After their initial gathering this summer, the Gay-Straight Alliance has kept a low profile, still focusing on organizing and trying to decide a regular location and time for their meetings.

“For right now, we’re doing morning meetings for about two weeks just because a lot of our kids [were] in Hot Topic,” co-founder Morgan Garrett said. “But then after that we’re going to try to do it bi-weekly, and do it after school hopefully in [Brian Erskine’s] room and then if the group expands a lot then the school has offered us other options for after school meetings.”

On Sept. 17, the GSA held their first official meeting at Celebration park, and spent their time getting to know each other, tie-dyeing T-Shirts, and organizing for the year.

“[The tie-dyeing] went really well, we had a lot of people come in and new faces and new people,” Garrett said. “And we got a lot of planning done for the rest of the year which I think is really good, it’s a good start.”

The founders of the GSA got the word about the first major meeting in a variety of ways.

“We advertised [the event] over Twitter (@LovejoyGSA) and then it took us a while to get signs approved through the school and stuff so we put up signs kind of late at the bathroom posts,” Garrett said. “So it got a little bit of word out that way, but a lot of it is just through social media and word of mouth I think.”

Club adviser Brian Erskine also attended the tie-dyeing meeting and thought it to be “a huge success.”

“The tie-dyeing] was great, we had I think around 40 people who showed up and some parents came to support us,” Erskine said. “It was super fun, I mean it was nice for everybody to just get some time to relax and be around each other and since everybody is still so new and the club is still so new, we need some time to get to know each other.”

Though the GSA does host fun activities, the club has a serious meaning behind it.

“The purpose of [the GSA] is important to me,” senior Bella Cano said. “I know people that are LGBTQ and they’re afraid to be themselves in a community that tends to not fully support it. There are even people our age that openly condemn them for something they have no control over. It’s really important to me that people are able to be comfortable in who they are. I don’t think anyone should be looked down at because they love different than the majority of the community.”

Garrett and the other founder of the school’s GSA, Sonali Mehta, are hopeful that the alliance will grow.

“I had kids come up to me and ask me when the meetings were and stuff and that was really cool because I’ve never seen their face,” Garrett said. “I think [the group will expand] given that that was our first meeting and a lot of it was kind of rushed and so I think it’ll definitely expand.”