Yesterday was Lavender Graduation at my university.  What a glorious occasion.  It is the event put on for the LGBTQ students, open to all.  Before you wonder why they would segregate themselves and have their own graduation ceremony, or why a university would allow such a thing, keep in mind that they can, and do attend the big graduation for all students.  This is a supplement.  Read on if you wonder why it is even needed.

It has been my experience that most students who are LGBTQ come to college without having ever even admitted that to themselves.  This happens for several reasons: 1) for fear of rejection from their parents, 2) fear of rejection by their friends, 3) fear of physical harm for being “different,” 4) lack of knowledge of what it means.  I’m sure there are other reasons I’m forgetting, but those are the biggies.

Once away at college, away from their parents, and away from the group of friends they may have known all their lives, they are free to explore the world on their own.  They had not realized how much their reference group had shaped for their entire lives, what they thought they knew, liked, disliked or cared about.  While they thought they were essentially free agents, they realized that their world had actually pretty much been dictated by forces they never really knew or questioned.

Once on their own and free to explore their exposure to new ideas, people, places, things, it opens up whole new worlds to them.  The world is no longer bordered by the county lines they grew up with.  They are free to roam the world during study abroads and be exposed to cultures and people and language far more different than anything they ever dreamed, even though TV, movies, books and the Internet brings these world to them.  They meet people who are no longer just the insular groups they may have grown up with.  These new people are from all over the world, all over the country, many from communities quite different than their own.  They sit in classes where they are exposed to and learn ideas that challenge their very idea of who they are, how they fit into the world, the value of ideas they may have thought were cast in stone in their heads as unassailable.  Such is the nature of education.

In this process, they begin to understand how much they have been impacted by the normal flow of life up to this point and what it means for what they think they knew.  Once out of that normal flow, they come to realize that things can and are different for different people, places and things.  They discover it in big ways and small.  For me, it was a group of us freshmen going to a ice cream shop in Ohio from my home in DC and ordering sodas, only to have them place ice cream sodas before us.  Turns out, in this part of the country, soda meant ice cream sodas.  What we thought of as soda (carbonated beverages) was called “pop.”  Who knew?  Why would we? Light bulb moment.  

One of the things students are often exposed to for the first time in college is others who are open about their LGBTQ orientation.  It is a real wake up call to find that what was whispered about in hushed tones in their hometown, or the basis for vicious ridicule, can be just plain life as it is lived elsewhere.  They come to learn that they are not foreign, awful, shameful, a loser, or an embarrassment.  They discover that there is a community of others like them who value each other for who they are and what they bring to the table rather than the insignificant, though, in some ways profound issue of who they love or are attracted to, or what body they feel more comfortable in, or what gender they present as.  They learn that though these things may tie them together as a community, they are only one small part of what creates that supportive community.  They also learn that there are others who support them and accept them for who they are.  Period.

By the time they reach graduation, that community has become an incredibly important part of their lives.  In a large university like mine, even one that takes inclusion very seriously and works every day at making everyone feel included, there are still pockets of resistance that the students have to navigate.  That makes their community, and sometimes family of choice within that community, even more important.  Nearing graduation, this takes on even greater importance as they realize they are moving from this supportive, protected environment into the “real world” where they may not have the same support system available—that is, until they create it.

All of this comes to the fore at graduation, when you want and need the support of those who truly understand that your struggle to get through the university has not been the same as that of other students without your life-altering self-revelations and all that inevitably came with it.  The broken hearts, the false starts, the challenges to who you are, the search for finding where you fit, the fear over being able to find a job where you are accepted for who you are rather than requiring you to fit a template, the social justice campaigns just to exist as who you are, and, at times, worse.  While other students’ culmination ending in graduation has been about the struggle for balancing time, workloads, a social life and finding a job, yours has been about much more.  At the point where it all comes to an end, at graduation, you want those around you who understand that struggle and appreciate what you have accomplished, and recognize that it was not the same as it was for everyone else.

What always saddens me at Lavender Graduation is the lack of parental support.  It is rare to see more than a few family members stand up when the call is made for them to do so.  For some of the students, their families abandoned them once they came out as LGBTQ.  For some there was even violence attached.  For most, it included a huge dose of their families either not understanding, not believing it or simply rejecting the possibility.  As the student keynote speaker said at the event yesterday, when she told her mother she is a lesbian, her mother’s response was “You may think you are a lesbian but Mommy doesn’t think that you are a lesbian.” Pretty soul crushing, whether it was intended to be or not.

This makes the sense of community even more urgent.  We are social creatures.  We need a tribe. One of the speakers yesterday said a quote that was something like “We can’t thrive without our tribe.”  We need a reference group.  Sometimes it will not be the one we thought it was.  At the very least, most of us think it will include the families we were born into.  Maybe not.  Which is why it is so important to have a community here for those students who need it.  They deserve it.  They deserve our support.  We taught them that they are just fine as who they are and that matters.  

Kudos to the university for providing emotional, intellectual, and physical space for the establishment of community for our LGBTQ students, and for having Lavender Graduation as part of it.  As any student who has been a part of it will tell you, it matters.  That sense of community is important.