Queer Spaces

Two RAs patrolling Main Street on the weekend before spring break began entered Schaff, or Queer House, to find the common room overflowing with residents and non-residents dancing, many of them visibly intoxicated. A number of students had been seen coming and going from the house, a quiet house where parties and alcohol are prohibited, and the RAs could hear loud music through the open windows, so it was their duty to investigate. They entered Schaff, passing by a few students huddled outside smoking cigarettes in the cold and found what was very clearly an unregistered party.

It wasn't just a party, but my 21st birthday party, and even though these RAs did what they had to do and instantly shut it down, taking names and checking IDs, it remains in my mind one of the best birthdays I've had in years. I was surrounded by people I had come to care for in my three years here at Ursinus, slathered in various colors of bright body-paint, hand-prints left by my friends. In the corner over a window was the house's vivid rainbow flag and it occurred to me that, unlike I might have years before, I didn't feel like I had been caught at the scene of a crime in its presence.
Freshman year, I celebrated my birthday in secrecy, sneaking others into the too-small dorm room I shared with a boy I would never tell that I am gay. "It's not that I dislike gay guys, it's just that I don't feel comfortable around them," he would tell other residents of our hallway, shrugging. As far as I know, he remained unaware the rest of that spring semester that the girl across the hallway had written in small print all around the room: "If you read this, I'm gay!"

My freshman roommate no longer attends this school, and I regret to this day that I didn't ever tell him. Many members of the queer community argue that the strongest political action that someone who is gay can take is to come out. Such an action reveals how close to home the issue of LGBT rights is to people who very rarely want to recognize such a truth. The truth is, however, that I didn't want my roommate to feel uncomfortable in his own room. I knew that he came from a very religious family, and so I guessed that his beliefs were more a product of that upbringing than a genuinely personal bias. My coming out might very well have been the thing that made him reconsider his value system, but I had only begun to come out the fall before that spring semester, and I wasn't ready for that kind of confrontation. Plus, I didn't want him to feel like his own room wasn't a space in which he could return to after class and relax. As someone who grew up in a home where I felt that I could only truly breathe freely once there was a locked door between myself and the rest of my house, I knew how important it was to have a space to call your own.

The queer community needs these queer spaces. These are spaces where we can speak about those things which might earn us insults like "faggot,"dirty looks, or even physical acts of violence in other places; these are spaces where we're guaranteed safety, that sense of "home." The queer community often likes to think of itself as a family, and the sad truth is that this is often because its members have been rejected by the ones who were supposed to love them. We like to provide each other the love and friendship that isn't guaranteed by the rest of society because society itself isn't a queer space yet. This doesn't mean that these queer spaces are limited to people who identify as LGBT -- many of the people who hang out in Schaff identify as straight -- but just that those who enter these spaces consider that it is a safe space and behave accordingly.

Most of our campus is not yet a safe space, not just for the LGBT population but also women and people of color. Women on our campus still fear rape, the word "nigger" has been found carved on a professor's podium and friends of mine are still occasionally called "faggot." I don't go to parties at Reimert, not only because I don't enjoy the environment, but also because it's an overwhelmingly heterosexual-oriented environment. I assume that if I were to make a move on a guy there, I'd likely have a whole room of eyes turn to watch in disbelief.

My 21st birthday, despite that it was shut down, was such a personal success because for the first time in a long time I felt exactly at home. I was among friends who loved me and celebrated a part of me that for so many years I hid away and overlooked. I think this campus needs such queer celebrations, celebration of things that are "queer," different than the norm. It needs a culture that celebrates things purely because they are different, because they're weird and maybe make some people uncomfortable. It is the necessary challenging of things thought to be normal, that clash between primary culture and counterculture, that creates change. So long as people feel unsafe on this campus, that counterculture, queer culture, should be encouraged and not silenced.