By Shana SagerThe Daily Northwestern
When Elizabeth Birch was little, she found it amazing that in a field of a million daisies, there could be one pink one. It, like her, was different.
At age 11, she knew that she was born a lesbian, but she didn’t know that it would cause any problems.
Birch, the former president and executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, urged an audience of about 40 Thursday night in Fisk Auditorium to abandon indifference toward the women’s movement.
Under Birch’s direction, the campaign – the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy organization – opened its national headquarters in Washington and increased its membership from 100,000 in 1995 to 600,000 in 2004. Birch also spoke at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, making her the first LGBT activist to address a national political conference.
College Feminists, the event’s sponsor, brought Birch to campus because her background shows the alignment between feminist and LGBT movements, group leaders said. While the College Feminists’ main goal is to promote equality between the sexes, co-director Kamardip Singh, a Weinberg senior, said that “there are many different types of feminism.”
Birch, who currently runs Rosie O’Donnell’s KidRo Productions, said that while the growth of the evangelical movement threatens the LGBT movement, progress has been made because young people have continued to come out and “add truth to the conversation.”
“We should not take gay marriage as the measure of progress,” Birch said, because it is “the most controversial issue in Christian history.” To illustrate the progress of other LGBT issues, she added that homosexuals live in 99.7 percent of the counties in the United States; three out of five lesbians are mothers; and one out of five gay men are fathers.
Even so, Birch argued that more can be done on a local level to promote equality. O’Donnell and Birch, for example, donated time and money to shelters in Baton Rouge, a typically conservative area, after Hurricane Katrina.
“Now,” Birch said, “Baton Rouge has a little bit of a different view of gay people.”
Kelsey Pacha, co-president of Rainbow Alliance, said she enjoyed Birch’s focus on lesbian issues.
“Usually when you hear a gay speaker it generally focuses on men, unfortunately,” the SESP junior said. “Lesbians don’t have that much representation within the gay community sometimes.”
College Feminists hold meetings every Tuesday to discuss issues such as rape, domestic violence and women’s health. They also will offer a self-defense course on Nov. 29.
“We want to offer a place where people can discuss these issues without feeling judged,” said College Feminists co-director Katie Wright, a Weinberg sophomore.”We’re definitely growing, and if we can get our name out and have people know that College Feminists are strong on this campus, then that will be a success.”
Reach Shana Sager at [email protected].
