Penn State’s Facade: Performative Support for LGBTQ+ Students
This article is written by a fourth-year trans student. Read the full Fall 2024 SCDS Dis-Orientation Guide here.
When I was a first year student, I was told that Penn State truly cares about its queer students. I walked downtown and saw pride flags and UPUA banners that said “LGBTQIA+ Students Belong Here” and I thought this was going to be a fresh start for me. A chance to live authentically, free from the homophobia and transphobia that plagued my hometown. But the longer I was here, the more disillusioned I became. I was put on a girls’ floor in my dorm (I am not a girl), I was told I was going to hell on my way to class, and I was called slurs on the campus that was supposed to be safe for me. Soon the “You Belong Here” flags began to feel like a slap in the face.
How can a university that claims to care for its queer students treat them so poorly? Why are our needs ignored? Our protests silenced? The truth is that Penn State is a capitalist institution and capitalism not only fosters queerphobia, it depends on it.
Queerphobia emerges from patriarchal family structures, which have their origin in class society and therefore private ownership of the means of production. As nobles emerged in history, they wanted to keep their wealth to themselves and to pass it down on a strict bloodline to consolidate power. The invention of the patriarchal family set strict rules for who could own and inherit property. Through this construction, norms emerged and proliferated in society to punish any deviance and challenge to this structure. These norms evolved but nevertheless persisted under capitalism, which is a form of class society, and now serve to sow division within and between the working class and oppressed strata. The capitalist ruling class maintains power and subverts revolution by dividing the oppressed along arbitrary lines such as race, gender, and sexuality and subjugating them through those divisions. All capitalists, whether they realize it or not, have a vested interest in the continuation of queerphobia. (1) Inversely, the patriarchal relations built in class society are reliant on class society, so to destroy queerphobia and all forms of gender oppression we must destroy capitalism and class oppression.
Understanding how capitalists benefit from queerphobia helps us recognize how we as queer students relate to our university and our administration. This is because the university budget, goals, policies, and procedures are dictated by the board of trustees, who, as politicians, landlords, and corporate executives, fall squarely into the capitalist class. This is expanded on in the article “A Basic Political Economy of Penn State,” also in this guide. As capitalists, their interests are not aligned with ours, which is made clear by their policy choices.
Despite the university’s flaunting of their “inclusiveness,” living as a queer student at Penn State is often uncomfortable at best. When I was a first year student coming from a small conservative town, I was thrilled to learn that Penn State had a Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, several clubs for queer students, and gender-inclusive housing. And these things are great; they made my experience at Penn State better, as I’m sure they do for many students, but they are far from enough. Queer students at Penn State still face harassment and discrimination at an alarming and ever-increasing rate. Although the university claims to be fostering an inclusive environment, the number of reported bias incidents regarding sexual orientation and gender rose from 37 in the 2017–2018 school year to a staggering 142 in the 2022–2023 school year. (2)
Queer students on campus often face harassment from the many homophobic speakers that are allowed on campus under the guise of “free speech.” For example, conservative Christian preachers frequently set up shop at the Hub, the Willard building, or the Allen Street gates to spew hate speech with impunity, often interspersed with a colorful assortment of slurs. The university could easily listen to student demands to stop platforming these speakers, but doing so would risk pushback from wealthy donors and would go against the administration’s interests as capitalists. The article “Fascism or Revolution? Two Trends on Campus and in Society,” also in this guide, examines this in more detail.
Penn State even went as far as to not only allow, but pay for homophobic and transphobic internet personality Milo Yiannopoulos to deliver a speech on campus that was called “Pray the Gay Away.” For weeks leading up to the event, students were confronted with the words “pray the gay away” on bulletin boards, walls, announcement forums, and even a large display case in the Hub; it was inescapable and deeply distressing. Yiannopoulos, who calls himself an “ex-gay,” is well-known for his queerphobic rhetoric and was even planning to open a conversion therapy facility at the time of his speaking engagement at Penn State. Despite the clear threat to queer students, the university administration refused to cancel the event, claiming that their hands were tied. (3, 4)
The university’s insistence on funding and platforming hate speech, a decision that was in no way required by the first amendment, reveals their blatant disregard for the well-being of queer students at Penn State. Rather than cancel the event and risk upsetting wealthy right-wing donors, university admin doubled down on their commitment to platforming Yiannopoulos, demonizing students that called for a protest of the event and condemning the righteous anger of queer students campus-wide.
In an attempt to subvert protest, admin, through an assortment of student organizations, organized a parallel event called “Love is Louder” to divert and distract students from standing up for each other. This event was advertised as a safe space and a celebration of diversity for students to attend instead of “giving in to hate” by protesting Yiannopoulos’s event. I understand what made this event appealing; celebrating diversity is a wonderful thing. I attended myself because I thought it was the right thing to do, but it made me deeply uncomfortable. It felt wrong to be celebrating in the Hub when just across the street my fellow students were putting their safety on the line to protect mine.
Attending Love is Louder, I felt as if I’d been tricked by the university into “protesting” Yiannopoulos on their terms — into being “civil” for the sake of being civil and expressing and defending my queerness by their standards in order to avoid causing them “trouble.” Our rights and pride have never been won through civility and politeness, but rather through militant protest. When our own well-being, both mental and physical, and the well-being of our fellow students is threatened by a hostile individual that our own university paid to bring to our campus, that is not the time for a celebration. That is the time to stand up and fight back.
Administration not only allowed, but paid for Yiannopoulos to speak on campus and then had the audacity to insist that it was the students’ responsibility to be kind and polite in the face of overt hate, both from the speaker himself and from the queerphobic students on campus that were emboldened by the event. It was insulting and it was infuriating. But, since Love is Louder was technically organized by student organizations under admin’s control rather than by admin themselves, any criticism of the event was spun as a criticism of our fellow students rather than a criticism of admin’s blatant attempt to save their own hides. In this way, university administration used student organizations as a human shield to protect themselves from condemnation.
Our administration has a long history of using tactics like this to create the illusion of student support for their own positions. They are incredibly adept at using student organizations to neutralize and redirect queer rage, especially in a way that takes the target off of their own backs. Penn State has a number of queer organizations on campus, all of which do good work, but as parts of the university’s structure, they are subject to admin’s capitalist interests. If you are in leadership in a queer org on campus, I applaud you for the work that you do, but I also urge you to be vigilant. Examine your work and ensure that it truly serves the students, not the administrators. It’s disappointing to see an ostensibly student-run org abandon the interests of the students they represent in favor of university talking points. If you’re in leadership and this has happened to you I want to stress that it is not your fault; it can happen to anyone. If you do find yourself in this position, I urge you to fight back against admin’s corrupting influence and re-align your org with the interests of the students you’ve pledged to serve.
As we’ve been shown time and time again, anything that the university administration does for queer students will always be hollow because of their class interests, which are inherently at odds with the interests of queer students. The administration is not our friend, and we should always be critical when they tell us what to think and how to behave. They give us concessions that they know will never be enough and tell us to be happy with the crumbs, and if we listen, we will never get anywhere. Capitalists can put on a friendly face and give us marginal and temporary reforms, but we as queer people will never truly be able to thrive under capitalism. Our goal should be queer liberation, not the performative facade of rainbow capitalism. As capitalists, Penn State administration would never want us to achieve real liberation, so why would we ever consider them to be an ally?
We should not be looking to Penn State administration to guide our queer experience, they have never and will never have our best interests at heart. Only we can define our tradition, and it would be a mistake to warp it to make it palatable to capitalists.
QUEER STUDENTS GIVE THEM HELL, IT IS RIGHT TO REBEL
This article touched on the history of modern patriarchy, gender roles, and queerphobia and their ties to the development of class society. If you would like to read deeper into this topic, I recommend Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (though it is a little long and dense) and Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Liberation, (a shorter, lighter introduction centered around the trans struggle).
Read the full Fall 2024 SCDS Dis-Orientation Guide here.
Sources
- Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (June 1992): https://www.workers.org/books2016/Feinberg_Transgender_Liberation.pdf
- “Bias Motivated Incident Annual Reports,” available on PSU Educational Equity’s website:
https://equity.psu.edu/bias-response - Penn State students condemn message of Milo Yiannopoulos’ ‘Pray the Gay Away’ event (November 3, 2021): https://www.psucollegian.com/news/campus/penn-state-students-condemn-message-of-milo-yiannopoulos-pray-the-gay-away-event/article_dd2c6864-3c31-11ec-84ec-8f38e9df8c30.html
- Controversial Speaker’s Appearance Funded By $18,000 In Student Fees (November 2, 2021):
https://onwardstate.com/2021/11/02/controversial-speakers-appearance-funded-by-18000-in-student-fees/
