LGBTQIA+ Resources

We work to create an inclusive campus culture and offer support and services that help LGBTQ+ students with their specific needs. Provided below are several resources to help create a safe, inclusive, and respectful campus. 

Why We Use LGBTQIA+ & Why It Matters

Using the correct acronym to describe the impacted communities is something allies and members can work on to accurately speak to the history, strength, and resiliency of the LGBTQIA+ communities. It's LGBT (with some variation, such as LGBTQIA+), not GLBT. Here's why:

"This history of the acronym goes back to the last sustained trauma in the LGBT world: the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and 1990s. During that time, thousands of gay men and transwomen died (as did many straight and bisexual men and women). Not only were the retroviral drugs that make HIV/AIDS chronic rather than fatal conditions today not available, but sustained, compassionate care through the torturous path of the disease was lacking. Gay men themselves rallied to each other’s sides as did many straight allies, providing companionship, meals, and some measure of nursing care to many people with AIDS. However, a central, and largely unacknowledged, factor in the care of men with AIDS were organized and more loosely configured networks of lesbians. 

As historian Lillian Faderman details, lesbians donated blood for gay men in the 1980s when gay men themselves were prevented from doing so. They navigated the healthcare system, often from within the gendered nursing system that allowed them a particular sensitivity to the masculinized, heterosexist structures of much medical care. They organized to provide food, clothing, and housing. With so many gay men sidelined by HIV/AIDS, women were took more leadership roles in LGBT communities, breaking through a pronounced gay male chauvinism that often veered into misogyny, dampening participation in post-Stonewall organizing and activism for many lesbians.

As the AIDS crisis itself contributed to an enduring politicization of the LGBT community, women began to challenge the masculinist structures of power within a community whose very survival depended (depends still) on deconstructing such structures. At the same time, as treatments for AIDS became more promising and more available and affordable, gay men themselves increasingly recognized the role lesbians had played in mitigating the crisis. By the late 1990s, then, "gay community centers" across the country became "lesbian and gay community centers," and it became common to switch the “G” and the “L” in standard acronym (as well as, over time, to add the “T”…and then the “Q”…and so on)" (Drescher, 2016). Read more here.