PHOTO: The front page of the Oregon State University student newspaper included a headline reference to the OSU Pride Week Staff, "Editorial: We are proud of Pride Week," Barometer, May 5, 2015, p. 7 dailybarometer.com posted May 4, 2015 that said, "Something we realized while we were discussing this staff editorial was how natural it felt that we were going to write a piece about Pride Week and its general awesomeness. It got us thinking that if we wound back the clock 30 or 40 years, we might be dealing with a strong negative response from the OSU community -- folks who might write in wailing sin and the end of days." (The editorial referenced this year's "Pride Week 2015: Can You Queer Me Now?" facebook.com accessed May 5, 2015. Also see Oregon State University Pride Center on Facebook and "Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University," OSU Women Studies facebook.com accessed May 5, 2015.)
Also of interest on the opinion page of the Oregon State University student newspaper editorial page was the regular column by Dr. Kathy Greaves, "'Overt sexuality' of Pride celebrations not overt or sexual," Barometer, May 6, 2015, p. 7 dailybarometer.com posted May 5, 2015, who said, "In fact, many Pride parades look a lot like Carnival in Rio de Janeiro or Mardi Gras in New Orleans where half naked people parade around and straight women bare their breasts to straight men in exchange for beads. So it clearly isn't just the homosexuals doing the naked thing." (See previous post OSU mom's weekend edition included letter about pegging advice from Dr. Sex (5/2/15))
Although I am happy to see the good publicity for OSU Pride Week, I was disappointed at how hard it was to find the OSU Pride Week 2015 Facebook Page -- a quick Google search failed me (I am sure Google and Facebook would insist this is NOT because they are competitors) and so I searched in Facebook, itself, but with no success. Then I checked the Oregon State University Pride Center home Webpage at dce.oregonstate.edu/pc and the Oregon State University Pride Center Facebook Page and found nothing listed in the Oregon State University Pride Center Facebook Events tab. Perhaps it is because I am legally blind (with low vision blindness) that I wasn't able to easily find it, but it appears that another reason is because one of the links to it had a graphic with text in it that made it obvious to sighted readers, but the digital image did not include the special hidden text that is used by the accessibility features of modern internet browsers and mobile devices, which would have made it easier for me and the Google search robot Web crawler to find it.
Something else I will need to search for later is more about he reference made to LGBT students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors. OSU is in a good position to be a national leader here.
Another side point I would like to note is about the Oregon State University Pride Center home Webpage -- somebody is remodeling it and there appears to be a broken link to my Thomas Kraemer, "Corvallis, Oregon State University gay activism 1969-2004," printed to PDF from OutHistory.org in 2010 permanently stored by the OSU Scholars Archives @ OSU. When this is fixed, I hope the person doing it can consult with me or others about a better summary and use the OSU library's permanent links so that it will be less likely to become a dead link in the future.
