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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

MOQA organizes week of celebrating identities

The Middlebury Open Queer Alliance (MOQA) sponsored a week of identity exploration Oct. 20-28, replacing its traditional Coming Out Week, centered around National Coming Out Day on Oct. 11, with a program of events called “(So) Over the Rainbow.” Coming Out Week has been a staple of MOQA’s yearly agenda since the late 90s, but this year’s shift in focus reflects an effort to be more inclusive according to MOQA board member Joey Radu ’13.

“We wanted to take a look and see if the events we do every year are actually efficacious and something that benefit our group and the campus,” said Radu. “What we saw with Coming Out Week was that some people saw it as a great series of events, but a lot of people who were in MOQA or outside MOQA were feeling alienated because they didn’t feel it spoke to their own experiences.”

The MOQA board, which also includes Elizabeth King ’13 and Tony Huynh ’13, decided to decentralize the idea of coming out, especially when celebrating it can turn it into a social imperative.

“We want to shy away from the idea that everyone who comes out is going to feel liberated and happy because that just doesn’t happen for everyone,” said King. “And not everyone can come out because maybe their identities aren’t stable, and we want to show that that’s okay, too.”

Showing all members of the community that their identities are legitimate and accepted, even celebrated, became the new focus of the week, with special emphasis on integrating what Radu called “marginalized” groups — like transsexuals and queer people of color — more fully into the queer community. The scheduled events included a well-attended Verbal Onslaught open mic at 51 Main where students shared everything from coming out stories to slam poems; a dance party in Coltrane Lounge; a workshop on important terminology reflecting a wide range of sexual preferences and different types of privilege; a discussion on the intersection of race and queer identity; a confidential meeting for individuals questioning their sexual identity; two film screenings exploring transsexual identities; a meeting of administrators, faculty, staff and students to investigate the resources the community can offer students who are questioning or closeted; and a campus-wide celebration of identity diversity called Midd OUT Day.

MOQA did not officially sponsor the last event, Midd OUT Day, but several MOQA members, including Bronwyn Oatley ’13, Molly O’Keefe ’12.5, Chelsea Guster ’11, Sarah Pfander ’13 and Emily Ashby ’13, organized it with MOQA’s support. On Oct. 27, students, faculty and staff were encouraged to wear t-shirts with the word “OUT” spray-painted on them in what Oatley called “a solidarity movement.”

“It’s a representation of the fact that identities are unique to each individual, but by everybody wearing [the shirts] together, it’s an act of solidarity in recognizing that we all have identities, but those identities need not divide us — they can bring us together,” said Oatley.

O’Keefe explained that, in a variation of MOQA’s goal of decentralizing traditional coming out, Midd OUT Day is about “redefining the idea of what being ‘out’ means.”
“We decided that we were comfortable with that term, and we wanted to make it a term that was broad enough and nuanced enough for a lot of people to be comfortable with it,” said O’Keefe. “We’ve come to the conclusion that ‘out’ is just being happy with who you are and where you’re at in any particular moment.”

At press time, O’Keefe, Oatley and their cohorts had helped students, faculty and staff spray-paint more than 250 shirts with the expectation that more would be made on OUT Day,

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making the concept of being “out” the most visible aspect of a week specifically geared towards deemphasizing coming out. While OUT Day might be slightly at odds with some of the MOQA board members’ hopes for “Over the Rainbow” week, Radu was quick to assert that it is actually a positive indicator of a structural change within MOQA, and that even if the two groups (Midd Out Day organizers and MOQA board members) are not entirely on the same page about “out,” the week is still about celebrating diversity — in identity and in opinions within MOQA.

“The results we’re looking for are kind of creating a new consciousness and awareness of the different identities and experiences of our members and how we can acknowledge those and still continue to work together as one organization,” said Radu. “This is a launch point for a new consciousness for MOQA with more member involvement and planning their own events. We want to get it out to the larger community that MOQA is not this monolithic group with one set of opinions.”
King echoed Radu’s sentiment.

“You’re welcome to dissent, you’re welcome to disagree,” said King. “We want people to disagree so we can have discussions and understand where people are coming from, why people have such different experiences — we can’t be homogenized into one group with one message.”


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