Wyatt Smith
Features Editor
Note: This article is part one of a two-part series on LGBT+ representation on campus. This week the focus is on issues students have with how queerness is currently represented. Next week’s segment will cover what changes students would like to see and who they think should be responsible for bringing them about.
Spectrum, a student-run organization, is Wooster’s lone LGBT group. As the sole representative body for queer topics, this group has often been at the center of many divides in Wooster’s LGBT+ community. Among the students who are socially active in queer issues, some work with Spectrum while others distance themselves from the organization.
“It’s a contradiction,” said Christa Craven, chair of the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program and Spectrum’s former faculty adviser. “We have an organization that is here to represent LGBT students on campus, but many of our LGBT students are not involved in it.”
Spectrum is primarily an educational and activist, rather than a social, organization. Like most student groups, Spectrum holds weekly meetings and special events, but also operates several committees (including a policy committee and a support group) and is closely associated with a program house that offers further support services.
“The fact is, Spectrum is the voice of LGBT issues on campus whether the rest of us like it or not,” said Emily Hrovat ’16, “and most of us do not like it.”
The most common complaint students lodge about Spectrum is that it’s too cliquey.
“I think Spectrum represents the views of a very specific niche of the queer community on campus and I don’t find it very inclusive,” said Hrovat.
“If all the main members of the group eat all their meals together and hang out together and watch movies together and then at their meetings tell a bunch of inside jokes, that’s not going to help people feel welcome,” said Ananda Menon ’14. “I think that the group needs to be run in a more professional way.”
“We do know each other,” explained Jacob Malone ’14, Spectrum’s current treasurer and former president, “we get to know each other and I feel like that’s a problem when you get into any group… I don’t want to tell people they can’t do what they want to do and be friends with who they want to be friends with.”
For some students not in Spectrum, their disinterest is due to a perceived lack of a need for LGBT+ activism on campus.
“I think if it were necessary to be doing student activism for queer benefit, that would definitely be something I would be a part of,” said Maria Janasz ’14, “but I don’t think that that’s something our campus is in dire need of right now… I think there are definitely bigger things on campus that need to be addressed than queer issues.”
Brandon McDonald ’14 agreed. “I specifically want to know what issues are particularly going on,” he said. “I personally haven’t experienced… any of that.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, other, more active students feel differently.
“I would absolutely say that LGBT people in general, on this campus, still have a ways to go,” said Michelle Baker ’14, president of Spectrum. “For example, I have personally seen harassment, I have heard a lot of reports about it and it is an issue that we need to work on.”
Students point to an unacceptance of trans individuals and uninclusive language in classroom discussions as examples of LGBT+ issues on campus that remain largely unaddressed. For her part, Craven believes that further activism is needed to combat ongoing violence against LGBT+ individuals, both on and off campus, and Ohio’s socially conservative laws, which forbid same-sex parents to adopt and allow employers to discriminate based on sexual orientation.
Even though claims of cliquishness are the most common, more contentious disagreements are over which identities should and shouldn’t be the focus of Spectrum’s activities. Debates rage over the proper place of those with ‘plus’ sexualities, fetishists and allies.
Most students — both those in and not in Spectrum — agree that the organization often emphasizes queer identities that do not fall into the categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans. These residual categories are often referred to as ‘plus’ sexualities, as in LGBT+.
“My sense is that [Spectrum’s] focus is on non-heteronormative sexualities,” elaborated Craven, “but not necessarily on sexualities that revolve around homosexual attraction, which was primarily the case before.”
Members of Spectrum hold that plus sexualities are important components of the array of human sexuality, and often deserve special attention because they lack homosexuality’s growing visibility and acceptance.
“At least in my opinion, there’s a large representation and visibility for gay and lesbian individuals, so they’re moving on,” Malone said. “It makes sense they would. They’re represented, they’re seen… But bi, pan, fluid individuals, for example, that’s not a representation that’s usually out there… We’re all on different playing fields.”
Malone explained that — for the most part — Spectrum’s smaller events focus on plus sexualities while the speakers they bring in focus on gay and lesbian issues.
This approach has drawn ire from some gay and lesbian students who believe that their needs are being overlooked.
“There’s a very significant population of just gay and lesbian students who are left out of much of the programming,” said Menon. “I think that this focus on the plus, it’s kind of good but it also really takes away from the struggles that I feel far more students face on this campus.”
“Spectrum doesn’t really have a clear grasp of what student sexuality is like,” Steve Schott ’14 said, “because their framework of sexuality comes from the internet and it’s different versus… lived practice of what student sexualities and student views and student life is like.”
Jackson Tribbet ’16, who loosely associates himself with Spectrum, considers this accusation “insensitive,” although he agrees that there should be more programming for lesbian and gay individuals.
“Spectrum is going to represent the people who are a part of it, because they are queer and that’s what Spectrum is for,” he said. “Queerness is not just lesbian and gay, it’s a whole spectrum of gender and sexuality. People don’t get that.”
Some students do not like that Spectrum lumps BDSM and other forms of kink together with issues of sexual and gender
identity. Malone holds that BDSM and kink belong in Spectrum because they can profoundly influence one’s sexual identity, but others disagree.
“I found… events geared toward things like kink and BDSM… incredibly off-putting and very out of place in an LGBT student group,” said Hrovat.
“If you want a kink group, perfect, make it,” Spencer Zeigler ’16 said, “… but leave it out of the queer group.”
The proper role of allies is also constantly debated, by both Spectrum’s members and its detractors.
“The allies I’ve seen in Spectrum genuinely want to learn and help, and they help out so much,” Baker said. “It’s activism and education and we can’t just expect every queer person to be an activist or to be interested in educating, and so we need people who are really dedicated to that… At the same time, there is a need for queer-only spaces.”
“I think the issue comes when Spectrum claims to be the LGBTQ space on campus, that then they very specifically carve out a space of safety and consideration for straight people,” said Scott McLellan ’15. “I’m not saying that hetero people or cis-het people shouldn’t be involved in Spectrum, but what I’m saying is that they should be very much like guests.”
“A lot of the time the queer voices get drowned out by the very large number of allies,” agreed Menon.
Although Spectrum’s leadership would like to host queer-only events, the College’s rules governing student organizations prevent them from doing so; if they held closed events, Spectrum would lose its funding.
“I’ve been talking to people, trying to figure out ways around that,” said Malone, “but in all honesty, we’re not allowed to.”
Craven attributes these disagreements over Spectrum to a mix of ideological concerns and social divides. “I think there are shifts within the national community discourse in terms of queerness,” she said, “but I also think that there is a lot of interpersonal stuff that goes on on a small campus that really impacts the organizing and how well students fit together… I don’t think this is unique to queer organizing; I think this [happens in] any kind of organizing that involves trying to get diverse constituencies together.”