Memoirist Kicks Off Queer Awareness Month Events
30th September 2008
This year’s Queer Awareness Month is about thinking outside the closet, organizers said.
As about 100 students gathered in Roone Arledge Auditorium Monday night to see writer Augusten Burroughs speak at the QuAM kickoff, Aquino and QuAM co-coordinators Joseph Daniels, CC ’09, and Anna Steffens, BC ’10 explained that this year’s month-long celebration will be dedicated to intersectionality—the interaction between different types of identity from race and religion to sexual orientation.
The theme, Daniels said, is “Beyond the Closet.” The goal of the 2008 QuAM is not only to raise queer awareness but also to promote diversity within the gay community.
For much of Monday’s event, the focus was on Burroughs, a well-known and openly gay memoirist who wrote Running With Scissors. Cracking jokes and answering audience questions, Burroughs read from a rough draft of an upcoming work and discussed his own adolescence and young adulthood. He did not, he said, experience “coming out” in a way that he found difficult.
“I was never indoctrinated to believe that it was wrong to be gay,” Burroughs said.
QuAM will continue on October 1 with an all-day presence on Low Plaza, and will include many events co-hosted by other student groups. The organizers’ goal is to create a diverse month that will appeal to queer students of every background.
The events may also serve as bridge-builders. Daniels stressed the need to help diverse groups learn about one another’s experiences. “With anyone, their gut reaction is to say that they don’t understand,” he said. But in planning QuAM, he and Steffens found widespread campus support. “Most of us,” he said, “all believe and care about the same things.”
Involved groups include Alice, the Columbia Political Union, Gayava, and members of the Greek community. The campus will also play host to figures such as poet Staceyann Chin, who will speak in Miller Theater on October 14. A full week will be dedicated to transgender events, which will range from a workshop to a school-wide party.
According to Daniels, QuAM wants to engage with every aspect of college life—after all, he said, “to be queer in America is to be a million things at once.”
Source: Columbia Spectator