance of working independently and being smothered by too many instructions leaned too much toward independence (and me not always knowing what to do), I think I learned more from it being this way than if it had leaned toward too many instructions. I think it was also difficult because we are sort of spoiled at Stanford in that there is usually always someone there to help us, and it was probably breaking out of that habit that was the most difficult. I think I’m happy with the way that everything turned out, however, because I would have been complaining if things had been too easy. Of course, saying goodbye to my family again after spending so much time with them was difficult as well, but that’s not really related to my “official” fellowship description.