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Queer Archives Project

Image of McKelvy House, 1960's

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Unofficial Queer Spaces For nearly 30 years, there have been official queer spaces on campus where individuals can gather and feel openly supported and represented. However, before this, there were unofficial queer spaces where people could gain similar forms of support. In the Arts, people have the ability to express themselves, pretend to be someone else, or play around with their identity. This fluidity is inherently welcoming to queerness. Naturally, a lot of queer folks gravitate towards this space whether it be for an excuse to play around with your identity or a true love for the arts, or both. The Arts are a prominent theme for the QAP and many interviewees have taken part in the arts in one way or another.

For some individuals, the Arts were a smaller part of their life but still provided a space where they could enter as their authentic selves. The arts are a unique space where one does not have to major to participate. The Arts can be found in poetry, visual art, theater, music, literature, and many more forms. Some people choose to be involved in a more official way, while others explore the arts on their own. Leah Wasacz ‘16 found refuge in literature and expression through academia, where she wrote a paper on trans people in the Renaissance. This course provided her with the opportunity to dive into a topic she was interested in and wouldn’t otherwise explore outside the classroom. Frank Herman ‘59 claims to have not had much of a social life at Lafayette due to the climate in the late 50s, but theater was one of the only things he was involved in. 38 years later, Peter Theodore ‘97 found a more accepting community in theater than the greater Lafayette. He found that the themes in theater were discussing LGBTQ+ issues, diversity, and more, while the rest of the community was silent. As campus has changed drastically over the years, the Arts has consistently been a place where queer people have been accepted authentically.

McKelvy House has also traditionally been a space where queer folks have been accepted on campus. The McKelvy Scholars Program, which has been around since 1961, is a co-ed community of nearly 20 students from different academic interests and upbringings. The McKelvy community offers students the opportunity to broaden their horizons and meet students from different lived experiences. Stephen Parahus, who was a member of McKelvy, explains that the nature of the house invited people of all different identities. This created a safe space where all different types of people were accepted. Professor Susan Basow describes McKelvy as “a place for students who were willing to think outside the box and not be Greek members, and so it attracted students who were maybe disproportionately gay, lesbian, so that’s where students often felt it was a safe place to be,” [00:49:43]. Like Parahus mentioned, Basow reiterates that, “it was a place where people were not unafraid of different -- where they were unafraid of difference, and not only unafraid of it, but willing to think and talk about it.”

Both the Arts and McKelvy House have proven to be unofficial queer spaces in which queer individuals feel safe and welcomed. However, every space can be exclusionary. Who is truly welcomed in these spaces? As an African American man, Riley Temple ‘71 reasons, “I love the theatre, yeah. Because then, there was no such thing... And I had been an actor in high school. And I got awards in high school for my acting. But when I came here, I felt that I couldn’t because there was no such thing as color-blind casting at that time. No, no,” [01:02:08]. As a predominantly white institution, the Arts can continue to reproduce the same racial/ethnic inequalities of the general Lafayette community.

In addition, while the McKelvy Scholars Program can be a great support system for queer folks, it can also be intimidating and exclusionary due to the extensive application and interview process, making it difficult for less socioeconomically privileged students to find and take advantage of. In order to even apply for the program, students must be nominated by a faculty member. Students from minority groups might not feel qualified enough to ask a faculty member for a nomination, or even feel “scholarly” enough to apply for the program after receiving a nomination. While the Arts and McKelvy have acted as a home for generations of queer students at Lafayette, a safe haven still has the ability to reproduce other intersectional problems.