Where a pole once zipped firefighters to the ground, an elevator now carries students between floors of the Fire Truck House. It’s a historic, quirky building that has housed a number of student organizations over the decades, and none has been there longer than the second-story occupant, currently named the LGBT Community Resources Center.
In April, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students will observe the 30th anniversary of their center with an exhibit at Tresidder and the release of a DVD that will coincide with the annual Queer Awareness Days (QuAD). The first interdisciplinary LGBT survey course at Stanford, Introduction to Queer Studies, also will debut spring quarter.
“For much of LGBT history, our community was circumscribed by the walls of this building and it was the only place to be queer on campus,” says Ben Davidson, the first full-time director of the center, appointed in 1999. “We’re celebrating that, and we’re also celebrating the fact that we’ve worked hard to create a community presence on the web, and the fact that there are LGBT presences in many different physical spaces today, including other community centers, the Women’s Center and various academic departments.”
The Tresidder exhibition will chronicle the history of LGBT students on the Farm, from the earliest known individual act of coming out (Branner’s Harry Hay, ’34, in 1931) through the efforts of gay and lesbian students to challenge homophobia in the ’60s and ’70s, combat anti-AIDS sentiment in the ’80s and transform a student-run group into a largely University-funded and staffed center in the ’90s. The evolution was mirrored in a sequence of titles: Gay People’s Union (1971-1981), Gay and Lesbian Alliance (1981-1987) and Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community Center (1987-2001).
“By all means, the center has been a positive space,” says junior Hunter Hargraves, a student staff member at the center. But as he has interviewed alumni to gather their recollections for the upcoming DVD, Hargraves realized the center has historically been even more: “It has felt safe because the rest of campus hasn’t been all that safe.”
