This year, the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) club wanted to reintroduce a new spin to an old project and make their mark on the school. The Equality Project is a recreation of the Ally Project done in the 2012-2o13 school year. Sophomore and Co-President of GSA, Sofia Veizades, says “Basically we start with a quote that says ‘I stand for equality because’ and then we are taking pictures of people and putting their quotes next to them.”
The difference between the upcoming posters and the past project is the statement. Vince Bravo says, “We had a lunchtime meeting about how we could do a cross club kind of poster project and at that meeting we decided that the focus of it rather than being an ally would be standing up for equality.”
Sophomore and Vice President of GSA Sean Parkis says, “The equality project is a conjoined project between Aragon’s GSA, BSU, and other clubs.”
Veizades adds, “This isn’t just focused on GSA and LGBTQ+ community, it’s focused on everyone, we have the Armenian club, the Latino club, and we are trying to get more clubs to be a part of it to show that everybody should be equal no matter who they are and who ever discriminates against them.”
The project is expected to be completed in April. Veizades says, “So we are doing the first couple drafts to show what we want the posters to look like just with the club leaders right now, we are getting their picture and their quotes. Then after that we are really going to hit it hard in April which is when we are going to have the photo shoot with everybody’s pictures.” Veizades says, “The real importance of this is to show that even though everyone has a different minority in this whole school, nobody is alone, whether they’re black, white, Armenian, from the Middle East, whether they’re Catholic or Muslim, whether they’re gay or straight, or transgender or cisgender, it’s all about making sure everyone is equal and everyone has an ally at this school.”
Bravo adds, “I think it’s going to shed some light on-often times when people talk about intersectionality, they talk about the way in which people are discriminated in a similar fashion, I think the intersectionality of why something positive is important to display as well as to say that someone from the LGBT population, the Latino club or the Black Student Union would make a similar statement about equality and we could learn a lot about those things.”
Veizades concludes, “As a photographer, I am really excited to take all the pictures for this and I am mostly excited because this is my first year as co-president and I really want to do something big to really make sure that everybody knows GSA is here and ready to put in the work to make everybody feel accepted.”
