Campus Connection

Pride Center marks 25 years of advocacy, education

Willem Van Roosenbeek knows as well as anyone that progress is a crooked line.

As director of the Pride Center at UW-La Crosse, Van Roosenbeek has seen many beautiful moments — students embracing their sexuality at drag shows and the campus community making a genuine effort to better understand their LGBTQ+ neighbors.

But he has also seen ugly moments — hateful messages written on sidewalks, flyers ripped from walls, and the very identity of LGBTQ+ students challenged.

“Over the years, I’ve seen somewhat of a decline in face-to-face opposition, but there are still things people are doing, and people still say horrible things online,” Van Roosenbeek says. It’s a good reminder, he adds, that there’s still much work to do, still many students who need support.

That’s where the Pride Center comes in. The center, on the second floor of the Student Union, has been serving LGBTQ+ students, staff and faculty for 25 years, making it one of the oldest such centers in the UW System.

The center has grown over the years to offer a wide range of services and events, from in-class panel discussions, to monthly film nights, to annual drag shows.

Often, the center is a place where LGBTQ+ students can come with their problems and leave with a sense of friendship, community and hope.

“We have students struggling with things, especially hate or bias, and we want to be there to listen to them,” Van Roosenbeek says. “We want to be that safer place, that common place where they can go to hang out, do homework, take a nap, play games — just be with people.”

Talk of opening a Pride Center at UWL began to swirl in the mid-1990s, and the university formed numerous committees to explore the possibility. The result, after months of discussion, was the Diversity Resource Center, which served not just the LGBTQ+ community, but all marginalized populations on campus. 

“It was about educating people about all the ‘isms’ — racism, classism, ableism and being inclusive of LGBTQ+ identities too,” Van Roosenbeek explains. “Today, LGBTQ+ people are our main focus, and we have learned that we must remain vigilant about racism, classism and ableism, because those are our issues too.”

While the work of advocating and educating is never truly done, Van Roosenbeek looks around campus and feels heartened by the progress.

Things like all-gender bathrooms and the use of preferred names and pronouns may seem small to some, but they mean the world to others, he says.

New policies and protocols are hardly the only indicators of progress, though. Van Roosenbeek says he is most encouraged not by changes to rules, but changes in people.

“It’s fun to watch students come to terms with their identity and be really strong in who they are,” he says. “You see that transformation from scared and worried to strong and secure. They have a sense of pride that they didn’t have before.”