Being accepted to Duke and accepted at Duke

Students looking for their late night coffee fix in the library will notice something new this week on their way to the Von der Heyden Pavilion. “Queering Duke History: Understanding the LGBT experience at Duke and Beyond,” the latest exhibit in Perkins Library, commemorated its grand opening last Thursday and kicked off a semester-long series of events on campus that will highlight the last fifty years of the LGBTQ community. The exhibit’s opening is timely, coinciding with this weekend’s North Carolina Pride Festival parade on and around Duke’s East Campus that saw a large number of students, especially athletes, go out and show support for Duke’s LGBTQ community.

These recent LGBTQ community outreach programs prompt us to ask what causes non-LGBTQ identifying students to choose to involve or not involve themselves in the LGBTQ movement and how Duke has progressed in making the LGBTQ community comfortable and productive on campus. When presented with overt LGBTQ advocacy opportunities like the pride parade, some students are all for it while others stand back. We want to explore why the latter type of student, who is passively supportive, might back the movement if asked specifically for an opinion but still refrain from direct involvement.

The difference in support here is nothing new. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. chides the moderate as someone who supports a movement but “prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action.’" To confront this ambivalence, the LGBTQ community at Duke has been doing an excellent job in making other students feel welcome to participate. For instance, being an “ally” of the LGBTQ movement makes it much easier for supportive students to avoid the feelings of being marginalized as supporters through the power of a coalition name. The title of an ally also makes it more convenient to support the movement because, while many students are supportive, they are not keen on putting themselves out their personally for the stigma of identifying with it.