Out on Campus’ Queer History Project seeks to demonstrate SFU’s continued engagement with the queer community at large.
By Rachel Braeuer
Photos by Mark Burnham
For many, October is the month spent busily readying a Halloween costume that will inevitably be lost to the night. Not true for the folks at Out on Campus; for them October is Queer History Month, and this year marks the 40thth anniversary of queer activism at SFU. Out on Campus is now in the process of planning a Queer History Project to trace a trajectory of queer activism at SFU, and how it plays into the history of the Vancouver LGBTQ community at large.
SFU’s history as a radical activist university is represented in Vancouver’s news archives, and Out on Campus hopes to find examples of SFU’s first queer activists’ actions both on and off campus to chart not only SFU’s queer community, but the intersectionality present with the queer community at large. “A lot of the things that have happened in SFU reach to the larger LGBTQ community activism; a lot of things going on at SFU were informed by the things going on in the larger community of Vancouver, so I’d be really interested in us linking those things together, because I think it’s really easy for folks to forget how influential SFU has been,” said Samonte Cruz, Out on Campus’ Volunteer and Office coordinator, who is heading the charge to get this project off the ground.
The project itself is expected to take the form of many smaller endeavours that together will shape the project as a whole. One potential starting point is a panel discussion between former queer activists to outline their experiences at SFU and demonstrate the ways they and their peers’ efforts have informed the queer community at large. Cruz notes that tracking queer activism on campus and influential activists is difficult because of “the nature of the university, where people are around for a limited amount of time, and then they move on.” Cruz hopes that ideally the panel session would identify “the discussions that actually started at SFU,” which will demonstrate the far-reaching nature of the campus’s activism. Other hopeful sub-projects include radio shows and websites documenting the findings of the archival research, and Out on Campus is open to suggestions from volunteers about how they would like to see the project take shape.
Right now, plans for the Queer History Project are in their infancy, and Out on Campus will require a strong volunteer base to see the project through to fruition. Because of the archival nature of the project, volunteers are in need to help with that, but anyone interested in the general concept of the project is more than welcome to join. The volunteer-run status of the project means that it’s up to SFU students to create and shape.
