In an exciting conference that I accidentally stumbled upon after 45 minutes of looking for a passably clean washroom on campus, UBC unveiled a new course to be integrated into its curriculum in celebration of Pride Month.
“We thought about consulting ‘real gay people’ about the sort of course topics they would find beneficial to the university’s curriculum, but that seemed too hard tbh,” said Leia Z. Bones, a prominent university alum and “like, the biggest ally ever,” according to her LinkedIn. I took a seat in the back row because they were giving out rainbow-shaped cookies (I love free snacks).
Bones, who has spearheaded over 10 different Pride T-shirt design teams across 4 discount stores and grocery superstores over the past 6 years (according to the conference program I used as a napkin to brush off my cookie crumbs), “believes in Queer inclusion!” This, written in large, bold, underlined font on the program’s first page, should perhaps not need such overt clarification as that’s like, the bare minimum, but I’m gonna keep my thoughts to myself and keep giving you the cold hard factual juicy yummy news.
“Drumroll, please...” Bones waited for seven minutes and forty-six seconds in order to ensure conference-wide percussive participation. “I am both humbled and honoured and humbly honoured to introduce the university’s newest course concept: ‘Corporate Allyship Principles for Dummies: Pride’ or ‘GAYS 350B’!” The course will be available for registration immediately, after being added to Workday within “one week I guess. Or nine business years.”
GAYS 350B will be an interactive, hit-the-ground-running type of course taught by Bones and a lot of her friends who have gay friends, they swear.
“Students will have the unique opportunity to visit a number of offices across Vancouver where they will conduct real research on how corporate allyship is implemented within different workplaces, from mainstream retail stores to pyramid schemes,” Bones said. “There’s a lot to be done with the term ‘MLM.’”
At this, some probably AI-powered humanoid entities in uniforms started passing out various samples of “corporate-approved Pride products.” These included a rainbow button with a thumbs-up emoji and the word “ok” printed on it in Comic Sans, a see through plastic fanny pack that says “BE YOU!” in hot pink block letters and a flimsy cotton tote bag with nothing on it at all because, as Bones said, “gay people love tote bags, so the bags speak for themselves.”
“This is a real step forward for inclusion and diversity and stuff. I don’t think the university has any classes that will help students think critically about these relevant topics and issues,” said Bones.
When an anonymous audience member commented on their own experiences taking UBC Arts courses which discussed and explored gender, Queerness and sexuality in “enlightening, enjoyable and important ways,” Bones laughed.
“Arts courses! You’ve gotta be joking. Everyone knows those aren’t real.” The audience member was then escorted from the conference, but was given what appeared to be a mildly uplifting poster of a cat and a free clicky pen on their way out.
Bones went on to describe more core elements of the course, including key topics such as “the importance of vaguely supportive phrasing,” “leveraging Millennial beige in rainbow product design,” “the art of changing the company profile photo to rainbow colours in June,” “performing the performative” and “weaponizing your incompetence.”
Because of its highly-involved hands-on nature, and also because Bones “can only handle all that PC stuff for so long,” the course has been specially designed to run only during the month of June and then promptly be forgotten about for the rest of the year.
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