In December 2005, the Ford Foundation awarded Hollins University and the American Association of University Professors $10,000 to participate in the foundation's Difficult Dialogues initiative. The project supported by this grant brings together a consortium of academics, including the author, from three separate institutions in Virginia and the AAUP. The author discusses the means that led her to help form the consortium and the challenges in carrying out this initiative. The statewide conference aims at building a network of people at Virginia's colleges and universities to promote civil and rational dialogue on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender-related campus issues. She uses vignettes that illustrate some salient characteristics of the discursive terrain in Virginia on the subject of homosexuality as well as what is at stake--life, liberty, and faith. (Contains 5 notes.)