Professional Allies: The Storying of Allies to LGBTQ Students on a College Campus

Abstract

This article details the narratives of faculty and staff involved in a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) ally organization at a large southeastern state university. We illustrate how interview participants diverged from organizational literature on how to be an ally by offering a different narrative, one of professional responsibility to a diverse student body. We expound upon how this notion of professional responsibility differs from most models for understanding ally development and action. We suggest that from an organizational standpoint, these professional ally self-concepts make sense and should be taken into account when building ally organizations in educational settings.

Keywords:

• ally
• LGBTQ
• higher education
• narrative
• professional identity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all of the members of ALLIES who agreed to participate in this study and contributed to it by actively constructing the meaning of their work in a conversation with Broad. We also deeply appreciate the support of the director of the program and ALLIES during the time of the study. We could not have done this work without the transcribing support of Debbie Wallen and the administrative support of both the Department of Sociology and the Center for Women's Studies and Gender Research at the University of Florida. Finally, we want to thank the reviewers of the Journal of Homosexuality.

Notes

1. There has been research done by psychologists and other mental health professionals about heterosexual-ally identity development. For the purposes of this study, we do not review that work, per se, as we are most interested in how allies tell their stories in a particular social context (not in terms of assumed stages of psychological development). We do, however, offer brief discussion of how the people contributing to this study did, or did not, engage that literature themselves.

2. Although 24 interviews were conducted, only 17 interviews were transcribed. The remaining 7 interviews were unable to be transcribed due to technical malfunctions with the transcribing equipment that fatally ruined the tapes.

3. In terms of the 17 transcribed interviews, 13 of these participants were White, 3 Latino or Latina, and 1 Chinese American. Eleven participants were women and 6 were men in the transcribed interviews. Four of the LGBTQ participants were part of the transcribed interviews.

4. All names are pseudonyms arbitrarily assigned to participants using a list of the most popular baby names.

5. Identifying information about job title and academic unit have been deleted or changed to protect the confidentiality of participants.

6. As appropriate for evolving analysis in qualitative research, the interviewer explicitly asked about personal experiences and whether gender or sexual identities were relevant in a few of the final interviews, once the pattern of not talking in these ways was noticed.

7. Today, the program still exists, but with a new director and different training materials (emphasizing more discussion of transgender issues, for example). The campus climate has changed as well, with the addition of same-sex partner benefits and the inclusion of gender identity and expression in the university's nondiscrimination clause.