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What Do You Know About The LGBT Community?

This conversation starter will help your students open up about important issues that affect the LGBT community.

Divide students into pairs. Tell them to sit with their backs to each other, the idea being that it is easier to talk about serious things with someone if you do not need to make eye contact. Give students 5 – 8 minutes do answer questions from each section before instructing them to proceed to the next section.

Tell students that everyone should try to answer two questions from every level but that they can always use their “cop-out clause” if they do not wish to answer a certain question. The “cop-out clause” allows students to answer questions by saying how they feel most students would answer the question. If not using the “cop-out clause,” students should state their own perspective.

After students are finished discussing all five levels of questions, ask lead a discussion by asking the following questions:

  • Who used cop-out clause? For which questions and why?
  • Why are these the “socially acceptable answers?”
  • Which of our “socially accepted” norms should be accepted?
  • Which of our “socially accepted” norms should be challenged?
  • Where do you go for information about LGBT issues, community, etc.?

Below is our suggested list of questions. Click here to download a .pdf of the questions.

Level 1

  • What did you know about the LGBT community when you were growing up?
  • What do you wish you had known about the LGBT community when you were growing up?
  • How did you view the LGBT community when you were growing up?

Level 2

  • Who was the first LGBT person you met, and how did they impact your life?
  • Which parts of the LGBT culture do you identify with, and which don’t you identify with? Why?
  • If someone came out to you and you were only able to give them one essential fact about being LGBT, what would you tell them and why?

Level 3

  • What (if anything) do you feel you are you pressured to like or dislike because of your sexual or gender identity?
  • What aspects of LGBT popular culture do you feel pressure to know a lot about?
  • If you could change one thing about LGBT culture, what would it be? How would you change it?

Level 4

  • If you could magically become straight (LGB participants only), gay (Allied participants only), or cisgender (T participants only) would you? Why?
  • Do you think that very effeminate gay men and/or very masculine gay women inhibit the LGBT community’s progress in society?
  • What is the most difficult part about being “queer”?
  • What are your thoughts about President Obama’s views on LGBT issues?

Level 5

  • How have you reconciled you faith with how the majority of organized religions view homosexuality?
  • What do you think constitutes “sex” when it is between two people of the same sex?
  • How long do you think two people should be in a relationship before they have sex?
  • When is it “OK” (generally) acceptable for a couple to not use protection during oral sex? Anal sex?

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