One of the special events for Wordstock this year revolves around a topic that has been in the news lately -- the issue of gay marriage and acceptance of alternative lifestyles.

Get the Word Out! will be held at 1 p.m. Friday in Webster's Bookstore Café warehouse, 133 S. Allen St.; which is located underneath Chili's Grill & Bar, 137 S. Allen St., and will feature five poets reading works dealing with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues, as well as stand-up comic/ex-nun/lesbian Kelli Dunham.

Afterward, there will be an open mic during which the audience will be encouraged to participate with its feelings on LGBT issues.

Four students in the class CAS 498.2 (Private lives, public voices: activism and social justice) taught by professor and local poet Dora McQuaid, worked on an activism project and the presentation, Get the Word Out!, is the fruit of their labor.

One of those students, Emil Friend (senior-journalism), said McQuaid's class was designed to show how the personal matters of one's life are a public, political matter. Amy Madison (sophomore-liberal arts), who also helped organize Get the Word Out!, said the group did not really plan to present its activism project until members found out about Wordstock from McQuaid, one of the annual language festival's organizers.

"State College has so many extra people during Wordstock," Madison said.

Madison said she feels poetry is a good way to discuss sexuality because it allows individuals to be humanized and creates a personal message anyone can relate to.

"The goal was to raise awareness that people in the LGBT community are people," Madison said. "Their lives are the same as everybody else's. They just fall in love with people of the same sex."

And this mantra of humanizing and relating to others with spoken word and writing fits Get the Word Out! guest speaker Kelli Dunham's outlook as well. Dunham said this is why she decided to come to State College.

"I wouldn't miss a chance to be a catalyst in an event like that," she said. "It's about creating a community to raise awareness to take it to the next step."

The first line of Dunham's biography on her Web site says, "not your typical lesbian, ex-nun, stand-up comic." And as an example of her humor, here's a rebuff to a question that asked if she did homosexual material: "Do I do gay material? I look gay, so I could be talking about peanut butter and it would be gay material," she said.

As a child growing up in Wisconsin, Dunham used to practice her early comic routines to the dogs and cows - or anyone who would be an audience.

As a young adult, Dunham left college and moved to Haiti, where she decided she liked what the Missionaries of Charity did. As unique as a lesbian nun might sound, Dunham said it was natural for her at the time.

"I was living and working in Haiti," Dunham said. "And they had my same values: living in a community and attempting to change the world. I guess I thought I could get past the 'being a nun' part."

And Dunham said now she feels that with her current profession she can achieve the same goals as the Missionaries of Charity.

"Through comedy, I hope to make the world a better place," said Dunham, who started humor writing at a now defunct Philadelphia newspaper.

Coming off a recent performance at Seattle Pride, Dunham said it's fun to see pride events in every city in the U.S., and she tries to be a speaker at as many as she can.

"I do a lot of pride celebrations," Dunham said. "With the upsurge of the gay marriage issue, there's been more protestors."

When people protest the pride events, Dunham said humor can help ease the tension felt by people attending the event. In Pennsylvania, specifically, Dunham said she has seen one group that protested most of the LGBT pride rallies.

"This one guy, it's all he does all summer. He goes to every pride event," Dunham said. "I don't even do that. I think that's kind of gay."

When Dunham goes to pride events, she said she sometimes feels like a traveling preacher, but this is exactly the kind of thing Friend and Madison said they want to avoid: preaching to the converted.

"[Get the Word Out!] would be most successful if the people who knew the least about it came," Friend said.