In honor of Pride month this June, the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) plans to continue their long-term tradition of producing a display of queer authors in the library, with an addition of a display of queer musicians on the bulletin board outside the activities office.
By featuring a wide variety of authors in the library display, the GSA’s goal is to ensure they are able to represent a multitude of identities across all demographics.
“Some authors are not as well known, some are more well known and some are historical,” said junior Marley DeRienzo, GSA co-president. “For example, we’ve got James Baldwin, TJ Klune and Alice Oseman. We’ve got contributions from a lot of perspectives.”
The GSA chose to feature queer authors this year, rather than featuring books with queer storylines.
“I think it’s important to center the people as part of [queer culture] because recommending things like books is alright , but they’re fictional characters,” DeRienzo said. “We want to focus on the fact that queer people do exist in real life.”
The GSA feels that featuring queer artists will help to destigmatize queer people at McLean and allow heterosexual students to familiarize themselves with queer culture at a higher level.
“The displays will help people be able to accept those that are different from them, because being queer ultimately shouldn’t be something that polarizes people like it does,” said John, a GSA member who wishes to remain anonymous. “Queerness in a person isn’t their defining factor in the grand scheme of things, it’s just another facet of the person.”
While creating a library display has been a yearly pride month tradition for the GSA, the addition of creating an exhibit on the bulletin board outside the activities office is new this year. Photos and small biographies of varying musical artists will be featured on the board, with both well-known artists and more underground artists being featured.
“We’ve got Billie Eilish, SZA, Janelle Monae and Steam Powered Giraffe, to name a few,” DeRienzo said. “We’re putting the artists genres underneath [their names] too, so if you have a specific kind of music you like to listen to, such as R&B, folk or indie pop, you can look at the board and say ‘this [artist] would like suit my tastes.’”
By featuring queer musicians on the board, people will be able to widen their knowledge on how queer culture influences musical culture.
“The display will help show that musicians that people enjoy are part of the queer community and that the world isn’t entirely heteronormative,” John said.
By creating these two displays, the GSA hopes to effectively spread queer culture across McLean and widen the viewpoints of McLean’s students and faculty.
“I want people to realize that [queerness] is not like something that’s ‘other,’” DeRienzo said. “Queer authors are writing the same kind of romance that heterosexual authors are writing.”
