On Monday, Oct. 21, the Queer and Trans Outreach Center hosted their first ever “Queers and Coffee” event.
The Queer and Trans Outreach Center is new to campus, having started during the 2019 spring semester. This is the first large-scale event they planned this academic year.
Last semester, according to club Vice President Derek Lawrence, they hosted an event called “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Gay,” where they spoke about topics like identities and pronouns.
Their goal as an organization is to spread knowledge and resources about the LGBTQ+ community to the college campus. They have worked with other organizations before in order to meet this goal, such as collaborating with the Latino Student Union to present how coming out can intersect with the Latinx community.
LGBTQ+ students, allies and professors were all invited to a coffee hour discussion to talk about topics concerning the LGBTQ+ community.
According to club President Nicky Radford, the goal of the event was to provide students and faculty the opportunity to discuss issues that members of the LGBTQ+ community face, and potential ways to help.
“I think that we don’t really have any network on campus for queer and trans students to connect with folks from another generation. I wanted to start this to be hopefully semi-recurring so students are able to meet administrators and faculty who are part of this community, and so the administration and faculty can see students who are part of their community, as well,” Radford said.
The idea for the event started when Radford visited his brother at San Francisco University, where there is an organization similar to what Radford started with the Queer and Trans Outreach Center. One of the events the San Francisco University organization put together was a luncheon for LGBTQ+ faculty, which is where Radford first thought of the idea to host the coffee hour. The Queer and Trans Outreach Center has been planning this event since the beginning of the semester.
In the beginning of the event, attendants were given a pronoun pin to wear, along with the name of a prominent member of the LGBTQ+ community, such as Pete Buttigieg. After opening statements from the e-board, attendants filled out anonymous forms, answering questions about their own identity. Sheets were then shuffled and distributed, and used in an exercise to show the vast spectrum of how people identified.
After, attendants split into groups based on the person they were given upon entering. The groups were mixed between students and faculty, and from there, the discussions began. The e-board provided discussion questions, asking things like “What is homophobia?” and “How has your identity affected you in your daily life?”
“We had 50 people on the sign-in sheet, so that was more than we expected. We went through a lot of paper and a lot of coffee, but I think it was worth it, because we got a lot out of it,” Lawrence said. “I was just really curious about, not even just the opinions of the staff, that I do value, but knowing there are faculty and staff that identify as LGBTQ.”
Although nothing is planned as of yet, Radford would like to host more coffee hour chats, if it would benefit the community.
“We’ll see if people enjoy it, if people want it to be a regular thing. At the end of the day, I want to make sure that there are opportunities for members of the LGBTQ students, so if a recurring coffee hour facilitates that, that’s what it’ll be.”
