"I'm very excited to be recognized by Campus Pride for my contributions to the Boston College community. It is very rewarding to have a national organization recognize one's efforts and work. I'm both honored and humbled to be recognized among other three student leaders as recipients of the Voice & Action Award." ~ Celso Javier Perez

Celso Perez is currently a senior at Boston College majoring in biochemistry and theology, expecting his Bachelor’s in Science in May 2009. Celso is specifically interested in the relationship between sexual morals and public health as it pertains to human rights and theological ethics.

At Boston College, he is part of the Presidential Scholars Program (PSP), a four year merit scholarship program that offers students an integrated academic experience by means of three summer programs as well as a weekly speaker series. Last year, he spent four weeks in France with the Presidential Scholars partaking in an intensive language and cultural immersion program. This past summer, Celso worked with the Program on International Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, thanks to a grant provided by the PSP.

In the summer of 2007, Celso traveled to Geneva, Switzerland to be a research assistant for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). There he identified relevant technical and policy resources for UNAIDS prevention website and summarized and classified key technical and policy documents for prevention website.

Currently, Celso is working on his undergraduate thesis. He will be writing on homosexuality and Catholic theological ethics. Specifically, he will be looking at Catholic social teaching on justice, human dignity, and the common good as a means for greater dialogue and understanding of homosexuality today.

In Celso's words: What do you see as the role of a leader?
A leader’s role, broadly defined, is to engage others as to bring about a particular vision. More specifically, this role can be described as four basic responsibilities: to articulate or refine the mission of a group, to set goals to bring about this vision, to organize the group to meet these goals, and to oversee progress towards these goals. Additionally, a leader should provide cohesion, purpose, and drive in guiding other towards this vision. As the past U.S. electoral race indicated, perhaps one of the most sought after qualities in a leader is a sense of hope and possibility.

Campus Pride asked Celso to share the challenges he thinks Generation Q (LGBT and Ally Youth) will face or are currently facing in our movement to achieve fairness and equality.

I feel Generation Q faces in the U.S. at present are two. First, most of Christianity is still openly hostile to homosexuality, and at times fuels much of the hatred and lack of understanding for LGBT people. However, in U.S. history, religious movements have historically been the impetus behind many social movements: take the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, and the movement against U.S. interventionism in Latin America in the 80s, just to name a few. Although religion is certainly not a requisite for social change, it is a powerful rallying cry and symbol which unites people in a common goal. Especially for prolonged struggles for rights of minority groups, such a symbol has been both a source of empathy with others and a source of support for those within the movement. Given the contemporary hostility of many religious traditions towards LGBT people, the LGBT movement has had to, and continues to struggle to find unifying themes and symbols for a protracted struggle for rights. Second, this struggle for a unifying identity in the LGBT movement is exacerbated by several factors including the range of people it represents (see just the acronym LGBT), the advent of post-modernity and people’s rejection of group identities, the number of competing interest groups in today’s pluralist society, and the relative novelty of the concept LGBT. Indeed, it seems that to people outside the movement, LGBT is simply a euphemism for sexual licentiousness. On both counts, it seems the major struggle facing the LGBT movement today is the lack of an identity that is easily packaged and sold.

Being a leader there will times when the successes you are wanting to obtain will not always be reached. For this reason during the application process Campus Pride asked applicants to describe a time when you were unsuccessful at bringing about positive change and what you learned from this experience, below is Celso’s response.

One of our ongoing struggles at Boston College has been the inability to organize a ball for LGBT students. Although as a student organization we have regular social events, for historical reasons, certain administrators have repeatedly expressed reservations about having an LGBT student ball.

BC students first petitioned for an LGBT ball in the fall of 2005, but their proposal was rejected, due in part to a much publicized event at Brown University, which scared administrators into thinking that an LGBT dance at BC would degenerate into a night of public sexual revelry. In the spring of 2006, student leaders again petitioned for a ball, but due to hostile relationships with the administration at the time, it was once again cancelled. During my first term as president, I avoided the issue altogether, but this fall; we brought it up again, and are currently working with administrators towards a February date. We still don’t know if the event will take place.

From this experience I have learned two things: first, it is important to maintain good relationships with the administrators I work with in the university. Even though we don’t agree on many things, having established better relationships with certain administrators than previous generations has certainly made for a much smoother process. Second, harking back to an earlier point, breaking down stereotypes is often a process of repeated personal encounters. It has already happened twice that a particular administrator has expressed reservations about an event. However, upon attending said event, this person was surprised to find out things did not fare as she feared. In fact, she was quite pleased with the outcome both times.

The lessons that Celso learned from this experience is a lesson that takes some leaders years to learn and to fully understand. We can all learn something from Celso’s experience – caring about the relationships you develop with other and especially people who are in the position of make the decisions is key to creating positive change on campus and beyond.

Recommendations -- What makes Celso a Leader?
It has been an honor over  the many student generations to have worked with a succession of committed and creative undergraduate leaders, many of whom have gone on to make a contribution to our community in a variety of professions. Celso Perez is however the first campus leader who we have felt deserves not just recognition within our university, but to be held up as a compelling model of a gay student activist particularly for other students who, like those at Boston college, are struggling to create a more inclusive and supportive campus environment on denominational college campuses that historically have been indifferent or hostile to their sexual minorities. It is a view I am happy to share with many of my fellow gay and lesbian faculty/staff colleagues. ~ John McDargh, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Theology

My colleagues and I agree that Celso’s ability to work with his fellow students, faculty members, advisors and senior administrators on various projects for students is a testament to his interpersonal skills and dedication as a servant leader. He is respected by his peers and all of the senior administrators he has worked with over his years at Boston College. ~ Mark J. Miceli, Assistant Dean of Student Development