The women of Omega Phi Beta sorority invited members of the DePauw community to flip sexuality norms on their head during "Heterophobia: No Hetero Bro."
In this discussion, around 25 students, both male and female, entered into a role-play situation in which homosexuality was the societal norm.
Group leaders, sophomore Asucena Lopez and junior Lindsay Gay, started the panel of six heterosexual men and women off with a series of questions, while the about 20 all-gay "normal" students listened.
Gay started the scenario off with a bang.
"When did you first know you were straight?" she asked.
The six "straight" students dove into their roles.
"I think I was just born this way," senior Shavon Mathus said.
The questions, and answers, continued to throw the "gay" audience off kilter. A particularly thought-provoking exchange occurred when Gay brought coming out into the discussion.
"Do your parents know about it? How did they react?" Gay asked.
"They didn't know how to handle it. All of my family is gay-you know, they're normal," junior Estrella DeLaTorre responded.
In essence, DeLaTorre's answer summed up the exercise. In a situation in which the majority becomes the minority, norms are completely reversed. This, according to Lopez and Gay, was the basic point of the activity.
"I thought it was really important to shed light on where we are at DePauw with this issue and to invert people's expectations and make people think and make them a little uncomfortable," Gay said.
After questioning the six "heterosexual" panel members, the group broke their roles and gathered together to debrief and speak about how this exercise had changed or broadened their viewpoints.
"I always try to think of myself as someone who's critical and someone who's conscious," said DeLaTorre, a member of the heterosexual minority during the role-play. "But then with things that I'm not so sure about, I'm one of the people who ask these dumb questions."
Though prior to this experience, DeLaTorre had considered herself an "ally" to the LGBTQI community, she felt afterwards that this experience had given her a greater insight into what that meant.
"Even if you try to be an ally, you can never really know what it's like to be in their shoes," she said.
The idea for this norm-reversal exercise came from the combined brainstorming of Lopez and Gay.
"Mostly things grew out of the fact that one of our sisters identifies as a queer woman," Lopez said. "I remembered doing a similar activity with a different organization and it was just amazing."
Lopez hopes the activity reached people in the LGBTQI community most.
"Knowing that there would be some LGBTQI people in this group," Lopez said, "We hoped that they could say, 'Finally, these people are getting asked some of the same questions that are always asked of me.'"