When Kenneth Hodges (C'57) came to Georgetown in 1953, he had a vague awareness that he might be gay, but there was no one to talk to about it.

As Hodges notes, the 1950s were the "dark ages as far as homosexuality is concerned."

When the Pittsburgh native walked through Healy Gates for the first time, McCarthyism reigned in Congress. A year before, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education. Georgetown College wasn't open to women yet, and men were expected to wear suits and ties to class, play sports and act "manly."

Despite standing 6'4'', Hodges says he felt "shy, withdrawn and bewildered" and couldn't be the person his parents wanted him to be. 

"I remember that my mother, who had hopes of me identifying with some good masculine figure, became furious with the prefect of the dormitories when she realized that I was just as isolated at Georgetown as I was at home, and just as much a gay ‘type,' something she considered the nadir of social life," Hodges recalls.

He eventually came out in Paris in 1963 while attending the Alliance Francaise. But he says he did so with "fear and trembling." And when he came back to the United States, he went to a psychologist to be "cured" of his homosexuality.

"I had a crazy, embarrassing, useless time of it," Hodges explains. Eventually, he reached a point of self-acceptance that gave him more confidence. He received master's degrees in art history and information science and is now a law librarian for two international law firms. He also conducts research for the National Gallery of Art in his spare time.

Hodges' experience as a gay man wasn't unusual for the era in which he entered Georgetown. After all, it took 20 additional years for the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders in 1973.

Many recent alumni say coming out can still be a frightening and uncomfortable process, but over the past two decades, colleges, universities and high schools have developed new forms of support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, as well as students who are questioning their sexual identity (known collectively as LGBTQ).

While Georgetown has not moved as quickly as some institutions in this area, the university has steadily enhanced its services for LGBTQ students, especially in recent years, in ways consistent with its identity as a Catholic, Jesuit university.

"We wrestle with complex questions that bring to the surface areas of uncertainty and disagreement, as our work must be authentic to a university, and most authentically Catholic and Jesuit," said President John J. DeGioia. "I approach this work from within my own lived experience as an educator and administrator. It is my responsibility to ensure that the conditions for success are present as we engage the issues, tensions and opportunities of these efforts. These efforts are important ways that we seek to strengthen our community."

In 2004, the university created an Office of LGBTQ Community Resources to direct students to campus resources, including faculty allies, and provide personal and community support. The office's part-time coordinator, Bill McCoy, has offered fora at which students, faculty and staff may discuss issues ranging from coming out to careers to health issues to homophobia.

Two years later, in November of 2006, Timothy Godfrey, S.J., director of the Office of Campus Ministry, hosted a dinner at the Jesuit Community to discuss how to build bridges between the university and LGBT alumni. A similar dinner took place in January of 2007, with a larger number of alumni and Georgetown leaders at the Alumni House.

These discussions helped lead to an April 2007 LGBTQ networking reception at the Alumni House, with about 100 alumni, students, faculty and staff in attendance. The Georgetown University Alumni Association co-sponsored the event with Georgetown Alumni Career Services, LGBT alumni, and the student organization GU Pride.

According to Tucker Gallagher (C'91), one of the organizers, the purpose of such events is to bring together Georgetown's LGBTQ groups to "meet mentors, make contacts and learn about being out in the workplace." (Another event was held in April 2008.)

Most significantly, in response to two physical and verbal assaults on students on campus this past fall, and strong expressions of concern from many members of the Georgetown community, DeGioia created three new working groups -- with representatives from the faculty, the student body, the Jesuit community, staff and alumni -- to make recommendations about how Georgetown could promote a more inclusive, respectful community and make clear that homophobia and any other form of discrimination is not acceptable. Daniel Porterfield (C'83), vice president for public affairs and strategic development, and Rosemary Kilkenny (L'87), vice president for institutional diversity and equity, led the efforts.

The recommendations include the establishment of a new LGBTQ Resource Center with two full-time staff members, new educational programming and more effective policies for notifying the university community about incidents of bias.

University leaders are planning for the new center's opening in the fall of this year, and Vice President for Mission and Ministry Philip Boroughs, S.J., Kilkenny and biology professor emerita Ellen Henderson headed up the search for the full-time director, who reports to Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson.

This past May, Georgetown hired Sivagami (Shiva) Subbaraman as center director. Subbaraman most recently served as associate director of the University of Maryland's Office of LGBT Equity.

"I have been impressed with the depth of engagement in the LGBTQ Initiative by so many diverse community members," she says. "The working groups developed a thoughtful and comprehensive set of recommendations. I look forward to joining Georgetown's dynamic community, building on the work that has already been started, fostering relationships with colleagues from across the university, and moving forward with the work of the new center."

Church Teaching

Providing support systems for LGBTQ students is still developing in higher education, and Church teachings must be carefully interpreted by Catholic institutions.

The catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that same-sex acts "are contrary to the natural law" and "under no circumstances can they be approved." It teaches that, for Catholics, any sexual activity outside the context of marriage cannot be condoned.

At the same time, the catechism is clear about how people with a same-sex orientation must be treated -- "with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided" (CCC, 2358).

The Church has re-emphasized this point over the years.

In 1997, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a now much-quoted document, "Always Our Children: A Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children." In that document, the bishops reached out to the families of same-sex-oriented people and urged parents to "draw upon the reservoirs of faith, hope, and love as they face uncharted futures," to remain in touch with their LGBTQ children and continue to love them unconditionally. Some LGBT alumni and Georgetown leaders say that publication was a step in the right direction.

And more recently, in a USCCB 2006 document called "Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care," the American bishops also called for respect, compassion and sensitivity.

DeGioia takes these Church teachings very seriously.

"As a Catholic and Jesuit university, a university administrator or center cannot advocate for policies or practices that are counter to Catholic teaching," DeGioia told students, faculty and staff this past October.

He also said, "To bring some clarity to the term ‘advocacy' at a Catholic and Jesuit university, we most certainly can advocate for LGBTQ students. We can and must advocate for respect, inclusion, understanding, safety, mentoring, dignity, growth and equal opportunity."

Not everyone is comfortable with this perspective.

In a Feb. 14 editorial in The Hoya, for example, Robert John Araujo, S.J., (C'70, L'73), of Boston College took issue with the university's approach.

"No one should fear any university community regardless of who he or she is," he wrote. "But this does not mean that acceptance of each person must mean acceptance and, therefore, subsequent endorsement of views and activities that are inconsistent and conflict with the teachings of the Church, which must be a part of any Catholic university's mission.

"A Catholic university must exercise its responsibility and its authentic academic freedom to state and argue through reason why the teachings of the Church are meritorious and why conflicting views are wrong," his op-ed stated.

Other alumni see the situation differently.

Tom Brennan, S.J., who graduated from Georgetown College in 1982, has a doctorate in English literature and teaches at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. He came out in 1984.

"I do get the question how can you be gay and be Catholic?" Brennan says. "I think it is a matter of ongoing negotiations.

"What I've learned in the process of growing up and in the process of being in the Society of Jesus is that there is a tolerance and understanding of who I am. Orientation is not a sin."

By the Decades

The gay rights movement in America started many years ago.

The first American foundation that can be called a gay rights organization was known as the Society for Human Rights, established in Chicago in 1924 by Henry Gerber. The society produced the first American publication for gay men and lesbians, called Friendship and Freedom. A few months after being chartered, the police shut the society down and arrested all the members.

In the 1940s, a gay and lesbian newsletter appeared in Los Angeles, followed by the founding of The Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay male organizations, in 1950. Five years later, two women founded a group for lesbians in San Francisco called the Daughters of Bilitis.

But the start of what some consider gay activism with a real impact dates back to 1969, when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village. This prompted a strong reaction from the gay community -- 400 people rioted in the city for several days. Stonewall is commemorated annually in June by Gay and Lesbian Pride Week.

After Stonewall, gay rights groups began to form all over the United States.

In terms of Georgetown history, there were simply no resources offered by the university in the 1960s or 1970s. GU Pride, the gay and lesbian student group, was recognized only in 1988 in the aftermath of a lawsuit.

Georgetown was a very social place for undergraduates on campus in the 1960s, says John LeBedda (C'68). Dances, parties, concerts and other events such as polo games on weekends represented the norm, he recalls.

"Unfortunately, all of these events were totally straight, as this was pre-Stonewall and there was no open manifestation of LGBT student activity on campus," says LeBedda, who is about to celebrate 34 years with his partner, Steve Jacobs. "Any indication of same-sex affection would have been marginalized or worse. While I was at Georgetown and in the closet, I didn't even know of other gay students or faculty members. There were no clubs or social organizations where gays could meet one another. There were no gay role models, let alone good ones."

He points out that same-gender sex was still illegal throughout most of the United States when he was at Georgetown.

"All of this placed a tremendous psychological burden on me throughout my academic career," he says.

A retired Social Security Administration official, LeBedda says the one person he could talk to was Royden B. Davis, S.J., longtime dean of the College who died in 2002.

"It was primarily through Father Davis' guidance that I managed to keep my sanity," LeBedda said. " … In spite of his busy schedule, [Davis] always found time to meet with me if I asked to see him. He was always warm, understanding, nonjudgmental and supportive. … It was very important to me to have Father Davis [as] my friend [and] to be able to talk to about my orientation."

After the APA decision in the 1970s, gay students began to organize and petition for resources at Georgetown -- a request that was repeatedly declined by the university administration through most of the 1980s.

Bill Appert (SLL'74) tried to help organize a gay and lesbian group in the early 1970s, with limited success.

"We got as far as organizing a panel discussion on gay and lesbian issues in the Hall of Nations with Franklin Kameny, Barbara Gittings and one other speaker I cannot recall right now," says Appert, who has lived with Chris Wallace (F'74) for 37 years. Kameny and Gittings were activists instrumental in raising issues that led to the APA decision.

"I think only about six people showed up in the audience," Appert recalled. "I also wrote an article about being gay at Georgetown for The Hoya and was featured on a campus radio program. For all of this, we all got called into the vice president's office on the second floor of the Healy Building for a friendly but serious talking to.

"Since then, life has been much less controversial," Appert notes. "We are your average middle-aged suburban couple who just happen to be both men."

In the 1980s, the gay and lesbian groups at the time -- Gay People of Georgetown University (GPGU) on the Main Campus and the Gay Rights Coalition at the Law Center -- sued Georgetown under the District of Columbia's Human Rights Act of 1977. The District law made it unlawful to deny the use of facilities, services or programs for a discriminatory reason based upon sexual orientation. The trial court ruled that the free exercise clause of the federal constitution rendered the act unenforceable against Georgetown in this case.

On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1987 decided that while university endorsement could not be legally compelled, the groups are entitled to equal access to tangible benefits under the Human Rights Act. A subsequently negotiated consent order gave the plaintiffs and their successor organizations the legal right to benefits enjoyed by other student organizations on campus.

The history of the LGBTQ experience at Georgetown also includes the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which began in the early 1980s and caused great hardship all around the country.

Chuck Walworth (C'82, M'88) stayed on campus during the summer of 1982 as a member of the trained blood-drawing team at Georgetown Hospital. He and his co-workers would wait on late-night shifts to get an order that instructed them to go up to a patient's room to draw blood.

"On the [order], it would actually tell you what the diagnosis was," he recalls. "So here we are just waiting around for the next assignment and I was the next person up and when the label came up it said immunodeficiency syndrome. We all just sort of looked at each other -- no one had touched a person with HIV before and no one knew what it was, no one knew how it was transmitted, no one knew what the patient would look like. [He] was one of the very first [HIV] patients at the hospital."

Walworth and one other person went to see the patient, who was in an isolation room. They had to put on a mask, gown, gloves and booties before they entered.

"There was a very spooky resignation about him, almost as if he knew his own destiny," the Georgetown graduate says. "He was very weak and his body was loaded with Kaposi sarcoma."

Walworth is now an infectious diseases/HIV specialist in California. He and his partner, Judson Slusser, have been together for about six years.

Winnie Stachelberg (C'86), senior vice president for external affairs at the Center for American Progress, was also on campus in those years.

"It was a crazy time," says Stachelberg, who has previously worked for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization. "It was just as AIDS was killing people and becoming more of an issue on campuses. …Certainly there was no discussion about your sexual orientation -- there was an undercurrent but we didn't have a place to go to. It was also relatively soon after the Supreme Court case."

The case Stachelberg is referring to is Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution does not protect the right of gay adults to engage in private, consensual sex. That case prevailed until the nation's highest court overturned it in 2003 with Lawrence v. Texas. The Supreme Court's majority said the Texas law violated privacy rights.

In the 1980s, many alumni remember, the campus environment was not supportive of gay and lesbian students, and to some extent gay student groups operated underground. Walworth remembers how GPGU waited until the wee hours of the morning to climb 10-foot ladders and put their flyers as high as possible on bulletin boards so no one could rip them down.

Kevin Ciotta (C'87) didn't come out until after graduation, but recalls the atmosphere on campus.

"I knew of one or two people on campus who were gay, pretty much because they were involved with the LGBT organization at that time," Ciotta says. "I think Georgetown was not an incredibly welcoming place to gays and lesbians in the 1980s. I think there were a lot of rough feelings around the whole lawsuit issue. There were also few or no resources to people who were dealing with coming out issues."

But he has since become involved with an unofficial LGBT alumni group that organizes social and networking events, sponsored a scholarship for an LGBTQ student at Georgetown, and holds mentoring and information exchange events with undergraduate groups.

"I've been really impressed with the students who have followed me at Georgetown and the level of comfort many of them have in terms of coming out," he says.

The 1990s brought more open discussion and tolerance on campus.

Part of the inspiration for Georgetown and other Catholic institutions was the publication of a 1986 Vatican document, "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," which speaks strongly about the rights of same-sex-oriented individuals: "It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action," the document states. "Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church's pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law."

In 1994, the year Matt Cluney graduated from the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown added sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy.

"I feel that my coming out experience was pretty unique in that it occurred right during freshman year, when I was still adjusting to living in D.C., and with people of many different backgrounds and perspectives," Cluney recalls. "From the day I arrived on campus, I realized that my orientation -- in all senses of the word -- would be much different from others and oftentimes it was a struggle to deal with. At one point during that year, I even considered transferring to a traditionally more liberal institution of higher learning. But through meeting a few upperclassmen -- some gay, some straight but gay-friendly -- and some other supportive university personnel, my experience changed significantly and for the better."

Cluney says he helped raise awareness among students about HIV/AIDS, which also was "a way for me to tap into support mechanisms for my own coming out." He worked with Deborah Marone, a family nurse practitioner who still works at the Student Health Center at Georgetown.

"Debbie was a great listener and provided me with some really sound advice as I was going on my very own journey of self-exploration and coming of age," Cluney explains.

Cluney became involved in the HIV/AIDS awareness group, leading educational efforts in first-year residence halls and participating in ongoing campus awareness activities about HIV. Though only a few of his family members knew he was gay in his senior year, he felt comfortable enough to take a male date to the SFS Diplomatic Ball.

Now Cluney lives in Brooklyn as a marketing director for a prominent company and says he is "completely happy living as a gay man."

"All of my family -- from my 88-year-old grandparents on down -- know who I am and love me just the same," he says. "… I look back on my years at Georgetown as ones that gave me the foundation for being happy and complete in the skin that I am in today."

But even in the early 2000s, by no means did all or even most LGBTQ students feel completely at home at Georgetown. In 2002, for example, the vice president for student affairs at the time did not approve students' request for a resource center. A compromise became the development of a part-time LGBTQ coordinator position, which wasn't filled until 2004.

"My process began with a Coming Out Support Group, which later became [known as] Outspoken," says Andrew Nolen (C'04). "At the time, the group was about 10 kids that hadn't quite come into their own. Besides those people, there were few that I felt comfortable to talk to. My coach, though, was excellent."

Nolen says Andrew Valmon, then a Georgetown track coach and now at the University of Maryland, knew Nolen was gay and asked the Georgetown student to let him know if anyone bothered him.

More Change

In the fall of 2007 there were two assaults on students in which homophobic slurs were made. Following the incidents, GU Pride held rallies and petitioned university leaders for earlier notification of hate crimes, an LGBTQ Resource Center, additional education for students about LGBTQ issues and a revamped LGBTQ working group.

"At the heart of the Catholic tradition we find resources that profoundly support our work for LGBTQ students," DeGioia said at a meeting with Georgetown community members this past fall. "I am referring, for example, to the Catholic insistence on the dignity and worth of each and every individual, the emphasis on social justice and multicultural understanding, and the Gospel call that we engage all of our sisters and brothers in a spirit of love. The character of our heritage supports the call to deepen the services and support we provide to LGBTQ students."

Nearly 40 Georgetown community members participated in working groups created by DeGioia to address concerns. Todd Olson, vice president of student affairs, and Ricardo Ortíz, associate professor of English, co-chaired a resources group; Associate Provost Marjory Blumenthal and Bill McCoy, associate director of student programs and LGBTQ community resources coordinator, co-chaired an educational programming group; and a reporting group was co-chaired by Tommaso Astarita, professor of history, and Dennis Williams, director of the Center for Multicultural Equity Access and associate dean of students.

"I've gotten the chance to get to know a lot of really supportive professors since the beginning of this whole process," says Olivia Chitayat (C'10), who served on the resources group and is co-president of GU Pride. "It was a really horrible thing that happened, and I think there was a lot of shock. Sometimes it takes something bad for people to start realizing the problems at the university and take the initiative to change things."

She says the faculty, administrators, students and Jesuits all worked well together in the groups.

Ortíz agrees.

"We worked remarkably well as a team, one that included members of every conceivable constituent population at the university: students, staff, senior administrators, faculty, Jesuits and alumni," he says. "The whole process reflected what's best about Georgetown, and I'm deeply grateful for the honor and the pleasure of having been called to participate in it."

"If implemented appropriately [the recommendations] will do much more than what had been done in the past," he says.

Melissa Bradley-Burns (B'89) served on the LGBTQ resources working group and also serves on the alumni association's board of governors, which she manages to combine with a full-time career and an active family life that includes raising six children with Allessandra Burns (F'90).

"I bleed Hoya blue," Bradley-Burns says. "[This] has been a great way to give back, as well as bring various levels of diversity to how Georgetown works with its alumni population. I am glad that Georgetown made progress in providing support for LGBTQ students on campus," she says. "I am proud that so much more is now being done."

John Cain Harrison (F'09), the other co-president of GU Pride, says his parents are supportive and are members of P-FLAG, which stands for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Harrison is from a small town in Tennessee, but says he has "experienced as much if not more homophobia at Georgetown than at home, partially because of who I surrounded myself with at home."

He recalls an international career panel he attended at Georgetown during which he asked a U.S. government official about partner benefits at the State Department for same-sex couples.

"He couldn't even respond, couldn't even process that question," Harrison relates, "and then he said something to the effect of, ‘Well, we don't discriminate against you people.' " McCoy, who has served as the part-time LGBTQ coordinator since 2004, has helped students by being someone they can talk to, before or after they have come out. He also has met with parents and other family members when asked.

"I think there's a lot of self-censoring at Georgetown -- our students largely act very professionally as it is," McCoy says. "So I think that [plays into] how publicly out [some students] want to be, much as you find in the business world and the political world. I see students here modeling that type of behavior.

"The limitation there is that when younger students get on campus and they look around, they don't see any out gay students," McCoy says. He also noted that many students are still struggling with their sexual identity.

"I am a firm believer that sexuality is a complex thing and sexuality is a very different thing for each person," McCoy says. "You can't put people in a box."

Campuses across the country are also struggling to meet the unique needs of the transgender community.

According to the Web site of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), the term transgender "refers to those whose gender expression at least sometimes runs contrary to what others in the same culture would normally expect." Transgender people are also subject to discrimination and may find support and solidarity as part of the LGBTQ community.

Faculty Perspectives

An informal faculty LGBTQ group formed in 2003. A listserv for the 20-member group is its primary form of communication.

"Students see that there are openly gay and lesbian faculty here who provide a sense of legitimacy to their own place at the university," says sociology professor Joe Palacios.

"And that as we are open that they can be open, and that there are allies in the academic setting for mentoring and for problem-solving and for support."

Many faculty members have mentored LGBTQ undergraduate students and faculty in a variety of fields -- including theology, history, English, theater and performance studies, and women's and gender studies -- incorporate LGBTQ issues and experiences into their course material.

Cal Watson (C'07) remembers many positive interactions with faculty.

"I felt comfortable coming out to a number of my professors, both in and out of the classroom, at Georgetown," Watson says. "These experiences helped me to grow and develop because I felt supported and encouraged by so many wonderful mentors."

Some faculty members devote their scholarly lives to LGBT issues.

English professor Dana Luciano, for example, has written extensively on sexuality and gender, LGBT literature and film. Law professor Chai Feldblum is a national leader in employer discrimination issues for many categories of workers, including LGBTQ. An author of the Americans with Disabilities Act, she directs the Federal Legislation Clinic at the Law Center.

Ortíz studies U.S.-based Latino writers and other artists of Latino descent who write in English and represent a variety of immigrant and historical communities in America. He also has published on LGBT issues and contributes to the Lambda Book Report, which describes itself as the country's most established review of contemporary LGBT literature.

"A good deal of my published work on U.S. Latino literature focuses on the dynamics of sexual and gender politics in the texts that I read, and in the relevant social, political, cultural and historical contexts in which those texts are situated," Ortíz notes.

His book, "Cultural Erotics in Cuban America," for example, looks in part at the role that sexual attitudes and values -- sexism, machismo, homophobia and heterosexism -- played from 1959 to the 1990s in shaping the experiences of Cubans both on the island and in the U.S.-based diaspora.

DC-MAPS is a five-year, two-phase project at the School of Nursing and Health Studies that targets self-identified Chinese, Filipino and Vietnamese adult gay/bisexual men living in the Washington, D.C., area. The study examines the role that sociocultural forces such as sexual mores, shame and stigma play on sexual identity and orientation, as well as the relationship between shame (or stigma) and sexuality in substance use/abuse and HIV-related risk attitudes and practices among the target populations.

Finding a Voice

Understanding the needs of LGBTQ students is a priority for many university leaders.

"I think we need to respond to what [LGBTQ students] require because these are our students," Godfrey says. "We consider the whole person. We don't say we're concerned with the whole person, but if you're this way or that way we don't address your needs."

He says the role of the Office of Campus Ministry and Georgetown in general is to help students "come to a deeper understanding of who they are, help them to make informed choices and provide an atmosphere that's safe for them so they can grow in who and what they are. It's part of our mission here."

Giving a voice to those who have not always had one is also part of the Jesuit tradition, Godfrey says.

"It's easy for people who make up the majority in a culture to decide what they think a minority group needs and what would be good for them," he says, "but it is more important to listen to the voices themselves."

One of those voices is Danielle DeCerbo (C'03). In 2001, she took part in an American Studies tutorial with four other students. Led by English professor Edward Ingebretsen, the tutorial attempted to address some of the problems LGBTQ students were having at Georgetown.

"Anecdotal evidence gathered from LGBT students at Georgetown showed a huge number of problems that they were facing that had no answer in current Georgetown programs," notes DeCerbo, now a project manager for the New York City Council's Land Use Division. "These were the problems LGBT students at most college campuses face, such as depression, suicide, eating disorders, sexual assault, isolation, substance abuse and harassment."

The student researchers came to the conclusion that Georgetown should create an LGBTQ resource center. "We found creating visibility was a successful way to combat the isolation of marginalized LGBT students," DeCerbo says. "The report we issued following that class spurred a semester of activism around advocacy for a [center] on campus, mostly driven by GU Pride and other student organizations."

This resulted, she says, in Georgetown leaders creating the original LGBTQ working group and a part-time coordinator to work solely on LGBTQ student issues.

During DeCerbo's junior and senior years, she was invited to work on LGBTQ issues with Todd Olson, dean of student affairs, and was impressed with how he stood up for all students, including those who were LGBTQ. DeCerbo also had a successful academic career at Georgetown -- she won the Rev. Joseph T. Durkin, S.J., Prize in American Studies in her senior year.

DeCerbo married Eliyanna Kaiser in Canada in 2006, and is the daughter of David A. DeCerbo (C'71).

"I was so proud of Danielle," David DeCerbo says. "I really believe that the work that they did there in the time period she was on campus was very important. And I think it had very important foundational implications for similar programs at other Jesuit universities."

He says he knew this daughter would be "encouraged and supported" at Georgetown.

"I can't think of a better place for her to get an education," he adds. "I feel very grateful that she was able to go there. Danielle is doing wonderfully now and a lot of that has to do with the preparation for life that you get from Georgetown."