UCLA opens Gender, Sexuality and Society themed floor

Elizabeth Manzanero studies, eats and talks with her friends in the new Gender, Sexuality and Society themed floor lounge every day. When they took a floor picture at the beginning of the year, there was no question she’d be in it.

But the first-year undeclared student doesn’t actually live on the floor — or even in the building.

Manzanero, who lives in Hedrick Hall, visited the themed community on the third floor of De Neve Acacia after learning about it from a friend. She decided to stick around because she was interested in the floor’s theme and liked how the residents welcomed her.

“I just kept coming back,” she said, sitting in the floor’s lounge.

Students moved into the Hill’s newest themed floor this fall. The themed community was intended for those interested in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexual, queer or questioning, and allied communities, said Suzanne Seplow, executive director of the Office of Residential Life.

UCLA is the last University of California campus to offer housing for the LGBTIQA community. They are also offering gender neutral housing – which allows students of different genders to live in a room together – in certain rooms in De Neve and Dykstra. About six students signed up for gender neutral housing this year, Seplow said.

Not everyone on the themed floor identifies as part of the LGBTIQA community, though, Seplow said.

Between 30 and 40 percent of the students on the floor did not request the themed community, but were placed there because of preferences they listed on their housing application, Seplow said.

Melissa Pagela, a first-year neuroscience student, said she was assigned to a room on the themed floor by accident, but has enjoyed getting to know other people on the floor and learning about LGBTIQA issues.

“Everyone here really cares about each other,” she said. “We’re bonding because we all have a common interest.”

Although Manzanero initially wanted to apply to live in the themed community, the cost of the plaza rooms was too expensive, she said. Manzanero said she would have applied to live there had it been in a classic hall.

The cost of plaza rooms on the themed floor is something the Office of Residential Life was concerned about, Seplow said.

But officials chose to have the community in De Neve Acacia because it was a smaller floor than Rieber Hall, where the majority of the themed communities are located, said Sharon Chia Claros, De Neve Acacia’s resident director. Rieber Hall floors have between 90 and 100 beds, and De Neve Acacia has about 30, making it easier to fill with people interested in the new community, Claros said.

Because the LGBTIQA themed community is a pilot program this year, Claros said they were worried they would not generate enough interest for 100 people to live there.

The themed floor is a mix of mostly first-year students and third-year transfer students, said Aaron Kinsfather, a first-year pre-psychology student who lives on the floor.

Kinsfather said the floor provided him with a safe community without having to worry about being ridiculed.

“I made the right choice,” he said.

Some of the floor’s bonding activities are similar to those on any other floor, like game nights and trips to Santa Monica, Kinsfather said.

Other activities are catered to the floor’s theme, like their common book discussion about “Pedro and Me,” which is about two friends, one of whom has AIDS. The discussion included a guest speaker, the director of the LGBT Center, who talked about the resources available to residents, like sexually transmitted disease testing, said Gregory Montano, floor resident and third-year mathematics student.

As a transfer student, Montano said he chose the floor because he thought there would be people interested in gender identity, like he was.

Matthew Farris, a third-year pediatric medicine student who transferred to UCLA, also comes to hang out on the floor every day with his friends, even though he doesn’t live on the floor. He met Montano and Kinsfather at an LGBT event, and since then has treated the floor as a second home.

“Being gay, it feels like a safe community,” Farris said.