NC State’s GLBT Center is wrapping up its celebration of GLBT History Month. Two more events are planned for this week, focusing on the importance of intersectionality within the community, a guiding theme for the entire month. 

“Our theme is celebrating the diversity that exists within the GLBT community, and helping people understand the ways in which our diversity and experiences intersect with one another,” Renee Wells, director of the GLBT Center, said. “Intersectionality in the GLBT Community is looking at what it means to have multiple identities and how that affects your experiences.” 

The GLBT Center continually strives to create safe spaces in which students can express themselves and the different parts of their identities.

Thursday at 10 a.m. there will be a workshop about intersectionality within the community. Later that day at 6 p.m., there will be a screening of “Al Nisa,” a documentary about five Muslim lesbians living in Atlanta. A discussion with the film’s director, Red Summer, will follow the documentary. Both events will be held at Talley Student Union. 

Earlier in October, the center held a Forgotten Queer History lecture, led by historian Josh Burford, assistant director of the UNC-Charlotte Multicultural Resource Center. The workshop explored the roles of specific, forgotten individuals and their shaping of historical movements. The workshop specifically focused on transgender and minority leaders within the LGBT community, whose roles are often whitewashed in media representation.

“The lecture was really enlightening,” Hayden Youngquist, a junior studying electrical and computer engineering, said. “There’s a lot of stuff you miss even when you identify within the community.”

Students added to the historical dialogue of the LGBT community in a queer zine workshop by turning their coming-out stories into something tangible. A zine is self-published, self-made magazine that was popular during the 1990s before the era of blogging.

“For a long time, queer zines were the only way communities could get their message out because mainstream media wouldn’t publish them,” Wells said. “They’ve been a way our community history has been preserved.”

Student-made zines are on display in the GLBT Center for the rest of the month. 

“It was a nice way to express yourself and think about where you come from,” Youngquist said. “It’s a good way to see how the LGBT community is developing today.”

Many of the student-made zines deal with issues of coming out, which were similarly addressed in the creation of a mural in the Free Expression Tunnel on National Coming Out Day on Oct. 11.  

“Visibility has always been really important within the GLBT community, especially for students who aren’t out to their family,” Wells said. “Being able to publicly come out through that mural was very affirming for many students.” 

A group of student volunteers will turn the zines into an archive of queer culture at NC State, which will eventually be a part of the archives within Special Collections at D.H. Hill Library. 

Assistant Director of the GLBT Center Natalie Nguyen, along with John Miller IV, a graduate student studying higher education administration, began the group Queer People of Color at NC State, where students can meet to discuss the impact their differing identities have on their daily lives. 

“I don’t want people to feel like they have to choose between race and sexuality,” Nguyen said. 

People who identify within the GLBT community, as well as a person of color are encouraged to attend group meetings.

“It’s a safe place for students to address as much of themselves as possible at the same time,” Miller said. “And they have the ability to talk and be with a group of people who identify similarly.”

The group was started due to a large amount of student requests, according to Nguyen and Miller. 

“We hear from students who talk about the fact that their needs and experiences are different, and there aren’t always spaces for them to feel like that’s a valuable part of the community,” Wells said. 

One of the faculty and staff focused events of GLBT History Month was a Project SAFE workshop, designed to prepare participants to understand and address the needs of GLBT students.

“The thing about this community is that it’s not static,” Wells said. “It’s constantly evolving, and the needs of students are constantly changing.”

This year, the GLBT Center has started the GLBT Advocate Program targeting faculty and staff. 

“Staff members who want to participate sign up for a year where they have to come to one workshop and one event,” Wells said. “To renew, they have to keep going to at least one event and one workshop a year.”

This way, Project SAFE participants stay engaged with the GLBT community, and better learn how to help GLBT identified students.

“This is our way to create a culture in which everybody on campus understands that making this campus inclusive is not just the work of the Center,” Wells said. “We need people who are advocates, who are working with us to push the conversation about inclusivity on campus.”