Bucks’ LGBT club has called foul on the Bucks County Courier Times for a column criticizing the group’s role in a recent drag show held at the Newtown campus.
Published Nov. 20, “At Bucks County Community College, a celebration of cross-dressing,” questioned the validity of “War of the Wigs,” the 2012 drag show competition on Nov. 16 inside the Newtown auditorium to help raise funds for the Bucks Villa, a housing facility for HIV and AIDS patients.
Columnist J.D. Mullane’s emphasized the “geniuses running the gate” for allowing children into the event and the “risqué” acts that were incorporated into the show rather than the motivation for the event.
A letter written to the editor of the Courier on Nov. 23 was also critical of the event and the school for allowing it to take place inside its doors. The editorial asked the college to “close the door on future drag shows” and claimed the event was “not educational” for students.
The article went further by implying that tax money went into the show, which was not the case, according to Barbara Yetman, dean of students and vice president for student affairs. “No public money funded the event,” she said. “In fact, its cost was covered by student fees.”
This isn’t the first time Mullane has found fault with school’s Open Door Club. “The facts of life, explained,” published by the Courier on April 26 was written in response to the club’s Sex Education Day, an April 25 event at the Newtown campus that distributed condoms and safe
sex tips to students. In the column Mullane described Sex Education Day as having “plenty of knowledge, but no truth” and saying that “it is tough for me (Mullane) to believe anyone over, say, 15, needs to be educated about sex in America.”
Both of the articles can be found on phillyburbs.com and on Bucks’ Open Door Club’s Facebook page. Both J.D. Mullane and the Courier Times could not be reached for comment on the issue.
The club expressed their displeasure with what they feel is negative exposure from the local media outlet. “There was not one nice thing said in the articles,” said Shannon Hoppe, 32, social work major and the president of the Open Door Club at Bucks “All of the attention was on the negative.”
Hoppe became aware of the columns through her own research and through a family member of an editor at the Courier.
“Most of us were really upset when we heard about the articles,” said Jordan Lloyd, 20, liberal arts major and member of the Open Door Club.
However, the club seems rather upbeat about its future regardless of what others are saying about them. “I think it’s going to make us (The Open Door Club) stronger, Hoppe said. “The negativity will give us strength.” The faculty has responded to the articles written by Mullane and the editorial staff by sending a letter to the Courier in support of the Open Door Club. The faculty had this to say as one of their many main points in the letter: “As an institution of higher learning, we have the responsibility to expose students to the new and unfamiliar, to open their eyes to the fact that the world is bigger than what they have experienced and, hopefully, to help them realize that just because an idea or attitude may seem different to them, it is not bad or dangerous.” The letter is published in full in this issue of the Centurion.