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B O U T L G B TQ + S U P P O RT By Clara Davis
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his year’s National Coming Out Day on October 11 marked the beginning of Out and Proud Week at Tufts, with events at both the LGBT Center and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Fenway campus. These joint celebrations are an attempt to bridge connections between LGBTQ+ SMFA students and the Medford/Somerville campus. At present, Tufts is listed as one of the most LGBTQ-friendly schools in the country, making it an appealing choice for LGBTQ+ students. In 2016, the university acquired the SMFA, bringing even more LGBTQ+ students into the community. According to joel gutierrez, the program administrator of the Tufts LGBT Center, the rankings are based on the amount of LGBTQ+ support resources the university offers, but can fail to account for whether the programs are actually effective. “Those rankings don’t necessarily mean anything,” gutierrez said. “I think you really have to look at what’s actually happening on the campus.” Despite its high ranking, five years after the merger, SMFA students are saying that more needs to be done to make both the Medford/Somerville and the SMFA campus more supportive of LGBTQ+ art students. Currently, the main avenue of support for LGBTQ+ SMFA students lies in the LGBTQ+ population on the SMFA campus. While Tufts does not collect demographic information on students’ sexual orientation or gender identities, SMFA students say that there is a large community of LGBTQ+ students, faculty, and studio managers. “In my dorm at least, I feel like there’s a lot of LGBTQ+ students. So I immediately felt like I wasn’t gonna stick out,” said first-year Bachelor of Fine Arts student Michael Tsiakalis-Brown, who lives in the SMFA Beacon Street dorms. Tsiakalis-Brown is also enrolled in the SMFA studio class Flora and Fauna, taught by part-time lecturer Ria Brodell, who is nonbinary. “I feel so comfortable in their class which is really nice,” Tsiakalis-Brown said. “[The amount of LGBTQ+ students at SMFA] is really empowering and nice to see. It’s a very safe space, where I feel like I can just have my art and ‘LGBT’ isn’t the first thing that’s thought of it, because there’s so many LGBT people in that space,” said
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SMFA Student Government Association President Kim Tran, who is a third-year in the dual degree program. “I’m in more of a heteronormative space predominantly at Medford, whereas [at] SMFA It’s like, ‘Oh, you just like happen to be LGBT, and you make awesome art,’” said Tran. Ira Craig, a fifth-year combined degree student, said over email, “There [is] something to the fact that there are so many queer artists who came before us, and that art is one of the few places where it is relatively safe to express queerness.” LGBTQ+ issues are also brought into the classroom explicitly in classes like Queer Studies Studio, which is currently being taught virtually by part-time lecturer Betsy Redelman Díaz. According to Díaz, who responded to questions over email, the class begins with an opportunity for students to check in with each other, listen to the class’ collaborative playlist, and respond to art prompts. “One [prompt] from a few weeks ago was ‘draw the Queer Future you want to live in.’ It sounds simple, but these rituals help us to recenter and come into this communal queer space together,” Díaz said. The rest of the class consists of time to discuss readings or videos relating to various intersections with queerness, followed by studio time to process those ideas. Díaz says that sitting with Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and POC-centered queer theory for an extended period of time offers her students the “opportunity to engage in a prolonged practice of self-reflection within
