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Gay Pride Month set at SOU By DANI DODGE ASHLAND -- Students at Southern Oregon University are scheduling a series of lectures, dances and parties to celebrate Gay Pride Month in October. This will be the first year the university's gay student organization -- the Lesbian Bisexual Gay Transgender Alliance (LBGTA) -- is sponsoring an entire month of events. Event organizers hope the activities will educate gay and heterosexual students and quell acts of intolerance that spring up on the campus from time to time. "The big point of having Gay Pride Month is to bring awareness to the campus and allow people to realize there are gay people around," said Jerad Sorber, the president of the student group. "We have a tendency -- especially in Southern Oregon -- to not realize these people are around. "This makes it almost impossible not to notice." The month will kick off with a dance in the Britt Ballroom on Oct. 1, and continue with Wednesday night lectures and a Coming Out Day rally featuring Betty DeGeneres, the mother of actress Ellen DeGeneres. The month's events will end with another dance and party on Oct. 29. Sorber expects the LBGTA to have about 50 members this year. The group, or a variations of it, has been active on campus since 1987. The university's student fees committee increased funding to the LBGTA this year to $10,000. Half of that is being used to fund the month's events, Sorber said. Sorber said he's come out of the closet with the support of the group, and hopes the month will teach gay students the positive aspects of being open about their sexual orientation."A lot of the events are designed to say that it's OK to be out and active and be visible and they won't necessarily be subjected to negative backlash," Sorber said. "And even if they are, there are ways of dealing with it rather than just accepting it." Sorber, who is now a fifth-year senior at SOU, said he was a freshman when he experienced harassment first hand. Although he hadn't been open about being gay, he woke up one morning to see hateful graffiti spray-painted on the walls outside his dorm room. "They wrote things like `fags must die,"' Sorber remembered. "It was a frightening experience." Last year, stickers appeared at the school with the symbol for "No" -- a circle with a slash over it -- superimposed on the word "homosexuals." "It really spurred me into activism," he said of the incidents. Sorber said a national rise in hate crimes, as well as the murders of a gay Redding couple in July, have the group on the alert for trouble. All the events will include campus security. But, he doesn't expect violence. "The faculty and staff here are very supportive, and they've worked hard to make sure that this campus is safe for all students,'' he said. "There's a ways to go, which is why we do events like this, but I don't think that we will have any problems." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA