Diversity Week kicked off on the Russell House patio Tuesday with a barbecue event, BBQueer, to celebrate the beginning of LGBTQ+ History Month.
The purpose of the event was exposure, recognition and to show the presence of the LGBTQ+ community at USC.
“We always want to recognize our LGBT students around campus, to make sure that they feel that they're included. So, October is LGBT History Month,” Caroline Wallace, the assistant director for LGBTQ+ education in the multicultural student affairs office, said.
Wallace said she believes the importance of diversity isn’t rooted in just a single sexuality or ethnicity, but in the results that come from the combinations of them. This is called intersectionality.
“The idea has been expanded to talk about the fact that people have multiple identities at all times and they all play differently together,” Wallace said. “Culturally, things that you meet at the intersection of your race, and ethnicity, and religion, and ability status, and sexual orientation or gender identity, all of those things play together all of the time.”
Wallace said the event is for LGBTQ+ students and their friends.
“So we always want to celebrate our students' multiple identities and recognize that they have certain things that they are working through because of their multiple identities at all times,” Wallace said.
Tracy Whelen, a graduate student in hazards geography, participated in the barbecue.
“For me it’s always nice to come and hang out with things that queer groups do,” Whelen said. “Otherwise I’m not really around queer people on campus much. At least, in my department, most of the grad students are straight.”
Wallace said what makes an event such as this more meaningful is also the amount of people who might be affected, regardless of whether they are LGBTQ+ or not.
“We have data that says 13% of our population is LGBT, that comes from sexual assault prevention for undergraduates module that all undergraduate students do, so that is a large population,” Wallace said. “So when we’re talking about supporting the community, it affects everyone, and we want to be able to take care of our friends.”
Isabella Campbell, a first-year pre-business student, said the event being out in the open helped exposure tremendously, not just of the event, but also the message.
"They usually do them in the inner multicultural lounge or whatever, and I like this, because if you didn’t know about the event and it’s in the cultural lounge, you don’t know how to get to it," Campbell said. "It’s not an easy place to find. But out here, people can just walk up and join in.”
To Campbell, the fostering of a community was an important aspect of this event.
“I think it’s a community, and I think it’s a place where the LGBT community can feel safe and, like, in our hetero-normative and cisgender-normative society, then we can come together and have our own thing for once,” Campbell said.
Wallace echoed the importance of community within Carolina. She wishes for this community to not only be established, but to also be visible to the rest of the students.
“I would like our students to, who are LGBT, feel a sense of community within Carolina, within the UofSC community,” Wallace said. “And I would like our friends who are not LGBT to find the community, to be able to recognize that we are here, that they're visible and just to create some connections.”