There are few spaces on campus more welcoming than a Triskelion meeting. Nestled at the end of a hall on the third floor of the Shapiro Campus Center, members gather every Thursday evening at 8 p.m. to discuss sexual identity, discrimination and challenges that the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning community continues to face. A few members sit on couches, others take up residence next to the bookshelves and someone is always engaged in conversation. It is a support group, an intellectual coffee discussion and a sociology class.Trisk, Brandeis University's GLBTQ and Queer Alliance, currently shares an office with Student Sexuality Information Services in Room 328 of the Campus Center. Books and DVDs line the wall of the lounge where students gather for meetings and do homework in between classes.

Many students at Brandeis pride themselves for being liberal-minded and open to discussing sexuality and gender. However, declaring the college campus progressive is not enough to move Brandeis forward. Students and staff involved in Trisk and the Queer Resource Center say the University will continue to face challenges in the coming years. These challenges include incorporating multiple identities into the GLBTQ?community, creating a full-time job for GLBTQ affairs, implementing gender-neutral housing and opening the dialogue for better education about misunderstood aspects of gender and sexuality.

Trisk currently has six branches: Outreach, Pride, Queer Resource Center, TransBrandeis, Sex and Sexualities Symposium and Queer People of Color.

SASS and QPOC are two of the newest branches this year. They helped organize the drag show on Accepted Students Day and Trisk's annual Halloween dance.

"Each of these branches has goals, but personally, the most important for me is to foster a safe space where literally any person can feel free to be themselves and not be judged," says Simon Zahn '12, general coordinator of Trisk. "My whole goal for Trisk this year was to make it more intersectional. Queer people are not just white or gay men. When you see pride parades or any form of queer life in the movies, it's very focused on certain groups. You either see butch lesbians or flamboyant gay men."

Zahn feels it is important to focus on intersectionality, which he defines as "how each person is composed of multiple identities. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Intersectionality is the way in which socially and culturally constructed categories interact on multiple levels to manifest themselves in inequalities in society. These include sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality, disability and class.

Trisk has embraced this concept through the incorporation of QPOC.

"QPOC is reconciling a person of color as a queer person [when] certain identities don't match. Some people who identify as being [Jewish] can also be gay," says Zahn.

QPOC, headed by co-coordinators Austin Auh '10 and Kaamila Mohamed '11, began as a project inspired by Prof. Sue Lanser's (ENG) Women and Gender Studies class, which focused on how women fit into a colored community as well as a queer community. "[QPOC] is a very safe place and it allows people to address particular issues about homophobia and other related things," says Mohamed, a Sociology major.

QPOC is working on building support groups and on collaborating with other clubs in the Intercultural Center. Toward the end of the semester, Brandeis African Student Organization and QPOC are considering holding collaborative efforts in which students from both groups hold meetings with themes on queer members of the black community.

Members of Trisk's outreach group, including Zahn and Jessie Brandon '10, will speak at Arlington High School in association with the high school's Gay Student Association on Nov. 20.

"When we were choosing who was going to go talk, it was important for me not to pick four gay white men to go talk. We have two males and two females. Two people who identify as people of color, bisexual and gay; . We have a broad group of identities presenting," says Zahn.

One of Trisk's goals is to create a full-time staff position to address LGBT issues. Currently, Alison Better works parttime as the Coordinator for GLBTQ affairs in the ICC.

Better, a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology department, has taught five University Writing Seminars and University Seminars on sexuality between 2007 and 2008.

"I try to support Trisk in whatever it is they do. I am here as an advisor role. The Trisk students decide their own agenda and I try to support it. In the past, students took a lot of burdens. . They took responsibility of everything that related to sexuality," Better says.

Better also believes that a full-time position in the future would help to alleviate the burden: "[Working on Trisk] burnt a lot of people out. It's fantastic to have leadership roles in college and in clubs, but it shouldn't be a full time job when you're a sophomore, junior or senior. Your job is not to fight with the administration," she says.

"Clearly, our community has made some efforts and is very interested in being queer-friendly and addressing any issues therewith. It helps to have a residential effort to assist us in getting it correct, . and evidence of that is the tremendous effort Alison has done," says Jamele Adams, associate dean of Student Life.

Zahn, Mohamed and Trisk's Sanity Coordinator Megan Straughan '11, all note Better's positive impact on Trisk but feel there can be more improvements in the future.

"Many schools have an office or a center for GLBTQ life that is part of student affairs, and that is something that we don't have. It's something that would be good for Brandeis," says Zahn.

In the two years Better has been coordinator and the seven years she has worked with the University, Better has noticed three major changes: the incorporation of Gender Identity and Expression in 2006 in the Non-Discrimination Clause of the Rights and Responsibilities in the Student Handbook, Better's appointment as a consultant in 2008 and the effort to incorporate gender-neutral housing in the fall of 2009.

"Alison and I have never run into an adversary against moving a queer-friendly agenda forward," said Adams. He notes that the problems are usually about "timing and financing."

Still, Alex Luo '11, who is involved in QRC, says that although the Brandeis queer community is "tight-knit," it is a community that is "difficult for people to integrate into."

Many students who are allies of Trisk are not necessarily members. "I do feel like there are untapped parts of the population," says Mohamed. Students and faculty have also expressed interest with introducing more classes that focus on sexuality and gender studies to address topics that are still sensitive or shrouded with confusion.

"Slurs are still thrown around a lot," says Luo. Transgender, polyamory, sadomasochism and asexuality are topics that still need to be introduced into the dialogue.

"There's no overt prejudice, but people still have issues. There's still a stigma, especially about men exploring their sexuality, using phrases such as 'No homo,'" says Mohamed. "Although we are an accepting place, we should not be too easy on ourselves.