The Gay Straight Alliance is a club made up of all kinds of students. Their main goal is to make sure everyone is thoroughly accepting of one another. It’s not a support group, and anyone is welcome to join as it’s not exclusive for gay people.

“We don’t have many rules,” club president senior Rachel Stephenson said. “There are no fees. We’re a really casual club; we just want this to be a safe space where people can be authentically themselves.”

The GSA meets after school from 4:15 to 5 every Thursday in room 368, and the club activities vary each week. Sometimes they watch videos, often on the topic of pro-equal rights or sexuality, and they often share news with relevance to the gay community and hold discussions. The club is very lenient and members typically decide as a group on the meeting’s agenda, as its first priority is to ensure that everyone has fun.

“I constantly hear from members how much they look forward to and enjoy coming to meetings,” Rachel said, “We get all kinds of people at GSA, and we interact with each other so much during meetings that it’s impossible not to become friends. It’s especially cool to know that all these different kinds of people share the same desire for equality.”

The club is made of 40 or so students and is still growing. Students are welcome to join at any time and are never obligated to attend meetings or activities outside of school that the club puts on.

“My favorite memory from being a part of GSA is our interschool picnic we had two years ago at Zilker park,” Rachel said. “We had students from all over Austin get together, and we played games and hung out and just generally had a great time being together. It symbolized exactly what the GSA stands for, in that we were just having fun and being ourselves.”