Mt. San Antonio College put the Pride Center’s 10th anniversary on a Thursday. October 1. Building 6-160. Greg MacDonald’s newsroom piece called it one of the flagship Pride centers at a U.S. community college. The party title was “We’re Trans, We’re Queer, We’ve Been Here.” Open house noon to 3 p.m. That is a calendar. The resource is the room that still has hours on Friday.
We already wrote UND’s 10-year Pride Center as a room, not a press release. Mt. SAC is the community-college version of that argument. Transfer students, night classes, and a portal card for chosen name. If you only showed up for bingo, you missed the door.
Fall 2016 is the founding. Oct. 1 is a calendar trick
Rony Castellanos Raymundo, the director, told the college they picked October 1 because October is LGBTQIA2S+ History Month and National Coming Out Day is October 11. They also found the center started in Fall 2016, so the date lined up. That is honest scheduling. It is not a founding myth. If your campus “anniversary” has no year on a page, you do not have this.
Castellanos Raymundo said the Mt. SAC Pride Center is among the first LGBTQIA2S+ Pride Centers in California community colleges. Credit the quote. Do not turn it into a national ranking. Community colleges are where a lot of queer students actually enroll. A four-year index will miss the building.
They described a taskforce that wanted students seen, validated, supported, and heard. That is origin language. The test is whether a student can still walk into 6-160 without an RSVP. Moorpark’s Club Rush table is not a center. A table is a Tuesday. A room with a phone number is the product.
The director’s longer hope in the same article is academic completion and well-being, plus campus support that is more than “friendly.” Friendly is a brochure. Hours are a budget. If your campus will not print the hours, you are reading a vibe.
Do not skip the event title. “We’ve Been Here” is the point of a 10-year room. The march at 2:30 p.m. looping back to the Pride Center is theater that ends at the door. End at the door.
Building 6-160 has hours. Write them down
The Pride Center page is more useful than the anniversary copy. Monday through Wednesday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Building 6, Room 160. (909) 274-6550. [email protected]. If you are a Mt. SAC student and you only saved the Instagram, you saved the wrong object.
Thursday closing at 4:30 is the kind of detail that wrecks a student who works until 4. The anniversary open house ran noon to 3 on a Thursday. That is inside the posted window. After 4:30 the room is closed. After-hours crisis is not the Pride Center’s voicemail. We already covered 988 Press 3 as a state backup. This week The Trevor Project said Press 3 resumed on September 30 after it was discontinued in July 2025. Jaymes Black, Trevor’s CEO, also said Trevor’s own 24/7 lines never left. Use that when 6-160 is locked. Do not use it as a substitute for a counselor appointment the center can help you find during business hours.
Staff on the page, with the pronouns they printed: Rony, director, they/them/elle. Citlaly, student services support. Crystal, project expert, they/them/elle. Frank, project expert. Julian, professional expert. You do not need to memorize the org chart. You need to know there is more than one human attached to the room. A “center” that is one overworked person plus a rainbow vinyl will vanish in a budget year. Names on a staff table are a small proof of payroll.
Call the number before you assume drop-in. Community-college centers run workshops, coverage gaps, and campus closures that the static hours cannot see. The page is the floor, not a guarantee the director is sitting in the chair at 8:02.
If you do not go to Mt. SAC, steal the method. Find the building code, the room, the hours, the email, and a named director. Campus Pride’s index is gone. A room number is still a room number.
You may never enroll there. The useful export is how a two-year campus talks about the center in public: a newsroom article with a director’s name, a staff table, and a phone that is not a Google Voice. If your college will only announce Pride on a story-photo of a flag, ask for the equivalent of 6-160 in writing. Flags are cheap. Room numbers go on maps.
Chosen name is a portal card, not a speech
Mt. SAC printed the chosen-name steps on the same Pride Center page. Log into the Portal. Search for the “Chosen Name” card. “Set or Edit Your Chosen First Name.” Edit in Personal Details. Name, pronouns, gender identity. Update. After that, the college says chosen name and pronouns show on class rosters, in Canvas, on Zoom, and on new student ID cards. That is a checklist. Do it before you need a professor to guess.
“New” student ID cards means the old card in your wallet may still deadname you at the door of a lab. Ask how often IDs reprint and whether the first reprint is free. The newsroom piece does not say. The Pride Center can. Bring the old card. Do not argue with a student worker who did not write the SIS.
Pronouns in Canvas help if the instructor looks. They do not rewrite a publisher’s homework login. Keep a short script for the first week: this is the name on the roster, this is the name I use. The portal work is so you are not doing that speech in every class.
Gender identity fields in a student system are data. Data has FERPA and a retention schedule. If you are not safe at home, ask the center what is visible to parents on a community-college portal before you fill every dropdown. This is not a reason to skip the name change. It is a reason to ask one question in 6-160 instead of guessing from TikTok.
Other campuses will not have a “Chosen Name” card with that label. The transferable part is: name the system (Portal, SIS, MyCampus), name the fields, name where it propagates (roster, LMS, Zoom, ID). If staff cannot tell you those four, you do not have a procedure. You have a vibe. Procedures are the resource.
Do not wait for Coming Out Day on October 11 to click Update. Castellanos Raymundo used that date as a theme for the party. Your registrar does not batch-process courage.
The open house was three hours. The workshops were the inventory
MacDonald’s schedule is a map of what the college is willing to put on grass and in rooms:
Noon to 12:30, land acknowledgement by Seqouia Salas and a welcome. 12:30 to 1:30, Drag Queen Bingo with Roxy Wood at Building 6 south entrance. 12:30 to 2, printmaking in the Library with Jennifer Chen, and Read & Resist on the shaded lawn with banned or challenged LGBTQ+ books from the Library, facilitated by Cynthia Orr and Jared Burton. 1 to 2, zine workshop in the CBCSS Audre Lorde Lounge with Eva Ríos-Alvarado. 2:15, sign making. 2:30 to 3, a Pride March around campus that returns to the Pride Center.
Read that as inventory. Library staff showed up. A lounge named for Audre Lorde exists. Banned-book browsing was allowed on the lawn in daylight. That is more than a flag on a sandwich board. If your campus anniversary is only a cupcake table, compare.
Read & Resist is the piece to copy if you have no budget for a march. A library already has a collection policy and a lawn. Banned-book displays are a student service when the collection is actually there and someone is sitting with it. Take the title list home. A party without a checkout is still a party.
Bingo and a march are optional. Hours are not. Students who work Thursday afternoons did not get this open house. They get Monday at 8 if the door is unlocked. When you evaluate a center, ask who can attend at noon on a weekday. Night students need a different proof: evening hours, online booking, or a clear email response time. Mt. SAC’s page does not advertise evening hours. Believe the page.
Castellanos Raymundo invited the whole campus to honor communities that have been there despite hatred and will continue to exist. Fine. Your job as a student is smaller. Get the room number. Get the hours. Get the chosen-name click path. Get one staff name. That is the 10-year product.
If you are not at Mt. SAC, audit your own door this week
October is History Month on a lot of campuses that still have no Pride Center. SIU can name a month. Colgate can still lack a center. We wrote that split yesterday. The Mt. SAC lesson is the opposite: a community college kept a room for a decade and printed the hours.
Walk your campus with four questions. Where is the door? When is it open? Who is paid to sit there? What system changes your name on the roster? If the answers live only on Instagram, screenshot the hours into your notes because Instagram is not a records office.
Community-college students transferring in spring should ask the destination university those four before orientation week. A Pride Center that exists only as a student club will not change Canvas. A dean’s “we’re working on it” is not Room 160.
If your campus closed the center, the leftover resources are usually a counseling referral, a student org, and a national line. EMU’s first-week cookout was a reminder to steal the resource list under the event. Steal Mt. SAC’s list the same way: phone, email, building, portal steps. Then check whether your school has any of them.
Press 3 coming back on September 30 is relevant after hours. It is not a building. Black’s statement is about crisis counselors and state partners. Your campus counseling center is still a separate waitlist. The Pride Center’s job during posted hours is the boring stack: name change, a quieter room, a person who knows which dean handles a complaint. Do not make 988 do the registrar’s job.
Ten years is staff who stayed and a room the college did not convert into storage. Celebrate if you were there at noon. If you were in class, go Monday. Building 6-160. Write it on the syllabus pocket. The march already ended.
One more check before you close the tab. The newsroom story tells you to visit mtsac.edu/pridecenter, call, email, or drop by. Do all four once so you know which one actually answers. A 10-year center that only answers Instagram DMs is a 10-year brand. You want the door that opened in Fall 2016 and still lists 8 a.m. on a Monday.
