For the Sake of Pride, Get Outside

Angelica Gajewski ’26

Executive Bits & Pieces Editor

Trinity College’s student body features a handful of students who are openly vocal about their queer identities and engage in the community. Meanwhile, most students, identifying as queer or ally, say “gay rights” a couple of times a year and call it a day. This isn’t unique to Trinity. The phenomenon of allyship being a 9-5 position, abandoned after hours in favor of social circles that reinforce hostility toward LGBTQ+ life, is at the center of passive allyship as a social concept. Echoes of this dynamic have since rapidly impacted the public actions of American institutions, with corporate support for pride events decreasing and diversity, equity and inclusion policy rollbacks. This trend exposes the very real dangers facing pride; at the same time, it illustrates how the labor and responsibility of liberation has been increasingly outsourced to brands, institutions, and policymakers in the unfortunately false pretense of LGBTQ+ liberation being a default or morally obvious stance. 

Trinity has built an inclusive cultural infrastructure, with spaces like the Queer Resource Center and the Encouraging Respect of Sexualities organization. Yet, engagement with these groups, particularly from straight students, remains low or is limited to minimal participation for the sake of resume building or signaling. As a result, Trinity’s queer and affirming campus culture, despite being set up for success, is rather small and self-contained, even compared to other NESAC schools with similarly low student populations. This may be attributed to Trinity’s relatively conservative reputation in comparison to similar institutions such as Wesleyan University. In the face of such historically heteronormative and conservative cultures, and even their well-meaning organizations, the onus is placed on students to push the student body forward in its thinking. In the everyday choices students make, by engaging openly, even in moments of uncertainty and ideological imperfection, we move toward a culture defined by curiosity and empathy rather than scripted allyship that displaces the responsibility of change onto organizations and marginalized peoples. 

If institutional support alone cannot sustain genuine progress and is as vulnerable to executive power structures and capitalist ideals as we are witnessing, then the task of pushing the student body forward falls to students themselves. So I ask our readers to do the seemingly small things, like recommending that Ocean Vuong novel to your book club president, donating the Christmas gifts that were too small to the QRC closet as opposed to selling them on Depop or making the effort to recommend and support Pratt Street’s numerous queer and woman-owned small businesses. Allyship, especially in times of peril for LGBTQ+ communities, doesn’t have to be complicated, but it should be active, visible and in direct communication not only with formal organizations already doing the right thing, but also with those who have stepped back, believing the fight for liberation to be over.