His story is now on display at Quinn Library at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in a new exhibit “Have a Heart: Friendship and Activism of Jesùs Lebròn.” Lebròn donated his papers, artifacts, and more to the Bronx County Historical Society Research Library, where the exhibit was first displayed. It was curated by his friend and fellow activist Brendan Fay, as well as Steven Payne, director of the Bronx County Historical Society, who received his Ph.D. at Fordham in 2019.

Professor Karina Hogan, who helped bring the exhibit to Fordham, saw it first at Bronx Community College and said seeing it and speaking to Lebròn and Fay afterwards had a huge impact on her and the development of her Religion in NYC course.

“It was transformative for me,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh it would be so cool to try to get the exhibit here because it’s so related to what I was teaching in my class.’”

Fighting Against the Defense of Marriage Act

The exhibit tells the story of Lebròn, who was born in the South Bronx, and how his work impacted LGBTQ rights in the U.S. In 1985, he became the manager of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, which was the first to sell LGBTQ-themed books. It was there that he met Fay, who became a friend and fellow activist in fighting for LGBTQ+ rights.

Lebròn got involved locally, starting Gay & Lesbian Advocates for Change, the first group in New York to ask political candidates about their stance on gay marriage. Following the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, Lebròn co-founded an organization called Marriage Equality, which grew to more than 40,000 members across various states, and organized educational and political campaigns. He led all of these efforts despite being diagnosed in 1991 with AIDS, which he’s lived with ever since.

The Civil Marriage Trail

In 2003, Lebròn and Fay started the Civil Marriage Trail Project, which helped LGBTQ couples travel to Canada—and eventually Massachusetts and Connecticut—to marry where it was legal. One of the couples who used the trail was Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer. After Spyer died in 2009, Windsor’s legal efforts for her wife’s estate traveled to the Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor in United States v. Windsor in 2013. That case laid the groundwork for Obergefell v. Hodges two years later which legalized marriage equality.

Local History, National Impact

Hogan said that she hopes the exhibit will help students and community members understand the connections between local history and national impact.

“We owe a lot to these two guys, especially to Jesùs Lebròn, who was this kid who came up out of poverty in the South Bronx,” she said. “They had such a huge impact on American history and nobody even knows about it.”

The exhibit was opened at the Ignatian Q conference and will be on display at the library through the end of June.

Karina Hogan, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, said her goal for the course was to help students to understand and “actually experience” the diversity of religions across New York City. This is the second time the community engaged learning course was offered, but it was the first time that it had a theme of gender and sexuality, Hogan said.

Hogan said the course, offered at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, explored that theme through class discussions, community activities, and texts such as Father Patrick Cheng’s book From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ.

Speaking Openly about Religion

Francesca Rizzo, a rising senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who is majoring in humanitarian studies and theology and minoring in peace and justice studies, liked that she could speak freely in the class.

“Both my peers and my professor were intent on building what we called ‘beloved community’—a space for us to talk about our experiences in an honest way,” she said.

Rebecca Hurson, FCRH ’23, who majored in sociology and minored in theology, said the course gave her insight into the complicated history between queer individuals and religious institutions, such as how some Catholic hospitals and nurses cared for patients during the AIDS epidemic.

“Queer religious people have always existed—there is a long history of queer religious people working with institutions,” she said.

Partnering with Mosques, Churches, and Synagogues

The students were also matched with a community partner and required to participate in at least seven events or programs with them; Hogan said many did more. The community partnerships and events were arranged by Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, which helped develop the course.

Hurson worked most Mondays at St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church’s resource fair for migrants and immigrants. They’ve recently been helping migrants who are getting bused to New York.

“People were lost and they started showing up to SPSA,” Hurson said. “People can take any clothes they need, emergency backpacks. They have a whole team of legal help to help with forms, and they have translators to help.”

Rizzo worked with Congregation Beit Simchat Torah and the Islamic Center at NYU.

“There were a lot of college-aged people there that are taking time out of their day to honor their own spirituality and honor their religious traditions,” Rizzo said about the Islamic Center, adding that it was powerful to see “multi generations learning about their faith side by side.”

Many students participated in the LGBTQ Community Iftar, a religious event that’s a part of Ramadan, held by the Center, an LGBTQ community center in NYC. It’s co-sponsored by many organizations, including Fordham and its Center for Community Engaged Learning.

“It was a very beautiful experience,” Hurson said. “It was very obvious how much it meant and for them to be in a room of Black, brown, queer Muslims—there’s not too many spaces where they can come together..”

New Yorkers Praying ‘Close Together’

Benedict Reilly, FCRH ’23, attended two Iftars—one at the Center and one at the Muhammad Ali Islamic Center, where he prayed salah, ”the traditional Muslim ritual prayers. The Iftar also inspired his final paper on how a prayer practice could be used to examine the relationship between topics like social justice and religious, gender, and sexual diversity.

“The practice of ‘closing the gaps’—coming physically close together to pray—stood out to me as a beautiful representation of community and inclusion,” said Reilly, a theology major with minors in Middle Eastern and humanitarian studies. “A Columbia Business School graduate prayed inches from an African refugee who, in turn, was inches from a local high schooler who was inches from me.”

Deciding on Fordham involved a bit of serendipity. A fellow Kinder alum, Chandler Dean, FCLC ’18, was already enrolled at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and loving it. But Freedman also had her eyes on Georgetown. Her father suggested she visit the Lincoln Center campus to help her decide, and after a tour, they took a break on the Plaza. 

Taking in the scene, her father noticed for the first time the name of the Lowenstein Center. Leon Lowenstein, the man for whom the building is named, also funded a scholarship that allowed him to attend University of California at San Diego. The moment felt like fate.

“That was one of those moments where I believe everything kind of happens for a reason,” she said. After that, she and Dean spoke at length, and his recommendation convinced her to enroll in the FCLC honors program. On May 21, she will graduate as a dual political science/film and television major. 

But the serendipitous moments didn’t end with that afternoon on the Plaza.

Freedman’s senior project, which was supported by an FCLC Dean’s Senior Thesis/Capstone grant, is a play titled “Self Portrait of a Modest Woman,” about the life of the artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. A staged reading of the play directed by and acted out by theatre students was held in front of a small audience at the Lincoln Center campus on April 25. 

Freedman’s play was inspired by Labille-Guiard’s painting “Self-Portrait with Two Pupils,” and takes place in 18th-century France and the present-day gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the painting resides. Freedman said became fascinated with the work during an art history course, and in the process of writing a paper on it, was dumbfounded by how little research there is about Labille-Guiard. 

“I was only able to find one biography about her, and I adored it. I kept it in my bag for several weeks and I would pull it out and take notes. While reading it, I was like, ‘This would make such a good screenplay. It’s such a good story,’” she said.

It turns out that the biography, titled Artist in the Age of Revolution (Getty Publications, 2009), was written by none other than Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center. 

“It’s so incredible for me to be able to know the only biographer of this French 18th-century artist, and to be able to ask her what she thinks about certain people and their lives,” she said.

Like her classmates, Freedman had spent a year and a half mastering in-person learning before having to pivot to remote learning in March 2020. Living in Houston added another wrinkle, as her home was one of the thousands whose water pipes froze and burst in February 2021 when the Texas power grid failed. Her family ended up living in a hotel for nearly six months during the pandemic, a period in which her dog went half blind and she needed to visit the hospital several times.

“It was such an intense experience. I jokingly refer to this as my study-abroad time in Houston, because this also would’ve been the time that I would’ve potentially been studying abroad,” she said.

A Potential London Debut

Freedman still made the most of her time. During her sophomore year, her first full-length play, The Wilde and Rambling Consequence of Being Virginia, was a finalist in a playwriting competition sponsored by the Questors, a theater company in London helmed by Dame Judi Dench. 

That in turn led to a partnership with a director at the theater to have Freedman write a new play, which may be staged at the theater company’s stage in the future.

She said the honors program has been everything that she hoped it would be, both because of the academic rigor and the camaraderie she developed with her 20-member cohort.

“I just really adore every single person in my class. The honors program is kind of like a sorority, because you have what’s like an intense hazing process your freshman year, where you have four honors classes,” she said.

“But that’s exactly what I wanted.”

Karina Hogan, Ph.D. a professor of theology and director of the FCLC honors program, had Freedman in her Sacred Texts of the Middle East.

While some students arrive their first year with a ‘deer caught in the headlights’ look in their eyes, Hogan said that Freedman stood out from the beginning as knowing exactly what she wanted.

“She is just an outstanding student and is really happy to volunteer and help out with things in the honors program, like mentoring other students,” she said.

After graduation, Freedman is going to take a few months off to travel with her roommate Gabby Etzel, with whom she started the website Absolutely Anything.—which chronicles their adventures in New York and beyond. At some point, she expects to travel to England, to help shepherd the play to completion. 

“Joan Didion has a wonderful quote that I always whisper to myself: ‘I don’t know what I think until I write.’ I think that’s so true,” said Freedman, who also writes screenplays.

“Playwriting and screenwriting is a way of understanding the world, how you feel about it, making sense of all of the insanity, and trying to find cohesion in a theme.”

It’s a phrase that’s uttered often in Jesuit circles, and at Fordham, it’s been exemplified through programs such as the Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice and Global Outreach.

This year, as part of an effort to advance and expand that work, Fordham’s Office of Mission Integration and Planning launched the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Arto Woodley, Ed.D., the center’s executive director, said the goal is to streamline operations, provide support for faculty who integrate community-engaged learning in their classes, and help students become civic leaders.

He also wants to instill what he calls a “philosophy of community.”

“When we say, ‘We’re working with the community,’ what does that really mean? Are we working with certain neighborhoods? Are we working with certain zip codes? What’s our emphasis? How do we engage with them?” he said.

“Part of developing this center helps us say, ‘Who are our neighbors? Who are we working with, and why are we working with them? What will be the impact of our work?’”

A Focus on Faculty

As part of the reorganization, the Dorothy Day Center and Global Outreach no longer operate as independent entities. Former Dorothy Day Center director Roxanne De La Torre has assumed the title of director of campus and community leadership in the larger center. Likewise, Paul Francis, who had been director of Global Outreach, has assumed the title of director of programs and operations.

Woodley said the level of community outreach, leadership development, and faculty support should increase significantly with the reorganization. This, he said, will honor the legacy of Day, for whom the University’s Community Service Program was renamed in 2009.

Faculty will be a key part of the center’s new focus. That’s because like the residents who live near Fordham’s campuses, they have long-lasting ties to the community. The goal is to develop deep and sustainable relationships between the two groups that will provide a context for students to learn.

“At many institutions, it’s activity-based. You know, we sent 50 students to a soup kitchen, they stacked 100 cans, and they gave those cans to five families. Our whole goal is to make sure we expand the boundaries of engaged scholarship beyond that,” he said.

Not every subject taught in the University naturally lends itself to engaged scholarship, but for some professors, it is a powerful tool. Karina Hogan, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology who was part of a faculty advisory committee on community outreach, plans next semester to have students in her Sacred Texts of the Mideast class examine the ways in which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam address themes of social justice in their texts. They will split into three groups and work out of a New York City synagogue, church, and mosque, where they will be able to observe how members of the respective congregations put words into action.

“The idea is to really get out and see how these ideas are actually put into action. I think it’ll be a good addition to the class,” she said.

“They Live In This Community”

For Carey Kasten, Ph.D., associate professor of modern languages, it would be inconceivable not to send students in her Spanish Language and Literature class off campus.

“They live in this community, and I want them to see that they’re capable of engaging civically with their community, ” she said.

“Speaking in a different language creates foreign travel opportunities in the city we live in, but ultimately, I would like to students to apply those skills to everything they do.”

In the past, Kasten has found partner organizations to work with both on her own and through the Dorothy Day Center. It can be a logistical challenge; since many only need three to four students, she works with several different groups to place all her students. She’s intrigued by possible connections the Center for Engaged Learning will create, and hopes they will add to those that happen organically.

A good example is the immigrant support group New Sanctuary Coalition, she said. Although many students have been referred there via faculty, several have found the group on their own and incorporated volunteering there into their own studies.

Ideally, Kasten said, she’d also like to connect volunteer opportunities to her research agenda, something that Woodley said the center will focus on as well.

“I’ve really struggled with how to bring some of this work out of the classroom and into my research. I hope to see examples from faculty members on how to do this,” she said.

Scholarship Intertwined With Civic Involvement

One of Kasten’s students, Colleen Kelly, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center who’s majoring in social work and Spanish, used a Dean’s Summer Research Grant to intern last summer at the Northern Manhattan Immigration Corporation. She was interested in learning what it actually means for New York City to be a sanctuary city.

She learned that immigrants who are in the country legally are being discouraged from applying to become citizens because seemingly minor crimes—such as jumping a turnstile—on their record might trigger a visit from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“In this time, it’s very critical to have an open definition of sanctuary and realize, in terms of the immigrant community, it’s always changing because the current administration is instilling a lot of fear of anyone who’s not a citizen,” she said.

“So anyone that’s not a citizen is really in need of sanctuary, in the form of community.”

Both this internship and one she’s currently doing at a school in the Bronx, where she’s assisting a social worker, have been directly informed by her classwork.

“I also know if a client comes to me and they need help with their asylum connection, I now have connections,” she said.

“Growing my network is not only great for my own job prospects but also my clients I’m going to serve.”

Woodley said establishing successful partnerships will go a long way toward helping Fordham fulfill the tenets of its Jesuit heritage.

“When Jesus was asked by the Sadducees what the greatest commandment was, he said to love the Lord thy God with all your heart, mind, and soul, and to love thy neighbor as yourself,” he said.

“The center is the ‘love thy neighbor’ part of it, but with a system that’s tied to engaged scholarship.”