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GAY PRIDE: Students march in
San Francisco in June 1979.
Courtesy LGBT Community Resources
Center |
Where a pole once zipped
firefighters to the ground, an elevator now carries
students between floors of the Fire Truck House. It’s
a historic, quirky building that has housed a number
of student organizations over the decades, and none
has been there longer than the second-story occupant,
currently named the LGBT Community Resources Center.
In April, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students
will observe the 30th anniversary of their center with
an exhibit at Tresidder and the release of a DVD that
will coincide with the annual Queer Awareness Days (QuAD).
The first interdisciplinary LGBT survey course at Stanford,
Introduction to Queer Studies, also will debut spring
quarter.
“For much of LGBT history, our community was
circumscribed by the walls of this building and it was
the only place to be queer on campus,” says Ben
Davidson, the first full-time director of the center,
appointed in 1999. “We’re celebrating that,
and we’re also celebrating the fact that we’ve
worked hard to create a community presence on
the web, and the fact that there are LGBT presences
in many different physical spaces today, including other
community centers, the Women’s Center and various
academic departments.”
The Tresidder exhibition will chronicle the history
of LGBT students on the Farm, from the earliest known
individual act of coming out (Branner’s Harry
Hay, ’34, in 1931) through the efforts of gay
and lesbian students to challenge homophobia in the
’60s and ’70s, combat anti-AIDS sentiment
in the ’80s and transform a student-run group
into a largely University-funded and staffed center
in the ’90s. The evolution was mirrored in a sequence
of titles: Gay People’s Union (1971-1981), Gay
and Lesbian Alliance (1981-1987) and Lesbian, Gay and
Bisexual Community Center (1987-2001).
“By all means, the center has been a positive
space,” says junior Hunter Hargraves, a student
staff member at the center. But as he has interviewed
alumni to gather their recollections for the upcoming
DVD, Hargraves realized the center has historically
been even more: “It has felt safe because the
rest of campus hasn’t been all that safe.”
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