ROAR! That is WELCOME in Lion speak.

I am Cris the Campus Pride Mascot. I joined the Campus Pride family during the 2007 Campus Pride Summer Leadership Camp. Camp 2009 is happening right now! You can follow us on all the happenings right here on the blog. Though I am there with them the Pride Leaders will be doing the reporting from the field, so be sure to give them support by reading their posts and commenting on them! ROAR! GO CAMP!

So right now you may be asking yourself why does Campus Pride have a mascot and secondly why is it a Lion. Well, I have a story for that! We all have stories, right? It all started when the Campus Pride staff put out a call for a Mascot. Here is the posting the staff posted on a mascot job site in 2007:

Campus Pride is looking for a very outgoing, positive, and visionary Mascot. This Mascot will be the symbol of what Campus Pride is and needs to go both inside and outside the organization, as well as be able to embody all of the LGBT Communities through the work you will do. This Mascot must also believe and follow the Campus Pride Values:

• Utilizing the diverse talents of student leaders.
• Giving students a voice and action in leadership.
• Empowering student leaders for positive change in society.
• Building stronger LGBT and Ally communities on college campuses.
• Celebrating and recognizing diversity.

The responsibilities for this position include:

• Serve on the leadership team to ensure all staff members follow and live up to the values of Campus Pride. (listed above)
• Represent Campus Pride at all events, conferences, etc that Campus Pride officially attends.
• Educate fellow mascots on how to be more LGBT-Friendly
• Other duties assigned.

So one could think the Campus Pride Staff wrote this job description for me. Well, when I saw this that is what I thought so I knew I had to apply! Then I just had to make my case on why I should be selected out of all the mascots out there in the world. Well, I can figure if you are reading this I must have made my case well enough to join the team.

So, now I will introduce myself to you, explain why I work for Campus Pride, and what you can look forward to read in my blog posts.

As I said before my name is Cris. Okay here is a fun fact – if you take the first and last letters of Campus and the “r” & “i” of Pride you get my name. That was how I introduced myself to the staff and the joke if nothing else they had to hire me because of that simple fact! It also an obvious fact I am a Lion, another reason I feel I am best mascot for Campus Pride. If you do not know lions live in what is called a pride. A pride can also be known as a family and Campus Pride is a family – one that I am SO HAPPY to be a part of.

I also want to take this time to let you who how I identify. I consider myself genderqueer and like for people to use the pronouns “hir” & “ze” when referring to me. When it comes to my sexual orientation, I do not like to put my sexuality into a “checkbox,” I am attracted to all genders along the gender spectrum. (Yes, I am single! wink wink)

Now that the background info is out of the way, I want to let you all know what I will be focusing on in my blog posts. I will be talking about the issue of school pride. There was a story I read the other day on gay.com about which campuses they selected as “Top Gay Friendly College Football Schools” (I will be making a blog entry about this very story so stay attentive it will be up in a couple days) this story got me thinking. All the other staff members at Campus Pride blog about things that are interesting to themselves and I was struggle to find topics to blog about. UNTIL NOW! YAY! This story gave me the idea to blog about issues around school pride and how either LGBT students are showing school pride or how schools are incorporating LGBT people in their school pride festivities. This could be from having a “rainbow” section at sports games to drag queens competing in Home Coming Queen contests (and not to mention WINNING! – THANK YOU George Masson University!) to even LGBT students finding their own ways to show school spirit.

I will also sometimes touch on LGBT students playing sports. This is a very important issue for me is to have more people who are out while they are playing on a team in college. The more people who are out the more it will become a norm in the athletics world. It is a big struggle but one we need to be willing to work through.

WELL, I think I went too long with writing this post. I hope you will come back and read my future posts. Please let me know your thoughts! I welcome feedback and thoughtful/respectful debates.

ROAR! GO CAMPUS PRIDE!!!!!