As a student at Cal State Fullerton in the early 1980s, Michael Losquadro was in the same situation as many Cal State students, having to hold down a job in order to pay for his education.
Looking back, Losquadro, now 60, said he was on the “five-year plan” to graduate from CSUF since he had to work 50 hours a week to pay for classes and, therefore, didn’t have the available time to take the full load of classes needed to earn a degree in four years.
Losquadro did indeed graduate in 1986 with a business degree and went on to a successful 30-year career in fundraising.
He also became an advocate for LGBTQ rights along with his husband and partner of 30 years, Dr. Brian Keller.
Motivated by a desire to ease the burden and provide more resources for future CSUF students, Losquadro and Keller have pledged a $1.5 million planned gift to the university to benefit the LGBT Queer Resource Center and student scholarships in the College of Business and Economics.
The center will be named in their honor as the Losquadro Keller LGBTQ Resource Center. A renaming celebration will take place following National Coming Out Day on Oct.11.
Of their gift, 80% will benefit the center and its programming.
“I’d like to make things a little bit easier for students in the future so that they could focus more on their classroom activity and maybe even have a little bit more fun than I did,” Losquadro said. “Looking back on my college days, I can’t exactly say it was a whole lot of fun because I was working so hard. So that was kind of the genesis of the scholarship.”
The pledged endowment also helps Losquadro and his husband fulfill their own philanthropic dreams, he said.
Losquadro, incidentally, has spent decades supporting LGBTQ causes, including Orange County’s first Gay Pride event in 1989, the fight against AIDS in the 1980s and the national march on Washington for gay rights in 1993.
Once the funds are received by the university, they’ll be invested…
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