It’s struck me that around this time on a Friday, every week, (pretty much) i would sit down and write. That’s over now, so i wonder if it might me useful to transfer these attentions to this blog. Silly and irrelevant as what i used to write was, the very fact of making it, and having it read was, i think, quite enjoyable, and perhaps healthy. The calming influence is something i would find very useful today, as i once again draw closer to fucking up.

I used to write the update for LGBT committee. As ever, i’m wary of saying nice things about myself, and i don’t want to sound bigheaded, (Which is not to say i’m not bigheaded, of course.) but the fact remains that people enjoyed my updates. This was a weekly email detailing the events committee had planned over the next couple of weeks, as well as whatever else i felt like throwing in there. And people would actually make a point of telling me they liked what i wrote. Given my slightly secret hope of one day writing, (I realise this is extremely unlikely, which is why i don’t really tell anyone anymore.) this is exciting.

But now i’m no longer on committee. As this is my final year, i was obviously ineligible to restand, and my place as secretary has now been filled. It does feel like a departure from something that’s been a huge part pf my life for some time now. I came to an LGB meeting (as it then was) in my first week at Sheffield, joined committee a couple of months later and now, five years on, i’m only giving it up because i don’t have a chance.

Well, that may not strictly be true. Five years later, i do think things may have run their course for me. I feel committee needs to move in a direction that not everyone seems to agree with. And since, in this regard, i’m a minority with little chance of convincing the others, my leaving would have probably been the best thing, whether or not it was already necessitated by my circumstances.

Committee, to me, now feels stagnant. Zombified. Little has moved on in my five years, and i now feel there are ways in which we are seriously failing, and unwilling to change, perhaps due to some inertia, or an obligation to previous incarnations of committee. My main problem is with our socials. For a long time, we have held a weekly Tuesday social in the evenings, each week a different event. In theory, this is not terrible, but the problem is that the socials generally are. Ill-thought out and poorly planned, the last one drew in three people who weren’t already on committee. Of committee, the people who are pretty much obliged to make an appearance, it drew less than half.

Previous rationales have discussed the inevitability that things will tail off as the year progresses, but i no longer buy these reasons. We are failing, and failing badly. At the end of last year, i remember discussing the same problem, and pointing out that if we obviously can’t even draw in people from committee, something is definitely not working. Then, my feeling was that we weren’t providing good enough socials. Now, i feel that the system itself is rotten.

We’ve tried to provide good socials. Occasionally we’ve even succeeded. Sometimes we’ve had quite the crowd. (Some might this as justification of the theory that numbers shrink as a year progresses, but i still see that as something that itself needs explaining, not as an answer of itself.) But that isn’t enough. They need to be good on a weekly basis in order to justify their existence.

Some seem convinced that we shouldn’t really mind too much about the dropping off of numbers, but i disagree, so much. Our role is primarily one of welfare. The other two strands are vitally important, but i believe that both socials and campaigns exist to feed into this are. (Not that this adequately explains the interconnectedness of all three.) We need to present a welcoming, exciting face, not to be just very obviously going through the motions. I’m not saying we need to have fifty people every Tuesday evening, but the Tuesdays need to be attracting more than just the three people coming out of habit.

My interpretation of the problem is that we rely too much on each weekly theme, without ever bothering to put any effort into it. And my solution, which i’ve proposed before and made no headway with, is to simply scrap this. The Tuesday socials, as they are, need to be done away with.

I still believe there should be some equivalent, but without this structure of panicking every two weeks because we’ve nothing planned one of suggestions, which failed not because of anyone else’s hostility towards it, but because at the time it was inoperable, was to convince some coffee shop or other to take us on a weekly basis. We already do this, in a way, with our weekly engagement with the Lion’s Lair, (An awful gay pub – another problem i have with the status quo) but it’s very important that we have non drinking socials, for various reasons, too obvious to go into.

As i’ve said, at the time it was impracticable, but i stand by the basic theory of this. I also feel it would free us up an awful lot. We waste time every week debating what’s to be done in each social – if they followed the same pattern this would free up so much time to talk about things that could actually matter.

It would also, i feel, free us up to put on events we’re actually passionate about. In the past we’ve had meetings on sexual health and coming out. This year we didn’t, partly through my efforts. I objected to the structure of these meeting, to the way they felt like AA meetings or were just plain boring. More than anything, i didn’t like the way they were just used to fill up the gaps in our schedule. These meetings were planned the week before, never, it felt, out of any genuine concern for the problem, but because we had nothing better to do.

I do think these are very important issues, and i feel the best way of addressing them has never been discussed. I don’t think a Tuesday social is by any means an adequate forum. I did once suggest that sexual health might be better dealt with in some kind of all-day workshop. There could be professionals, and perhaps even a time allotted so people could actually get checked for STIs without having to visit the GUM clinic, which is certainly something i’d be a bit nervous about doing. This was very quickly sot down, though, by out then Men’s Welfare rep, who admittedly is likely to have been the one who’d have had to co-ordinate it all. Still, i maintain that the idea holds water, and should have been at least considered.

Currently we are shackled to the Tuesday socials. Not only are we forced to spend probably a third of our time together as committee planning them, but we are often afraid to plan anything outside them. The things we do on Tuesdays – talks, trips – might all benefit from being treated as one off events rather than the next in a series of ideas how to fill an hour and a half. They could be better publicised, more thought put into them, and if we felt that something wasn’t going to work, there’d be no obligation to run it.

I truly feel that this approach could do a lot of good for committee, and i don’t think it’s terribly radical. But for whatever reason, (It may merely be my own inability to express myself) committee seems unwilling to take this on. I think the longer i was on committee trying to make this point and getting nowhere the more frustrated i’d have become, and the more annoying for everyone else. So i think it is for the best that my time on committee end now. (Is that subjunctive? I’ve put it as one.) Besides, i want to come back in a years time, and maybe to get back on, bringing myself to seven or eight years (on and off) contact with committee, and that’s not going to happen if i’ve burnt all my bridges with everyone.