This weekend, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) hosts the 15th annual Conference and General Assembly of the University of California Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex Association. The conference, capped at 500 attendees, will feature workshops, films, speakers and performers.

This is the first year the UC system-wide conference will be held at UCSD. “We’re really proud to be able to host it,” said Shaun Travers, director of UCSD’s LGBT Resource Center.

This year’s theme, “Through the Looking Glass,” reflects the need to acknowledge and explore diverse experiences within the GLBT community. Major discussion topics include sexual health, HIV/AIDS, people of color communities, organizing for change, GLBT marriage and legal rights.

Mitchell Katine, Lambda Legal’s Houston Cooperating Attorney and local counsel for John Lawrence and Tyrone Garner in the U.S. Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, will keynote the Friday evening Nicholas Papadopoulos Endowed Lectureship. Katine’s lecture, held at UCSD’s Price Center Ballroom, is free and open to the public.

“He is the first attorney that John and Tyrone ever connected with, and he has continued his relationship with them all the way through the Supreme Court decision,” Travers said. “[Katine] was cooperating with Lambda Legal, of course the primary organization that does do advocacy for LGBT people on a national level, but he was the attorney that kind of started it all for that particular case.”

In his lecture, Katine will review Lawrence v. Texas – the case that removed anti-sodomy laws throughout the nation last June – from the moment Lawrence and Garner walked into his office up to the present, and will explore the implications of the decision on other areas of GLBT rights, such as marriage, that may influence the presidential election. “He’ll be reviewing the case, reviewing what it meant, what its impact has been to date and what its potential impact will continue to have,” Travers said.

On Saturday, Lambda Legal’s regional director, senior counsel Jon Davidson, will talk in depth about what Lambda does in terms of legal issues for the GLBT community. Davidson will focus on the impact of litigation, Lambda Legal’s mission, and how litigation affects GLBT people and people with HIV/AIDS, discussing specific issues such as public policy, parenting and relationships, equal employment and marriage rights, domestic partner benefits, immigration issues, anti-gay initiatives, free speech and equal protection rights.

Saturday will also feature an evening performance by DRED, of the DRED Love Experience. “DRED is an actor/actress, Haitian-American, multi-spirited performance artist-poet,” Travers said. “Educator, artist, singer, gender-illusioning woman… that should be a powerful experience as well.”

Local Women’s Studies professor, activist and scholar Pat Washington will speak at Sunday’s closing brunch. “She is going to be talking about her experiences around the impact of race, sex, class and sexuality, and then the nature of how that has effected her as a person and how it effects LGBT people,” Travers said. “She’s looking at the broader connections of racism, sexism and heterosexism, both speaking from her personal perspective and from an academic perspective – how those things relate and interrelate.”

Over the course of its 15-year history, the LGBTI conference has expanded beyond the UC system and has developed into a western regional conference. At this point, only half of the attendees are affiliated with the University of California, while the other half are from colleges and universities throughout the western region, as well as several from the Midwest and East coast.

Separate LGBTI regional conferences are also held in the Midwest and on the East coast each year, and the Gay and Lesbian Task Force hosts their annual “Creating Change” conference in November, a national conference that draws together all of the regions.

“There is not one individual who can be said to be the progenitor,” Travers said of the origin of the conference. “It was created out of student, staff and faculty agitation on campuses around LGBT issues. The first meetings of the group were in 1989 and 1990 at UC Davis and at UC Santa Barbara, and that was people coming together from all the UC campuses at the time… It continues to be faculty, students and staff coming together and doing this work. It truly has been a community grassroots effort [throughout] the UC system to make this happen.”

Travers said the conference tends to focus on higher education issues, though faculty, staff and other educators also contribute to a large portion of the conference material. “[T]hey tend to focus around issues relating to the experience of 18 to 22 year-olds, although it’s issues that affect all LGBTI people,” he said. “That just has tended to be our audience because they have been at colleges and universities. That’s the audience that we attract… really there is a huge gamut of issues that will be addressed.”

This year’s conference coincides with the fifth anniversary of UCSD’s LGBT Resource Center, a community effort started in November 1999 that has proven to be a campus-wide success.

Travers said GLBT resource centers are set up on UC campuses in a variety of ways. “Some are completely focused on students,” he said. “Some – like at UCSD – focus on the entire LGBT community: staff, students, faculty, alumni. So we’re looking at a broader picture. Some centers have a really strong academic focus. It’s really tailored more to the needs of each UC campus.”

The first University of California LGBT Resource Center was established 11 years ago at UC Riverside. “One of the reasons that the UC system-wide organization was created was to lobby for increased services to LGBT people,” Travers said. “One of the first things on their agenda fifteen years ago was establishing resource centers on every campus…. Four years after the UC system-wide organization was formed, we had our first center established. From there, every campus now has an LGBT resource center.”

Plans are already underway to open a resource center at UC Merced, the newest UC campus, which is not slated to open until 2006. “That’s really incredible for the UC system to make that commitment [so early],” Travers said.

Along with Travers and Debbie Blake, assistant to the director at the LGBT Resource Center, almost 50 UCSD faculty members, students and staff helped to organize this year’s conference. “It’s not about Debbie and I, it’s about the community coming together,” Travers said. “We just have these unfortunate titles that put us answering the phones – there are so many folks that have done so much to make this.”

The 15th annual Conference and General Assembly of the University of California Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex Association begins Friday, Feb. 20 and runs through Sunday, Feb. 22. Although the deadline for conference registration was Feb. 13, there may be an opportunity for day-of registration. Call UCSD’s LGBT Resource Center at (858) 822-3493 for more information.