Eya Simpson is the leader of another new group on campus: Queer and Trans People of Color (QTPOC). The group aims to recognize the intersections between race, gender and sexuality and provide a community for LGBTQ+ students of color. Though not yet officially recognized by the University, the group has been running since 2015.
Simpson described feeling isolated when they arrived on campus as a first-year.
“I came on campus and I was like ‘I’m the only Black, non-binary queer person that I know,'” Simpson said.
Simpson said they hope QTPOC will be able to alleviate that feeling of isolation for new students. They're working to make the club an official student organization, to secure more funding for events and activism.
As for SAGA, the club’s presidents said they’re hoping to revive the activism of their founders.
“As we go forward, we’re trying to figure out how we can be more so activists and trying to change the underlying conditions that create the need for us to have something like SAGA,” Daniel Bowen, co-president of SAGA, said.
The group recently became a Campus Y Committee, which Bowen hopes will give them more resources to pursue activism on campus.
In addition to activism, SAGA is reviving Lambda, the oldest LGBTQ + student publication in the country. Lambda was started in 1976 as a newsletter for CGA but quickly became a space for LGBTQ+ students to express their views about life around campus.
“It’s been really cool to be able to revive something like that that was really impactful for people all over the southeastern region and who didn’t necessarily have access to queer news and to what was going on in the queer community, and also didn’t necessarily have to be outed to read that news,” Montia Daniels, co-president of SAGA and a former DTH staff writer, said.
Daniels and Bowen hope to begin publishing next fall with a mixture of digital and print content. They said the publication will not only include news and articles, but also art, creative writing and editorials.
“We want to elevate queer voices,” Daniels said. “We want them to be heard.”
Policy Changes
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The last decade has been a tumultuous one regarding law and University policy affecting LGBTQ+ rights.
In 2012, North Carolinians voted to ratify Amendment 1, which defined marriage as strictly between one man and one woman. But three years later, the Supreme Court ruled that all same-sex couples in the United States have the right to marry.
The ruling was particularly meaningful for UNC faculty who had married in other states but didn't have their union recognized in North Carolina.
“I always said I wouldn't get married until it meant something where I lived,” Stuart Gold, a pediatric oncologist with UNC Hospitals, said. “I finally gave up on that shit and said, 'We’re going to New York.'”
Gold and his husband have been together 23 years and married for seven. However, their marriage wasn't recognized in North Carolina until 2015.
Only a year after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the N.C. General Assembly passed House Bill 2.
H.B. 2 mandated that all public facilities only allow people to use bathrooms corresponding with the gender on their birth certificate.
“That moment for me was really, really reminiscent of a whole history of exclusion and civil rights struggle,” Holland, whose grandfather was active in the civil rights movement, said.
Terri Phoenix, director of the LGBTQ Center, said the bill led to a significant rise in harassment on campus. Phoenix worked with campus facilities to redefine many single-stall bathrooms on campus as gender non-specific to accommodate transgender students.
H.B. 2 was eventually repealed, but a three-year ban on local government's nondiscrimination ordinances remained.
Before H.B. 2 was passed, another campaign regarding gender-neutral facilities swept throughout the University. Beginning in 2011, Kevin Claybren, a gay, Black undergraduate, began a massive campaign to institute gender-neutral housing options on campus.
“The proposal arose out of concern from students who were queer and were living with roommates who were pretty awful to them,” Campbell said.
In early 2012, the proposal was denied by then-Chancellor Holden Thorp. But Claybren and Phoenix brought their proposal to the Board of Trustees, which unanimously approved it in November 2012.
Incoming students began applying for the program and were prepared to receive their gender-neutral housing when the Board of Governors met in August 2013. The Board then voted to definitively ban gender-neutral housing across the UNC system, leaving students who had applied scrambling to find housing.
“We’re only going to go bigger, we’re only going to go harder,” Claybren said in a 2013 DTH article. “We’ll take it to the state level at this point.”
In 2016, the University opened a new residential community called Pride Place. Though not gender neutral, it did offer a living space specifically for LGBTQ+ students.
Looking Forward
Nearly all of the LGBTQ+ group leaders interviewed spoke to a desire to make the community more intersectional throughout the last 10 years.
Campbell explained that, while CGA was an active and influential group, it was mostly white and not very intersectional.
“Because of their intersecting identities, queer people of color face unique challenges that are not necessarily symmetrical with the challenges that queer people face or the challenges that people of color face," Daniels said.
Many are uncertain about the future of the LGBTQ+ community in the next decade, but revel in the progress that has been made thus far.
“If you really step back and look at the trajectory — just that I ever thought I’d be sitting here telling you that I’m a married gay male in North Carolina with my husband who has my healthcare benefits, and we have the same legal rights as everybody else — it’s pretty amazing,” Gold said. “I don’t think anything could take that away.”
But the fight for LGBTQ+ rights isn't over, Nickel said.
“It’s more than just tolerance,” Nickel said. “We are looking for unconditional acceptance.”
university@dailytarheel.com | @kyle_ingram11
