>> Today is Tuesday,
March 22nd, 2022.
This is Helen Thomas,
Outreach Archivist for the Department
of Museums Archives and Rare Books.
And today, I'm interviewing Jessica Duvall.
Jessica was a student at KSU before becoming
the first full-time program coordinator
for GLBTIQ Student Retention Services,
which is now the LGBTQ Resource Center.
She now serves as KSU's Assistant Director of
strategic planning assessment and analysis
and is also a part-time instructor of American Studies.
Thank you so much for sitting down with us today.
>> Absolutely.
>> So, let's start with
a little bit about your early life.
When and where were you born?
>> Misawa, Japan. So I come from a military background.
My dad was in the Air Force,
so that's where they were stationed at the time.
And then I was there till about four.
And then we came stateside for a little while in
Maryland and then went back to Germany,
ironically for the Department of
Defense because of Burger King.
My mom's second husband,
he was a manager for
the Burger King on AAFES on the military installation.
So we got transferred to Wurzburg,
Germany, and I was there for a few years,
then came to California,
bounced around northern California quite a bit,
Marysville, Roseville, Vacaville, Fairfield, Dixon.
And then in between there did a stint in Italy
in Alibiano and then came back,
I was there for about maybe just a little bit.
My dad was stationed in Alibiano
and then came back to Arizona.
Was in Arizona for a little bit,
and then came here to Georgia.
So I came to Georgia, it was in high school.
I think at December
of my sophomore year, is when we moved to Georgia.
>> And where in Georgia did you move to at that point?
>> Well, it was the long-term stay hotel
over by Cumberland Mall.
I was there for a little while before we found a house,
but then we moved out to Dallas, Georgia.
And I went to Harrison High School
for my last year and a half of high school.
>> And what was Carl Harrison High School like?
>> Very different than anything I had experienced.
Not having been from Georgia,
I think I had a lot of adjusting to do to
learn what Georgia was
versus what I had been taught Georgia was.
I had a very specific and very narrow perspective
of what it meant to be living in Georgia.
And so, there
was a lot of differences that I experienced.
I think one of the things that
struck out to me the most was, A,
pulling up to Harrison and seeing students
with BMWs and Mercedes in the parking lot.
I'm like, that's not
something I had ever experienced before.
So there's a big class difference
coming out from having lived with my mom and
live with my mom's family to then moving in living with
my dad and moving out to
a more of an affluent area, Harrison High School.
So that was a big culture shock.
Also, I had never lived in a place
where it was very predominantly White.
Overwhelmingly so it was
very visibly and very startling,
and so that was something that was
a new experience for me to where there was
just an extreme lack of diversity in the space.
And so that was something that was a hard adjustment
for me coming out to Georgia.
But I think college is really where I learned to
love where I am and I've not
stayed and really have no desire to leave.
But that was a big shock for me because
adjusting from what my preconceived notions were,
and then some of the differences that I
wasn't anticipating to experience,
and then learning to find my own place inside of that.
I had a little bit of background.
My grandpa had been stationed in
Mississippi for a little while.
My grandpa was a chief in the Air Force,
and so he ran a base in Mississippi.
And so my mom had given me a little bit of
heads-up of what it meant
to move to the south and
some differences that I would experience.
But until I did it for myself,
I didn't really quite understand what that was,
and so I had a lot of adjusting to do.
>> So what year would that have
been that you went to Georgia?
>> I think, 2003, somewhere in there.
>> So what activities
were you involved with in high school?
>> So I was not what one would call a model student.
I had great grades. I just
didn't feel it was important to go to school.
I felt that was my rebellion stage.
I had a lot of rebellion in me as a young child.
So in school activities,
going to school was an activity,
and deciding to go to school that day was an activity.
Outside of that,
I tried to play soccer here,
but I quickly learned that
that was running while drowning.
With the humidity,
my body just could not acclimate to that.
So soccer, I had played that since
I was a small child, started playing in Germany,
but gave up soccer because I
just could not acclimate to the humidity.
I may have now and it's fine.
And photography, I had a
little dark room in the basement,
so I did a lot of photography,
and that's where a lot of lonesome self
was hanging out and doing art and stuff.
But I wasn't really an engaged students.
[LAUGHTER]
>> So can you say a little bit about your parents,
who they were, what they did?
>> So my dad
was a chief master sergeant in the Air Force.
I didn't live with my dad until high school.
So that was something that was new for me.
I think, it was a high school.
I think we moved over in
seventh grade, something like that.
So I didn't live with my father until very older
and we never really lived on the same continent,
because we were always just
stationed in different places.
My mom, right now,
she owns a yarn company,
so she makes hand-dyed yarn, which is really cool.
I'm really proud of her, the entrepreneur there.
And she was born in Maryland,
military family too, so she bounced around a lot.
So she was moved around a bunch of different places.
>> So what made you decide to come to KSU for college?
>> The honest answer?
>> Sure.
>> I followed a girl. [LAUGHTER] So
girl I had been dating in high school,
she came to KSU, and
I graduated high school a semester early,
beginning high school was not where I wanted to be.
And so I had graduated a semester early,
and she had done dual enrollment at KSU.
And so when it came time, I
had always planned to go back to California.
That's where my mom lives,
my mom's side of the family.
And so that's where I'd always plan of a guy.
That's where I'm going to go back to school I'm going
to go back to California.
And then I had taken my SATs, ACT, done,
all that stuff and was ready to go and met
a girl and said, well, I'll stay here.
And so I went to KSU to follow a girl.
>> So what year did you enroll in KSU?
>> So fall of 2005. It was my first semester.
>> And what were your first impressions of KSU?
>> KSU quickly became,
I don't know if it's first impression, but my memory.
So at high school, I was not engaged.
High school, I did not do anything,
didn't want to be involved in anything,
really just wanted out as quickly as I could,
took honors classes just to get out of
there. High school, it's not my place.
On the contrast, college is a place I never left.
KSU, really, for me, I think, became home.
It was the first time that I chose where I got to live.
It was not meeting stations somewhere.
It was not bouncing between family members.
This is my choice and I had a lot of agency in that.
And I quickly took advantage of that
and became extremely involved.
So the polar opposite
of my high school and other experience.
I got involved in student organizations.
I took on leadership responsibilities.
I felt like my voice mattered and I had a way to
create change on campus.
And I think that's really indicative of
my overall KSU experience.
It was a place that it was home.
I felt like I belonged, and I mattered,
which I know sounds cliche,
but it's the honest truth.
It was my first time I got to
choose when and where I was.
And I really dug in on that.
>> That's great. Did you live on campus?
>> No. That requires money.
I didn't have that. So the first time
my family ever came to KSU was the day I graduated.
So it was very much on my own.
So we had a house,
over off of Baker
that four or five of us lived in, all KSU.
Back then, Facebook was just for college students.
And so there was a little ad put
on Facebook and we were looking for
roommates and ended up being a bunch
of students that were involved
in Kennesaw Pride Alliance,
and we all rented a house together.
So lived nearby on campus.
It very much had an on campus vibe
in terms of all the college kids hung out there,
but didn't live on campus.
>> What did you major in and what led you to that?
>> So my major was business management, entrepreneurship.
I had always toyed with them,
I want to do business or do law,
and I ended up going on the business side.
So when I got out
of high school and I had that semester off,
I started doing custom picture framing. So I got a job.
That's my first job, I was doing custom picture framing,
and I had wanted to open my own frame shop.
And so I went ahead and majored in business,
thinking of giving the tools
that I needed to be able to do that.
And I did while I was actually in college.
I actually founded and opened up
a frame shop or started to then the recession hit.
People don't want to buy in a recession when they're
losing their homes really
expensive custom picture frames.
So that didn't turn out the way I had planned,
but that's what got me going into business.
And I enjoy building,
creating, figuring out why
things work, how do you meet a need?
How do you improve a process,
efficiency and effectiveness or things that
I like to toy around with?
Business seemed a place to be able
to do that and learn how to do it better.
>> Great. So what
was campus life like when
you were a student, just in general?
>> I was a very involved student.
But I would say that I was very involved in a narrow way.
So my campus experience was really
centered largely on Kennesaw Pride Alliance,
Department of Student Activities,
KSU hockey, because hockey was a big deal.
But from a student leader
and a student organizing perspective,
a lot of what I remember is,
there was a great degree of autonomy that we're
given to students to experiment, build, and create.
That's something that Dr. Rachford,
who's the Vice President of student affairs at the time,
I think it was called student success at the time,
but we've gone through a lot of reorgs.
But Dr. Rachford,
he had a really strong belief that
the role of student activities is,
it was a space for students
to be able to test out real-life skills.
So when we got awarded money and requested
budgets and were given space and resources,
it was a way for us to experiment with
real things in a way where the stakes weren't as high.
And so that's what a lot of what we got to
do as student organization.
It was really decide, hey, we want to
create this event on campus.
There's an experience that we think is not being met.
And we would just use our imagination and shoot for
the sky and try to do it and see what we could build.
And so that's what a lot of my memories
are and a lot of spending time.
On the third floor of the student center,
there used to be these cubicles.
There was about 50 of them,
they are 300 organizations.
So it was competitive to get a cubicle.
And KPA every year we got a cubicle.
Now, these cubicles, back in the day,
they were a different beast.
People had bunk beds in there.
It was a completely student-run space
with very little rules,
which is why there's no longer cubicles.
But back in the day, it was a lot of fun.
That's basically where we lived.
There's a balcony out there.
We'd hang out in the balcony and listen to music.
We had furniture stacked on top of each other.
We turned coolers into couches.
This was a very much a student created space,
and that's where if I wasn't in the cubicle,
we're hanging out on the campus green or sometimes class.
I felt like when I'm in college class
really got in the way of the college experience.
Again, I was not always a
stellar student with attendance.
But that's my vast memory of KSU.
There are so many different things that are being
created by students,
just having ideas and being empowered
by university leadership to go out and build them.
There's things that still exist this day on
campus that are the result
of student going, hey, I have an idea.
And then we were empowered to do that.
Which I think is
a really cool and unique thing about KSU,
especially as large as it got as quick as it got.
Now, having a professional side seeing
and understanding how unique of
an experience that was at a institution
this size to still be able to
retain that ability to
give students that license to create.
>> That's great. So compared
to maybe some of your classmates,
do you feel like you were on
the more involved side of things?
Do you think there were still a lot of students who
treated it like a commuter experience?
>> No, there was definitely a difference.
So the P2P student,
and they call the parking lot-parking lot student
and they go in and go to class,
go back to the parking lot.
There was a core group of us and I would say
it's honestly still now true for
KSU to an extent that you
have a core of highly-engaged students,
and then you have students who are just participating
and live on campus or engaged
and then you have commuter students
who are not necessarily as largely engaged.
And I would say that we were definitely on
the higher end of engagement. There was a group of us.
But again, there's two realms
where there was a group of
student leaders who are trying to
really enact change on campus,
and so we had a lot of
interaction with the administration.
I was serving on a lot of
university committees and having
those leadership responsibilities of interacting with
folks above leadership in the institution.
But then there was also the high level of
engagement within our community.
We had created our own space
as a group of LQBT queer students,
finding a place to exist
on campus and the first time that we
ever got to be that out
and open and create those experiences.
So there's a lot of engagement and
a very tight knit group of
students and a community
that I was definitely zeroed in on.
>> So what was Kennesaw Pride Alliance
like when you first joined the group?
Do you remember your first impression there?
>> Yeah, I think I got pictures
of the first meeting that I went to actually,
back when we had film.
So KPA is something that
I got involved in and I got involved in very quickly.
So I started KSU in fall of 2005.
I was held an officer position in spring of 2006.
So like I said, I jumped in full force.
The first event that I participated with KPA,
we had this thing called the Coming Out
day Cookout which I think they still do.
But back in the day, we had this VW bug,
was a bright yellow VW bug
that had been converted into a grill.
The top was sawed off and it was this giant grill.
It was bright yellow and it was the cab
for KU Kennesaw Activities Board,
so it was the cab for cab.
It was this giant grill.
So we held the Coming out day
Cookout for National Coming out Day.
And we fed a bunch of students on campus.
We got money from the university
to go out and buy hamburgers,
hot dogs, hotdog buns and the whole nine,
and we just held a giant cookout and grilled for
the campus to celebrate National Coming out Day.
And that was the first time I had seen like in person,
out queerness, and it's not like
a secret or just between people or a conversation.
It was just like this very out and
open and unapologetic representation
of queer life was the first time I'd ever seen that,
and that hooked me, as
somebody who was still in the early stages of coming out.
Not really knowing what that meant,
how I fit into society,
how society would accept me,
how I would accept society and
that interaction to then walk in and
see people out just doing this
openly and people
coming out and saying, Hey, how are you doing?
I'd love a hot dog. There was not this resistance,
there was not this anger
that I think I had been trained to expect.
So for me, that was something I wanted
to be involved in that.
And people were welcoming in the community was so open.
So that's something that I quickly
wanted to be a part of and wanted to help create
more of is people feeling welcoming at home because it's
something that I didn't have a lot
of growing up moving so often.
So that's my first impression
of KPA was like, This is amazing.
This is something that I need to be a part
of. I think I can help.
And they had just come through a revitalization.
So I think it was 2004,
the group had been reactivated,
so it had gone dormant for a little while.
So J Smallwood had
come in and was the president when I came in,
so he had reactivated the organization and
we had a kindred because he was a military kid too.
So we understood each other and
how that feeling of home we had found in KPA,
and then when he chose not to run for officer again,
then I ran in the Spring for an officer position.
I think the first semester, I was an officer.
I can't remember what position I held. I think it was
like secretary or something like that.
And then that following year I was the president.
So I had become the president of the organization
that second year.
>> So tell us a little bit about
what activities and programs KHA would do.
>> So the cookout was
probably our big at the initial time,
that was a big event and that was a big deal at the time.
We had a dormant organization
coming out and now requesting
thousands of dollars to hold
a giant cookout on the campus screen at the time,
it was on the terrace in the back,
and that's important later why
my theory on why we don't have that grill anymore.
But it was on the terrace.
And then we started an event that I had
brought in was celebrating National coming out Day,
which is in K-12 environments.
It is a day of silence,
a vow silence to mirror or amplify
the silencing that queer students
feel in a K-12 environment.
But us being college students,
I'm learning through this cookout that we do have voice.
We have agents we can speak out.
There's no be telling us we can't say something.
So we held an opposite day
of silence where it was a day of speaking out.
We took up space on the green,
we toured around the campus,
handed out water bottles with statistics
about queer life,
particularly in an educational setting,
try to bring awareness to that
silencing through using our voice.
That was an event that we had started.
And we ended up purchasing shirts
that said gay question mark,
fine by me, we ordered them in KSU colors.
There's black gold Maron.
But back in the day, Maron was a school color.
So we had those and we passed those out.
It was a big deal to make that connection
between being a KSU student.
It was really important to me that they were
KSU colors because again,
that's where that sense of home and belonging should
be and then to queer that was
really just to amplify the sense of belonging
for students who maybe didn't
always feel like they belonged.
And that was an event that we started
and then we had our first drag show,
and that was a lot of fun.
So they still do the drag show now,
but it's changed a lot since it was originally done.
So we first had the idea of doing a drag show.
We didn't hold it on campus.
We didn't think it would be okay.
We knew we would get the space.
Nobody would tell us no, but
we were really concerned that nobody would
come or it wouldn't be received well.
This is back in, I think 2006 is
when we did the first drag show, maybe 2007.
So we chose to actually hold it off
campus at a local bar.
So there was LeBz over in Marietta was a local drag bar.
So we worked with them, and it was a fundraising event,
so we were able to get a percentage of the door fees,
and we donated it to pals,
an organization pets or loving support,
where they provide animal care for patients
experiencing hospitalization as a result of
HIV AIDS, so they take care of their animals.
That's one less thing that they have to worry about.
So we did a fundraiser for them.
But it was a student run drag show at
a professional drag bar, and it was a lot of fun.
We had a lot of fun doing that.
We did that for years. We really
felt like that was a next level full scale production.
And then I think the year after I
left is when we started doing them on campus,
students started doing them on campus,
and I thought that was really spectacular.
Something that we had never
envisioned that it wasn't like,
let's not hold it on campus.
It was the idea that, why would you hold it on campus?
There was not this feeling of the community being big
enough and we were wrong.
They do it on campus now and you have
four or 500 people in the room
coming out to celebrate the Drag show.
We had Scrappy in the Dragshow one year.
So there's video footage of that somewhere,
scrappy and a drag show.
So I think that it
was less about what would actually happen and
more about our perceptions
of what would happen outside of our own knit community.
We had this really strong feeling
within the community of KPA,
but we didn't always feel that
that community was replicated across the institution.
So if it wasn't us, if we held a drag show on campus,
it would just be us showing up
and we're in the drag show,
then who's going to watch it?
And I think we were a little bit shortsighted there,
looking back on it, but in the moment,
just felt like, why would you hold it on campus?
>> Sure. So speaking of size,
about how many members did KPA have at that time?
>> That's a rough. Maybe I
think like actively engaged folks, maybe 30.
We probably had a roster a little bit
larger than that, probably around 60,
so, but like actively engaged,
I'd say, probably about 30 students.
>> So, you mentioned that
they had been dormant here before.
What else do you know about
the history of the organization before you joined?
>> Yeah. So when I came back as a professional,
I did a little digging trying to
understand the history of myself.
So what I had to go on was that the year I came in,
Jay had ordered these red shirts
and say Kennesaw [inaudible],
established in 1991,
and it was like baseball style shirts.
That's all I had to go on about when it really started.
And then I worked with Cathy all day,
who was the director of student activities at
the time to try to find out what happened.
Her pulling out her old notes and trying to
follow the organization because
she had been there for a while.
So it looks like it was glue
is what it started at in 1991.
I ended up later meeting with David Nubecker
who was a student who founded it.
So was glue, gays and lesbians
United in equality was where it started.
Then it was active for a few years.
The history gets a little sketchy.
I think there's some overlap, some SGA involvement
and then glue leadership.
And then it went dormant and came back.
DJ Burr brought it back as
the GLSA the gay and lesbian Student Alliance,
which is a pretty common way of naming
these organizations like GSAs and GLSA.
Then the GLSA is what had gone dormant,
and then it got revitalized in
2004 by Jay and
that was when they switched to Kennesaw Pride Alliance.
>> Do you know what made them decide on that name change?
>> So I think it was to open up
the inclusivity a little bit, realizing that A,
I think the GLSAs just a little bit dated in
terms of language and then opening up to
particularly not inclusive bisexuality.
I to be honest, I don't know that trans inclusion
was the impetus, at the time,
it was not a conversation that
was happening openly or being reflected upon at the time.
So I wouldn't feel confident
saying that it was for trans inclusion.
I say it wasn't I think it was just trying to
open it up a little bit more
and not focusing on specific identities,
but really more this idea of having pride in who you are.
>> Yeah. So what about the LGBTQ Collegiate Summit?
That was an annual event at KSU?
>> Yeah. That was actually originally
started Dr. Teresa Joyce,
she was over in Coles and then
was the Senior Associate Vice provost.
She had started that as
the offshoot of the Safe Space Initiative.
So Dr. Joyce was instrumental in starting
the Safe Space initiative and working with
the GLSA to get that off the ground.
One of the things that came out of that was
an annual conference to bring
together folks doing LGBT type work on college campuses.
I think started really looking at Georgia and then
eventually grew to pull from the Southeast.
It's just we gave
out some awards and it looked also at high school.
There was that Teacher of
the Year award that was given out to somebody who
would be nominated for Educator of the Year
for a K-12 environment.
Folks involved in safe spaces
across college campuses and education,
and then also a chance
for us to bring the student organizations together.
That's where my involvement mostly came into a,
how are we building alliances and
relationships with
all the other LGBT student organizations within the USG.
So that's where in the summit,
it was a traditional conference style.
So there's different folks coming with
Shane Windmier Campus Pride came one year.
I know Daniel Helminiac was
our keynote speaker one year because I
remember being very stressed to
make sure I said his name correctly,
so it's Daniel Helminiac.
He came and did the keynote speaking.
There's different conference sessions.
We'd work with Deloit a lot and bring in
different businesses to come and talk about what
does it mean to be out in the workplace
and all of these resources for students.
But the end, we always ended
with the collegiate round table.
And then we would take over the university rooms
and have a giant circle built of
all the chairs and all the student leaders from
the LGBT student organizations would come together.
It was this space of open sharing and alliance building,
what have your challenges been on college campuses?
What have your successes been?
How can we partner together?
Every year, we always had this idea that we'd have
the Georgia Collegiate Pride Alliance and
some manifestation and it has never come to fruition.
They're trying it again now,
it's something that they're looking
into doing and trying to
again figure out how to not all work
in silos to talk about what does it mean to be
a student and LGBT on a college campus.
But that was an event that we held for years. I grew.
We were pulling people in from Alabama and Florida.
It had grown into a really big event.
After I had left KPA,
the next administration had
decided that it should be a traveling conference,
and then it shouldn't just be located at KSU,
so I think they had two years of it traveling and
then it went to one institution
and just never left that institution.
It's no longer called the summit,
but they still do an annual conference,
I think, I don't know if they still do today,
but it had happened for a couple of years.
So after that, the summit just never really came back.
>> Did KPA ever do joint events with
any other college LGBTQ groups?
>> I think there had been maybe think with Georgia State.
I think they might have done something
around the drag show one year.
I think they worked together or they
partnered with each other's drag show.
They had performers from KSU performing in the state
one and folks from state performing in the KSU one.
But as far as I know,
I think that's the only something
that really, truly came out of it.
>> So can you tell us a bit about
your role in submitting a proposal for
a professionally staffed LGBTQ Resource Center
to the Chief Diversity Officer in 2008?
>> So, a group of friends and I.
We were quickly approaching this thing called
graduation and realize that
college is going to come to an end.
And I had already I think in
my third year of being president, I was done.
I was ready to focus on other things.
I had felt the pressure
of being the source of all of this,
but every year, we'd have elections
and nobody else would run.
So I was like, well, if I don't run,
the organization goes dormant
and we have all these people who are
involved and want to participate.
Me coming out I was like, this is not
sustainable and it's also not fair that
the entire weight of
queer community and sense of belonging that building
that sense of belonging for the population
sat on the back of students that didn't seem fair.
Socially I looked around and I saw that there were
other offices on campus that provided
support and community building
for underrepresented students on campus.
And there was
the International Student Retention Services Office,
the Multicultural Student Retention Service Office.
We saw student disability services,
we saw women's resource There's
other resources on campus focusing on
specific populations and offering
them support and resources.
They didn't have There was
student organizations attach those offices,
so students had autonomy to plan,
but the entire weight of it did not sit on students,
whether there was a community or
not did not sit on the weight of students.
So I started getting a group of us myself,
the woman who eventually become my wife
Tiffany Duval and Stephen Satterfield.
We started working with our advisor
doctor Whitlock to ask
those questions like why
isn't there something for the LGBTQ community?
What responsibility does the university have to
provide support and resources
for this population of students,
and what would that look like if they did?
So we drafted a proposal.
We looked at other institutions.
LG resources Centers are still fairly new.
I think the only one in the state of Georgia at
the time was [inaudible].
Which is a hard model to follow when you're at
a public institution is to follow
a private institutions model.
So we did a lot of benchmarking
and wrote up a proposal that I have
told archives that I will give to y'all
once I'm no longer retire because,
well, I thought it was stellar at the time.
I have now come back to read it and it
was not good and I'm surprised anything happened to it.
Because it was not as well written as
I felt that it was in college.
but we drafted that up,
thought about what were the space
allocations that would be needed?
What programming and
services could be provided out there?
What would the staffing and technology needs
be and drafted that together,
and we were empowered by folks.
I had a lot of really great folks at KSU in
leadership positions that were really
supportive of the things that we wanted to do in KPA.
I don't think we would have gotten nearly as far
or been able to do as many things as we could
that we did do if we didn't have a lot of
really strong mentorship and
support from folks on campus.
And so for some reason,
we thought as 20 somethings that
we knew what was best and we wrote a proposal,
and we submitted it to the institution
and then I graduated.
We wrote this proposal up.
Nothing happened with it,
as far as I know, while I was in school.
We talked about it. It had been an issue that come up.
The University had started a presidential commission
on LGBTQ initiatives,
I think in 2008,
and I served on that committee
as a student representative.
There was a campus climate study was done.
There are some other things that are going,
particularly around staff and faculty engagement,
involvement around sexual orientation, particularly.
But I submitted it up to them and it was Dr. Wiberg.
She was the brand new CDO.
It was our first CDO that we had ever had was Dr. Wiberg.
And so I submitted up to
her office and a lot of other folks who had way
more important jobs than me and a lot of
different responsibility they took
it and they made something happen with it.
I didn't know until I found out about
the job opening for the coordinator position
because I graduated,
I didn't think that was ever going to happen, but I did.
I graduated and I went out into
the "real world," was out there doing
picture framing and I had happened
to run into Dr. Joyce outside of a Ted's Montana Grill.
And she was like, I need you to call me.
We got to talk about something.
I didn't call. I should have called, but I didn't.
But it got me thinking about KSU
and I was ready to move on to something different.
I wanted a "career" and not a job,
so I happened to go onto the KSU job board.
And then I saw like I was sitting in
my car on my break at work.
I was working retail and I was flipping through
my phone and I saw it and
my heart stopped and I was like,
this is a thing, somebody made it.
I submitted this piece of paper,
and now it's a real office and they're hiring,
it became real, this thing because
I had always told folks when I wrote the proposal.
I remember sitting in a commission
meeting and looking around the table,
going, let's all be very clear.
I'm doing this so I can work. This is my job.
I'm building the center and I
will come back and run this.
This is my job,
and I was very trained on
this is what I want to do I'm making
my job. They all laughed.
But, I came back,
and that's what I told him when I applied.
I put in and I was young and didn't
know anything about how actual hiring processes
worked or anything like that
or what the university structure was, to be honest.
And so I had called a mentor of mine,
Dr. Nicole Phillips, and he called and said,
do you know anything about this position?
Like, what is this about?
Where is it going to be? I need to know.
And turns out she was going to be my boss later on.
I told him I said, look,
I'm going to show up to help with
this center one way or the other.
If you hire me though,
I'm not in the way.
And so I went through the process and search committee
and all that good stuff and
was able to come back and be
the founding full time coordinator for the space.
>> Awesome. So you mentioned
the LGBTQ initiatives and
some other committees that you had served on as
a student rep. Do you
remember any of the other committees?
>> So the major one was the presidential commission,
and it had a couple of iterations.
So we were the student voice on that.
I had participated in SBAC a little bit,
which is student activities
Budget Advisory Committee, SBAC.
And and then I was on the search committee.
I was a student for the search committee for
the chief diversity officer, Dr. Wiberg's position.
And so I got to serve in that capacity,
and there's a few other things.
But those have the big highlights are ones that I think
are memorable to me. I'm sure there were more.
>> And you mentioned a few folks like Dr.
Rachford and Teresa Joyce.
Were there other professors or staff members that you
recall having just a big impact on your time here?
>> So definitely Dr. Rachford.
That was the first time that we had as students,
again, this idea of what is
the university's responsibility to
provide for the LGBTQ community.
We had put in for what was called at the time,
a line item budget,
which is just a student organization
about to have an annual budget,
similar to student government association or for
CAB where they have these large scale budgets.
They didn't have to go through and ask for.
Graduate Student Association had one.
We said, well, KPA does a high level of programming
and large scale programming for
the whole campus. We want one too.
I said, well, let's ask.
And so we put in for a budget,
and I started asking questions about what
are the rules around putting a budget,
and Dr. Rachford called me to his office.
Again, I'm a little nobody who's bounced around
and nobody's ever really listen to anything
that I've ever had to say.
All of a sudden, now I'm being called in with
the vice president of student affairs.
So I'm nervous. But I go into
his office and he sat down and talked with
me for like an hour and a half
about what are student fees for?
How do budgets work?
Ended up being there was a moratorium on
line item budgets because it didn't have
rules on how to make a line item budget,
and they realized that if one person,
everybody could ask and so they didn't
have a way to manage that.
He sat down and talked to me for like
an hour and a half in
his office just about why and how things are.
It wasn't just a know and move on.
Like he really cared and he asked me,
he's like, What do you think we should do about budgets?
How do you think we should allocate?
It was just very reciprocal and listening.
It was just something that was very new to me.
And that was this moment of how do you see leadership?
It's something that still sticks with me to this day.
There's definitely Dr. Rachford.
Cathy Aldey, she was the director of student activities.
Poor Cathy, there were
so many times I came to her office,
like, hey, look, here's this thing I want to do.
Can we do that? And we
barge in on her office all the time.
She was really supportive in helping us figure out
navigate the politics and
the rules and understanding what's going on.
I remember those times where we would be
before SBAC requesting funds and there
was a lot of intricate rules
around how you know it still is how SBAC
works and what you can spend money and what you
can't and why you have to spend the money,
and you have to say certain things in the right way.
I remember at first not understanding
and SBAC. She would grill me.
I felt like I was being grilled.
But really, she was trying to help me understand
the bigger picture and how we
needed to move forward and getting funding.
She was really supportive.
There was Dr. Teresa Joyce.
She was our advisor for a lot of years
and to this day we still,
I just chatted with her the other day.
She was by and far,
the first person that was not related to me.
They had so much faith in my ability.
She put a lot in me, a lot of trust in me,
she gave me a lot of latitude
to be able to do a lot of things
and supported some crazy ideas
that I had and she talked me through them.
But that was the first time
that I just felt like I could do things.
Things I have to say matter and
they can make a change and people would listen to it,
and it was her support and
mentorship that really provided that for me.
So there was definitely
Teresa Joyce, Dr. Eugenia Whitlock.
She was my first queer theory professor.
She taught, I think the first queer theory course at KSU,
she just the it blew my mind.
Being able to see A, that
my lived experience was not just my lived experience,
but a way of understanding and it can connect to
academics and change the way that we see the world.
So getting exposed to
queer theory for the first time really challenged me.
It was my first professor.
I teach now and I use the same model that she used on
me to my students because it was so powerful to me.
But it was the first class that I'd ever taken,
it was a seminar style.
It was stressful. She wouldn't grade
papers and people would stress out.
She would always say, if you're here for
learning and you focus on your learning,
your grade will follow.
Don't stress about your grade,
focus on your learning.
And she would ask these really theoretical questions
about how and why it just stuck with me as
really being the first class I took that was like
that movie version of what college is
about and really about
here for challenging the way that we think.
And so she was very impactful and then she later
became the advisor for KPA,
and so she was my advisor there.
I later served as my thesis advisor
for my master's program.
So she's just been all through
it really pushing me and challenging me and think about,
why and how do systems work and
how can I use my intellect to challenge those things.
And she's been really powerful in that regard.
I think those are the folks that
stand out the most as when I was a student.
There's Dr. Sansiverro.
I remember him taking long walks with me to
talk me through how the university worked
and how policies are built and how do you
understand the rules and the gaps between
rules and how can you bend things and accomplish things.
So Dr. Sansiverro was really powerful in that way too.
>> So when did you graduate?
>> 2010.
>> 2010. So then you did
the frame shop and then you came back.
>> So I had been doing framing all through college.
That was what got me through college.
And so I was doing that for a few years after the fact.
I was managing a frame shop.
I just realized that this I
was no longer fully satisfied with doing it.
I wanted a career and not a job.
And so that's where in 2013,
it actually it was 2012.
So it was fall of 2012 when I interviewed for
the position and then I started in January 8th,
2013, was the first day
that I was a full time KSU employee.
Found a way to get KSU to pay me.
>> Fantastic. There were a lot of programs, initiatives,
and events that were
associated with the LGBTQ Resource Center.
Run through a few and you can share your memories
about these things about how it started,
how involved you were, probably
a lot because you were there,
why it was important and how it maybe changed and grew.
So one would be the first celebration of
LGBTQ History Month at KSU. Can you talk a little bit?
>> I had started the position in
January and I spent a lot of time thinking
through my own college experience
and what were things that I wanted to
accomplish as a student group that just
wasn't really feasible as a student group or
things that I thought was
important and meaningful for
it to come from the institution,
not just from students.
I think that's where a lot of my building
of the center really focused
on is the meaning that's created
when something is hosted by the institution,
becomes institutionalized,
especially when you have an underrepresented
and at most times invisible
population that could often be overlooked.
So what does it mean when the university
puts resources in and provides
that representation to empower
and create belonging for students.
And really using that as a line to say,
what are things that really should be run by
the student organization or best coming from
student voice being student led and what
are things that are important for
the institution to have a voice in?
I never knew there was LGBTQ history.
I had never been taught LGBTQ history,
but I had started digging in
and trying to figure out what the history
of student organizations were.
That was one of the things that I
tried to understand what
had already happened before I
got there and outside of
my own moment and lived experience,
when you're 18, the whole world is very
much intrinsic to yourself and what you see.
So I start to step out and realize, oh,
there's people before me and people who had
done other really great things and I needed to know what
those things were so I
could necessarily reinvent the wheel or learn from it.
And so I started doing that research and in doing that,
I started learning about the Olympics at
a Cobb and theater on
the square and different things that happened.
So that spiraled out
to me stepping out and kind of going,
Wow, there's more than just stonewall.
Even then I don't think I ever really
knew what stonewall was.
It had never been taught to me
and I'm a bit of a nerd anyway.
I like history and politics and things.
And so, really think
like what are things that university should be doing?
I'm looking at all these other heritage and history
months the university is doing and
why do we do those things?
I said, you know what? October is
LGBTQ History Month. It's a national thing.
It's not something that I invented.
I said, well, we should participate.
That's something that university should
be representing and participating in.
And so that was one of
the short list of things that I wanted to do in
the first 1-3 years of
the center was to have involvement LGBTQ History Month.
I had this really crazy idea.
This is back when the center was very
big and I had a lot of time.
We're still growing and so
I decided I wanted to use actual doors.
I went to Home Depot and bought
doors to symbolize closet doors.
Then I took these doors and I hinged them together
accordion style and each door focused,
painted them different colors of the rainbow.
And then each door focused on
a different moment or element of LGBTQ history.
So it was the outing doors opening history exhibit.
And so it would get put up for
the entire month of October.
These doors would get scattered across campus.
I was putting queerness
in all these places that queerness was not already
existing and creating this moment
of this first level interaction
for other students who maybe
had never known there was queer history either.
To A, get exposed to a little bit of history,
maybe, drive some inquiry
and wanting people to know more.
And then it was also this visible representation of
these giant rainbows inside of different buildings.
So again how does that visit to,
how do you make visible and invisible population
without outing anybody?
And so using the doors as a way to do that.
And so our first door was on
the history of the LGBTQ community at KSU.
I'd reached out to a Lum
and started building relationships and asking
questions and then falling
on some big moments and then
the idea was that every year,
we would add a couple doors to the exhibit.
So it would be this growing exhibit when we
just keep adding more doors so
um really cool project, say curated.
That's always decided you just throw that around.
But it was really powerful for me to help people
realize and help myself realize in
the same moment that
people came before us. You're not alone.
There's things and there's reasons
for why the world is the way it is today,
people have accomplished things and you're not the first.
That sometimes can be really
grounding to not feel so isolated,
particularly if you're not out.
And so I thought that that was really powerful,
to be able to expose those stories
on campus for folks because
queer history is a unique thing in that.
It's really only history
that isn't taught in home or at school.
It's just not covered anywhere,
so most queer folks don't grow up in queer families.
And so there's not that heritage
that history that's passed down,
that way of knowing, and
so it can lead to a lot of isolation.
So that was something that I thought was a
quick, not necessarily easy,
but quick way to be able to address
a core issue that our community was facing on campus.
>> Great. And so that's something that came back in
later years that they repeated the draws.
>> I don't know that anything's been added to it.
I added it for I think two,
maybe three years personally.
I literally borrowed a KUS van,
went to Home Depot, picked it up,
took it to my home, used my own,
it was very much a labor of love and painting and
creating and doing the research and
getting the images and the captioning and all of that.
But very labor intensive.
And as other areas the department grew,
there's only 40 hours in a week.
And so it was something that became
increasingly having more of
a challenge to be able to expand that.
I don't know that more doors have been added.
I know I think I added it for
maybe one or two additional years personally.
Then after that, I didn't add anymore.
We explored going digital,
but there was budget issues and things like that.
>> Another thing that KSU did for
the first time in 2013
was to walk in the Atlanta Pride Parade.
>> Yeah. That was a fun one.
So historically, it was not
the first time KSU had been or KPA,
KPA used to walk in the parade.
So the student organization.
And that was something that happened after
I was involved in KPA because I very much,
again, we're all centered in
our own ways of knowing in our own feelings,
at the time didn't have a lot of reflection.
My perspective of when I was in leadership in
KPA was that folks wanted to go and watch the parade,
especially if you're 18-years-old,
it's the first time being out.
You've never gone to the parade before.
You want to participate and view it and
have that larger experience
compared to actually walking in it.
After I had left KPA,
they started walking in it as a group,
a student organization to be represented.
But then when I came on board,
I said, students shouldn't have to pick.
If they want to watch it, they can watch it.
If they want to march in it, they can march in it.
But what does it mean
when it's not the students on their own,
but the institution is backing them?
And it's not uncommon for
institutions to march in parades.
And so I felt like that was another one of those moments
where meaning was made for to
come for the institution and not from
the student organization since
the student organization can
sometimes feel like they're doing things in isolation of
the university and having to build on their own.
So I thought that was a moment
where students should see their institution,
that this place that they're told over
and over again that they're part of our nation,
that they should belong here,
that there's a sense of school spirit and pride.
They make sure that they understand
their experience is part of that, too.
And so having the institution walk in
the parade was something that I felt was really powerful.
So the first year it was
a group of us with a banner walking.
But the second year, the thing I'm proud about with
the parade is that we worked with parking
and transportation and actually got the BOB bus.
It's not a big bus, but BOB in the parade.
We were the only university to
have a vehicle in the parade,
and not just a vehicle, but the BOB.
I mean, the BOB leaves an impression.
>> Yeah.
>> The black and gold and all of that.
Ever since then we've walked with the BOB in the parade,
and we provide shuttle service, too.
So we realized that we're outside the perimeter.
And so students don't always have transportation.
They may not be as familiar with
being inside the perimeter and going into midtown.
So it was a way to provide
support for all students to be able to go,
whether they had a vehicle or
not because we also have a lot of
socio-economically disadvantaged students because
their parents may not
be supporting them within the community.
So they may not have cars, insurance,
all these other things and ways to participate.
So we thought it was important too that
we provided the transportation.
So we provide transportation to and from
Atlanta Pride on a loop of shuttle system
coming from both now the Kennesaw area
to campus down to Pride,
so all students can participate.
Whether they want to walk in the parade or
not, it's not just the parade,
they get to go for
the whole weekend and then really truly
feel that experience of community that Pride brings,
that they should be able to participate in that fully.
We would host a booth down there too.
So students had a place that they could
come and have a home base.
So we would sponsor a booth in the marketplace.
So really a full scale engagement,
which really rivaled and actually exceeded a lot
of the participation of Atlanta based universities.
And so that was a big part of
Pride for us because a lot of times
Kennesaw is seen as this little
school outside the perimeter,
and people don't always take us very seriously,
especially when we talk about Atlanta being
the home and the base
of queer community in the Southeast.
And so for us to be little Kennesaw,
coming up there, showing up with
the big guys was really fun.
And something I took a lot of fun and pride in.
>> Speaking of that, are there any other pride events in
the region or locally that KSU goes to or has been to?
>> So at one year,
my first year I went to I think it was in South Carolina.
I went to a Pride event up there,
did like a recruitment fair.
So Campus Pride holds college recruitment fairs at Pride.
And so I went ahead and I drove up there and did that.
But other than that, I'm not aware of
any other Pride events that we go to.
>> Atlanta is the main one?
>> Yeah.
>> One thing I wanted to ask about was
the Coming Out Monologues
at the Theater and Performance Studies.
That was a project that you brought to TPS.
>> Yeah. So again,
Jessica asks crazy questions and tries to do things
that are far beyond her ability, but says, why not?
And so I had seen other universities again,
researching what other universities were doing.
I think UC Riverside does a really big Coming Out.
I think is where it originates from,
if my memory serves me correctly.
This idea of the Coming Out monologues and
that's modeled off the idea of The Vagina Monologues,
and so other universities do it.
Either students will write
their monologues and then perform their own monologues.
Which is a really great way of
again sharing voice and experience.
For KSU, again, really looking at the student versus
the institution obligation is a big deciding factor.
I said, well, what if we do it as the resource center?
So first it started off with this idea
very similar to how UC Riverside does it
in terms of I wanted to use the theater, though.
I've seen other universities record
it and they were doing it in a classroom.
And I said, I want my students to feel legit.
It is a full scale production.
And so I knowing nothing about how to edit.
I was in Harvey once in high school and I had one line.
I have no idea how to do theater or what I was doing,
but I did want to reserve a space,
and so I was trying to go into the
reservation system and reserve a theater,
which apparently is not a thing you can do.
And so people called me and said,
what are you trying to do?
Why are you trying to book a theater and who are you?
And so I was like,
this is the idea that I had.
And so they connected me with Karen.
The Box Office connected me over to Karen and said,
I think you really should talk to Karen about this.
And so her and I met.
Again, since I was a very young professional,
had no idea what I was doing, but I said, why not?
Went and talked to her. I said, I have this idea.
I want to do these monologues.
I want students to expose the campus
to what does the coming out experience look like?
I want students to feel like they're heard
and represented and seen
and I want to give the respect that I think that's due.
And to me that means having it in a theater.
And so her and I worked
together and the project ended evolving
into where students we
collect the stories from the campus community.
So if we open up where people can
call and do a submission for monologues,
it was really important to me that
the stories that are told during
the coming out monologues reflect
KSU community specifically.
Because I think sometimes it's very easy,
especially, I talked to
Karen about this a little while ago.
Back when I was a student, the University
did a production of the Laramie project,
which is reflective of the Matthew Shepard story.
I don't know if you're familiar or not.
But in the Laramie project,
when I went to go see it on campus,
there's this line that kept coming
out that stood out to me where people said,
this doesn't happen here.
Because Matthew Shepard was murdered for
being an out queer person.
And so people say, well,
they were shocked in Laramie,
Wyoming this could happen there.
People don't do that. I felt
like I heard that a lot of KSU.
That the reason we don't have
certain things is people don't do that here.
That's not a problem we have here.
That's not something happens, I'm like well, it doesn't
happen here till it does.
And so I wanted
the coming out monologues to be grounded in
experience that they couldn't say that
doesn't happen here because
these are the coming out stories of KSU people.
Whether it's students, staff, faculty, alumni,
or larger KSU area,
you can't deny these stories
because they're written by people who are here.
It's about something that was really important to me.
But then we're also saying,
we want the full scale production,
for doing it in a theater,
we need the acting to meet that.
And so students are not
necessarily allowed to perform their own stories.
We actually hold auditions in the theater department and
student actors come in
and do a reading of the monologues.
So it gets a full scale production of the acting level,
the lighting, the production,
the space to really
elevate and give a full level of respect to what does it
mean to be out or to come out or
to reconcile or be challenged by
coming out in the KSU community?
So I think it's a really cool balance of very intimate,
very localized experiences, but also very
public and very professionally production.
I think the overlay and interplay of
those two aspects of experience creates
something really special that
I had a lot of involvement in the first couple of years.
But, I mean, Karen and
her team really took ownership of it and
really understood the function and the purpose and
have done a wonderful job growing that program.
>> That's wonderful. So you
mentioned the Safe Space Initiative
earlier and later that became
or involved the Safe Space Student Leadership Initiative.
So did that come about while you
were heading up the Resource Center?
>> Yeah. So the Safe Space Initiative at
KSU far preceded me.
It had gone through a couple of different iterations and
using different models to talk about how do we
train people for competency
and understanding around LGBTQ issues and topics,
is the broad level of a safe space,
is how do we create
a more inclusive environment around queerness.
And so that far preceded me.
But one thing I did encounter when I came to campus in
the professional capacity was that
in the interim between when I left as
a student and came back as a professional,
a group of students had started doing
student safe space where they were going in.
They didn't necessarily have an agreement
with the curriculum of
the Safe Space program from
an institutional level and so
they created their own thing.
And we're going into classrooms and providing training,
which is wonderful, great and
students should be empowered to do that.
I had a concern though,
that it's using the same language and the same naming,
and so those curriculums are not in alignment,
it may create more confusion on campus about what
is the official safe space position or
curriculum and things that we're wanting to teach
folks or that there's
two different sets of trainings going on.
And so I'd ask them, keep doing what you're doing,
but we just need to stop using
the name Safe Space on that right now.
And then as the department grew,
so Safe Space in general we would do
student safe spaces through the department,
and then we would do staff faculty safe spaces.
But staff and faculty and students were
never in the same safe space training.
Just the way that power dynamics work.
If you look at ways that people learn,
you have students who want to show off to
staff and faculty that they know everything,
and then you have staff and
faculty who don't want to admit
that they don't know something in front of a student.
So it didn't create a positive dynamic for learning
an honest dialogue about things
that are sometimes uncomfortable to talk about.
So we always kept those things isolated.
But I also was one person,
and then I had eventually a program coordinator,
it was office of two for a campus
of at the time probably 35,000.
That's a lot of training to try to do and facilitate.
And so we eventually
created the Safe Space Student Leadership Initiative,
which was a two birds and one stone initiative
where we realize that students learn best from peers,
especially in topics that are uncomfortable
and they are seen as
different divides in generational understanding.
And queerness is one of those things that there's
a challenge with the old way of thinking,
the new way of thinking and
changes experiences for culture.
And so the Safe Space Student Leadership Initiative
allowed us to transfer
responsibility for student focused Safe Space trainings
to be peer facilitated.
So students were teaching other students
about the Safe Space Initiative.
And so we started a cohort of training those group of
eight students to be able to go out and
teach the Safe Space curriculum to other students.
Go out in to classrooms. A lot of
it was is professors where like, Hey,
we're reading this book and it covers
queerness and we want
our students to know more about that.
Can you come in and do a training
and do some information building?
And so our students will go out and facilitate that.
At the same time, it was a way for us
to invest leadership development in students.
So that's all service work should be reciprocal,
and I think our students sometimes get
asked to do a lot of things.
And so we couldn't pay our students to do this training,
but we could invest our time and energy into them.
And so we did a lot of skill development
and leadership development, realistic self appraisal.
So that's where it was this two set.
They went down and did service on behalf of
the institution and we invested a lot of
resources into them to help them be
strong leaders and take this real applications they did.
They did project management presentation skills,
communication, timeline management,
all these really great things that they learned
as part of SSLI,
and then we were able to help them make that to
a transferable skill when they left KSU.
It was a great balance. And we got to get
exposure to more people on campus
because we had a higher level of capacity.
>> And that group still exists and still doing that work?
>> No. So we've had a lot of restructuring.
I think they're right now evaluating
how do they bring that back.
So we took the SSLI model and
it evolved in what we now
call the cultural. What do they call it?
CCP. I don't remember what CCP stands for.
But it's a similar idea where
students being trained to do DEI,
Diversity Equity and Inclusion training.
So whereas SSLI focus very specifically on safe space,
CCP is a broader initiative that also
does all cultural competency development.
And so SSLI is supposed to be folded into that,
and we're still working on what
that curriculum looks like.
But that's the way to move it forward.
Instead of having a bunch of these peer
facilitated DEI ambassador programs,
why don't we leverage and put some synergy to put
all those resources together
and then offer those trainings?
So it's semi. It's morphed.
>> So Stonewall Housing started I think in 2014.
So was that something that you were involved with?
>> Very extremely.
Yeah. So that was another one of
those short list of things that I wanted to address.
So while I didn't live on campus as a student,
I had a lot of friends who did.
And along that same vein of like,
this doesn't happen here,
I had heard some pretty bad stories of
what some of my friends had experienced from
their roommates about being afraid to be
out in their dorm
and true fear that if their roommates found out,
particularly, for some of my gay male friends,
that if their straight roommates found
out that they were gay and they're sharing a bathroom,
they were terrified to be out.
And so that was to me not a positive campus experience.
That thing that you're supposed to
get from living on campus,
you're supposed to get this higher level of engagement,
connection to the institution.
It has positive impacts on
retention, all these great things.
But if you're terrified to be yourself at home,
are you really getting that benefit?
And so that story is really what drove me to say,
okay, well, this is another area where this falls
under institution responsibility,
not student responsibility.
Me being the ambassador of the institution
responsibility as the coordinator,
I started to talk to my friends in housing and say,
Hey, got an idea.
A lot of things started just like, Hey, I have an idea.
What would happen if and just really asking
questions and being really supported along the way.
And so I found out
that the year prior to me coming back as a professional,
students had tried to take that responsibility on.
So there was a organization that had grown out of KPA,
called the Non-normative Anti-assimilation
of students of Kennesaw.
They had worked with housing previously and had
secured a floor of
gender inclusive housing inside of
what is now the Austin Residence Complex.
It was being built at the time. It wasn't a thing yet.
And they had secured
30 something rooms for
gender inclusive housing at a reduced rate.
So housing was really accommodating,
but then that's a lot for students to take on.
It's hard for professionals to get some of that stuff
done to put that on students who also have their life,
coursework and actual work
and all these other things going on,
student organizing to expect them to be able to do that,
or for them to expect themselves
to be able to do that was not realistic.
So they booked none of the rooms.
So it was not a good position for housing to be in.
They need to sell these rooms
and they've taken them offline.
So knowing that going in,
I negotiated with housing for
us to just have three apartments.
If you can give me three apartments at the standard rate,
but we can get them taken offline to be gender inclusive.
The way that housing works, as soon as
one student selects a room in the apartment,
the rest of that apartment gets locked down to
only other students who have
the same gender marker on their file,
which is not great for our trans and
nonbinary students because oftentimes
the gender marker on their file does not align with
the way they present
themselves and the way that they see the world,
they want the world to see them authentically.
And so I said,
"Let's take three apartments offline,
and let me place students on those rooms."
And so that was 12 beds,
and we called it Stonewall Housing
in recognition of the Stonewall riots that happened,
which is what pride comes from,
is the annual celebration of Stonewall riots.
And we filled the beds and we had a waitlist.
And then I think we grew to 16 bed
and then we do 32 beds.
We moved buildings because we set ourselves
up to take over an entire building to have it.
And if my memory serves,
we were the first university to have
formal gender inclusive housing on campus.
So that's those moments
that people were Kennesaw, we're out here.
We're not always seen as being
as progressives inside the city,
but we were able to get a lot of really
cool stuff done in
a really short period of time
and be able to grow and sustain that.
>> And that was in the Austin Complex?
>> So it was originally in the 1,200 building,
but now I don't remember.
I don't know where it is exactly now,
but originally it was 1,200 building and
there's no way were going to take
over the 1,200 building then.
The place is huge. So I think in
the third year when we got to
the 32 beds, we shifted over.
So that was in Arc 2, so we shifted over to Arc 1,
the older phase, but they had smaller buildings,
and so we could actually build from the floor up.
So I think the process is
still occurring where we slowly,
as rooms become open,
we can turn them over to being gender inclusive rooms,
so we can slowly take over the buildings
without kicking anybody out.
If students are already living there,
they should stay where they are. They're happy.
So we can roll those rooms off and
turn them over into Stonewall rooms.
And then after consolidation,
we were able to secure
some locations over in Marietta Campus as well.
Stonewall does operate on both campuses.
>> The rainbow graduation ceremony
was another initiative I think?
>> So that was something honestly was
just I remember sitting at my graduation,
knowing full well how involved I had been on campus.
Done a lot of great things,
put forward different initiatives,
held leadership positions, served on committees.
I've done a lot of really cool stuff.
And selfishly, I was watching
all these kids walk across the stage with
all these ribbons and
medallions and cords and I was looking pretty plain.
And I thought, "That doesn't seem fair."
And so again, one of those things looking at what
is a student's responsibility
to an institution's responsibility.
I said, "As an institution,
we should recognize that students are
doing all kinds of things on campus,
and we should recognize those experiences
similar to military students,
they get the military stoles and international students,
they got the stoles with their flags on them."
These ways of representing what their
experience was like and
these unique ways that their experience was
influenced by their identity on campus.
And I said, "Why can't we do that?"
So rainbow graduation became a thing.
We got these custom made rainbow cords
done and have a really big graduation ceremony,
not big, but for us, it was big.
I think the first class was six
students in the leadership room,
but this way to recognize that graduation does happen.
You had all these obstacles as
a queer student that
you would have gone through in terms of reconciling,
understanding yourself and accepting
yourself and learning to love
yourself in spite of a society
that tells you sometimes you shouldn't.
Having students who have gone through
homelessness and having their family
abandon them and still
show the resiliency, to get to graduation.
Graduation is hard enough.
Getting through college is hard enough as it is,
but then to have all these other layers
thrown on top of that
and you still made it to graduation.
I think that's something to celebrate
and graduation should be celebrated at convocation,
but there should also be this moment to
recognize that unique set of experiences that
a student has gone through and
the resiliency that they've developed and exhibited.
So that's what rainbow graduation does,
and it's for not just your assigned family,
but it's a space where students can invite chosen family.
So it would encourage students to bring
mentors who on campus was meaningful to you.
Have that person come and celebrate with you,
have them present your cords to you.
That was a really fun thing that we did it,
where students could pick a mentor
and that mentor could come on stage
and present them their cords and say
a couple kind words about the student.
We morphed into having
awards for engaged students on campus,
Emerging Leader Award and the Pride Leadership Award
and advisor of the year
and Safe Space Initiative Leader of the award.
So different ways to
recognize queer work that was happening and things that
students were involved in that were
influencing and impacting our community in positive ways.
So that's really what rainbow graduation is all about.
>> Wonderful. So a couple of years after that,
there was Queer Prom.
Was that something that you were involved with?
>> So the first iteration,
that was one of those things again,
what's best from students and versus the institution.
I wanted to do it because I thought it would be
fun for students to have a chance
where I remember sitting
in the center and overhearing students talk about
their high school experience with prom
and how they didn't necessarily get to take
the person that they wanted and there
was controversies in the news about
same-sex couples and proms and being
turned away and rules about only men and women,
couples can buy tickets.
I thought "That's not fair.
That's a quintessential experience somebody should have."
And so I myself had gone through it.
My date was a guy friend in high school,
but then my girlfriend was actually there at prom
and it was still the same thing
like how do you navigate getting to do this thing,
but you have to do it differently than other students.
There's a little air of secrecy and
strategy behind being able
to successfully do something like that.
So I shouldn't have that. So we did the prom.
And so we did it the first year.
We had a little photo booth set up and they got
the prom pictures and all that kind of fun stuff,
but that's something that we
realized after the first year,
that's probably something that really needed to come from
the students and not from the institution.
That was less of
a institutional sense of belonging and
more of a fun experience to have.
So things like that was really better
for the student voice and letting them play in that.
So I think KPA still does it. They do Pride Prom.
They don't call it the masquerade ball,
but they call it Pride Prom,
and they still do that now,
but it's led by the KPA student organization.
>> Speaking of what comes from
students in the institution,
the creation of community center resource,
can you talk a little bit about the role that those play?
>> So community groups
and the way that I originally envisioned
them served a couple of purposes.
One, I had student reach out about wanting to start
a new student organization Trans Pride Alliance to
specifically address ways in which they
felt KPA did not fully
capture the trans experience and really look
at if we're talking about ways that we
highlight the unique experiences of students.
Trans students didn't always see themselves
fully inside of KPA,
so they had brought that concern.
My job as representative of the institution was to
hear students concerns and help
them find ways to address that.
And how do we get them to yes
and something that works well for them?
And so we first started exploring
the idea of walking through the process of
creating a formal student organization
that will be recognized by the university.
In meeting with KPA and
the students who were wanting to start
Trans Pride Alliance,
they came to the realization that they didn't want to
fracture the university resources.
So if there's two organizations,
there's rules about organizations,
how closely aligned the mission statements
are and requesting for funding,
and so they felt they were going to be competing
over similar resources,
and that was not what
the purpose of the pride alliance was.
It was not to create competition,
it was create exclusive space to focus in on
a unique set of experiences within the community.
And so diving in upon
that reflection with the real
intent of what they wanted to do,
we decided that a student organization
really wasn't going to get them what they wanted,
and it's going to be a lot more work
to not meet that goal.
So I said, "As a resource center though,
I have space, I have a calendar, we have resources.
So why don't we help?
Instead of being a formal student organization,
we can create these community groups."
They're really peer-facilitated discussion groups.
And so for the first couple of years,
we had student assistant positions where we could
pay the student leaders to
operate these spaces on our behalf.
And so that meant they had to keep calendars,
they had to do event planning.
We had a little budget for each of them,
got 500 bucks a year to do an event,
and we grew from having became
Transcend to I think now they have
six or seven different
community groups that are operated.
Looking at specific identities that sometimes you can
experience erasure within the larger LGBTQ community,
creating that space for students to help other students
navigate the world in
that lived experience is
really the core purpose of the community groups.
>> Wonderful. And then the clothing closet.
Was that something that came about during
your time with the resource center?
>> So that came out of Transcend,
that first initial community group because I
also asked the community groups that
while they're there for peer support,
the reason that they're coming from the resource center
itself is that they serve as an advisory board to me.
I carry only a certain set of identities.
My lived experience is pretty narrow
when we look at the broad spectrum of queer identities.
And while I have the
educational and professional background
to understand the way the systems work,
I don't have the lived
experience that all my students have.
Ans do I wanted to
leverage the community groups to make sure that I was
hearing and I was accountable to
all the different experiences
that my students were having.
I asked them the leaders would
serve together as an advisory board to say,
are we hitting all the policies,
are the programs or the gaps that we're missing,
ways that we're not being inclusive,
ways that we can add programming
to improve student experiences.
And so one of the things that Transcend came back with
after meeting with their group was
that they had a need for trans students
are exploring transition or are in transition,
but don't have the financial resources to purchase
a new wardrobe that
aligns with how they experience the world.
They just didn't have those resources.
We know if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs,
if your basic level needs are not met,
you're not doing higher order thinking.
If you were concerned about your immediate safety,
shelter, food, clothing,
those immediate things, you're
not going to be successful in school and ultimately,
we were the retention services office.
My job was to help students get to
graduation within the six-year timeframe.
And so if they're focused
on not feeling comfortable in who they are,
then they are not succeeding in the classroom.
And so Transcend clothing closet,
it was a way that we can address that
pretty easily for free.
So why in the world will we not do it?
And so we opened it up.
We turned our conference room
once a month into a pop-up shop,
and throughout the year,
we would solicit donations from the campus community,
so students will bring in clothes.
So if one student transitioned,
they'd bring in their old wardrobe to
donate for somebody else who's transitioning.
We had staff and faculty donating clothes,
a lot of professional wear, which is something that
students had a really hard time coming across.
And so we maintain this closet and then we'd pop it up.
We've got clothes racks who try to make it very much
a real storefront feel.
I had a lot of dignity with it.
And so students would do it, it was completely free.
Students could come in and shop and we
opened it up, anybody could come.
You didn't have to be trans or
part of Transcend or even part of the center.
Come in and shop because we had
more clothes than we had students,
so we really encouraged folks to come and participate.
So it was a broader campus resource,
particularly when we look at financial need,
but it had a unique set of meaning
within the trans community on campus to be
able to get gender affirming clothing
that would ultimately help them feel
better and do better on campus.
>> Do you remember when that program started?
[LAUGHTER]
>> My gut wants to say we were
upstairs when Transcend happened.
So maybe 2017, 2018, but [inaudible] doing.
>> So shortly after you started working at KSU,
it was announced that KSU
and Southern Pollywood consolidate.
>> It was just a really slow time.
>> [LAUGHTER] Could you speak about the
role that you played
in consolidating programs and
services between the two campuses?
>> So in terms of form or outside of just my position,
I was on the student activities consolidation committee,
and so what did campus life look like?
How do we consolidate
two student affairs units across both campuses?
I was on that committee,
but then also I had to look at from the LGBT perspective,
what resources existed on SPSU?
How did they align or
not align with the resources that had been built at KSU,
recognizing that we were one of three institutions
that had a resource center of any capacity.
And so we had different levels
of programming and resources,
but how do we bring those into alignment without
erasing an invisible populations community in history,
which is a delicate thing to need to do.
And so there was a student organization and we
tried to keep that student organization revived,
but overall, students had a lot
of feelings through consolidation,
and so that was not their focus.
I think they were a GSA formally.
I think that is what their name was GSA
on Marietta Campus SPSU.
They went a little bit defunct.
We had some collaboration for a little while,
and we were trying to talk
through the same things
that the institution was going through.
Is there a KPA Marietta, a KPA Kennesaw?
Does that really align with the synergy there?
Would they feel like they're less than or more than?
There's a lot of that conversation going
on from the student organization perspective.
And we had the Marietta for a little while.
I think there's still
a Facebook page out there, honestly.
But eventually, it's all consolidated underneath
one and they hold programming on both campuses.
Then in terms of
the other big thing that existed
was the Safe Space initiative.
Kennesaw had safe space,
SPSU had Safe Zone that had been started in 2010.
So it was still growing.
And so, my first thing
is I went and I sat in on their training.
And before we prejudge
and assume that what I'm doing is right,
let's go and see what they're doing.
What can I learn from them?
Because I inherited Safe Space program at Kennesaw
and I hadn't really changed any since I came in.
And so I watched the Safe Zone
training, spoke with folks.
Dr. Holiday is still at KSU and
was very instrumental in Safe Zone at SPSU.
And so through that,
having experienced both programs,
I convened a committee and folks.
I had three folks from Kennesaw campus and
three folks from Marietta come together and
serve as an advisory board as I went through and
redeveloped and revamped the program.
So I moved Safe Space to a really moving it
to a social justice and queer theory based model
rather than a compliance HR type of model.
Really thinking about how and why are
students experiencing campus differently,
and how can we learn from that?
And so brought those together with the feedback
and advice of those folks
who had developed the original programs.
And so through that we just incorporated
Safe Zone into the new curriculum of Safe Space.
Rather than trying to just keep one or the other,
it was like, let's see where this is
an opportunity for us to improve both aspects.
Safe Space now is served on
both campuses under a single curriculum.
>> So in 2019,
you transitioned into a different role at KSU.
Could you talk a little bit about that?
>> So I had moved from
program coordinator to assistant director,
focusing exclusively on LGBTQ student experience.
Through that, I had developed a lot of skills, though,
when you're developing a new office that
hasn't existed before in a space where people
may not always understand what the need
is or understand the scope of that need,
I think [inaudible] queer communities,
it seems a small group of students,
and we quickly challenge
that in terms of utilization of our space.
In order to do that, to challenge and advocate for
resources for this new founding office,
I didn't have a budget.
How to get really good assessment.
Sandy, how do I tell this story?
How do I quantify what's happening
on campus and what the need is for students?
And so I started developing
some really strong assessment skills to be able to tell
that story coming from a business background
and meshing that with theory.
I knew that just because it's
right doesn't make it happen.
So I need to be able to paint that story
and really articulate the need.
And so I had been doing the LGBTQ work for a while,
but it had started to venture into,
really thinking about what does
the assessment model look like, not just for my office,
but for what became cultural community centers.
But the Multicultural Student Retention Services,
International Student Women's Resource
Center, and LGBTQ,
we were all underneath one umbrella of
a department now called Cultural Community Centers,
which is what it's currently called.
And so really thinking through how do we
effectively tell the story and
the need for these types of resources,
particularly when external stakeholders
were questioning the validity of
those resources and the need for them.
There's questions about why are we funding this,
how state funds being used for these offices?
Who is it serving? Is it really
serving the mission of institution?
Is it pushing an agenda?
And so we really needed to be able to fully tell
the reason why we're there and it
was not to push an agenda.
It's to help students graduate.
And we know that theory tells us
that an engaged student is a retained student,
a student who has a strong sense of belonging to
an institution is more likely to be
retained and more likely to graduate on time.
We're providing that for a set of students that
have a history of not always
graduating or graduating on time.
So putting that special emphasis on helping them have
a positive impact on our institutions of
potential progression and graduation numbers.
That all starts to get very assessmenty, a lot of data.
And so because I had had prior experience in
effectively articulating the need for
the LGBTQ student population,
I was allowed to provide
some leadership about how do you start to
look at that for
the scope of all of these kind of
population geared program services on campus.
So that's why I transitioned into
the assessment role for culture and community centers.
Then from there, was asked to
step up and scale that up for the entire division of
how do we tell our story more effectively for
the entire division of student affairs.
So that's what I do now.
>> Great. And at some point
you went back for your master's?
>> I did all of that. Yeah, I had a baby,
bought a house and got my master's degree all in there.
>> And now you also teach in
the interdisciplinary studies department
classes in subject areas.
>> So I've taught the American Studies,
Alena two, the intro to American identities,
and I taught in KSU 1101 back when I was a programmer.
I taught KSU 11. That was my first teaching experience.
And then now I teach gender women studies,
1102, the Love and sex course.
>> Reflecting back on the growth of
the LGBTQ resource Center during and since your tenure,
could you speak a little about the growth
of the physical space over time?
I know that's something that you mentioned.
>> Little pata.
>> Yeah.
>> Again, if we think about where I started with this,
we can't have a drag show on campus.
Nobody would come to now
having a full fledged department and
having so much support from
across campus in ways that I would have never imagined.
So a lot of me just going,
why can't we or what would happen
if people being willing to support and help that.
I think that's really,
truly something special about
the KSU community that folks were willing to help.
Everybody has very full plates.
We were institution that grew very
fast and has tried to evolve to that,
but people stopped what they were doing to try to
help. I think that's a wonderful thing.
There's no way that what we have
now would have ever been achieved without people going,
yeah, sure let's give it
a shot because there's things that we do
that I could never have done as one person.
And so I'm extremely grateful for that and the way that
the department has grown over
time, it was always just something I was like,
the shoe has got to drop at some point because you can't
do this much stuff in this short period of time,
in an institution this size and get away with it.
I've been shocked and amazed that
it continues to grow and evolve.
So I'm very proud of the ways that we have
balanced the weight of again,
not all of this being on students,
that the institution bears the responsibility.
The institution has taken up that call.
Again, not just from our office.
It's really been pushed into the entirety of institution.
Queer work should come from all places and
we've had a lot of folks who have really supported that.
So it's truly institutionalizing and therefore,
creating a true sense of belonging
for queer students on campus.
I think that's wonderful.
I'm excited to see what comes next.
There's a whole new group
of leaders that are coming through.
They really get to take it now outside of my perspective,
because I have one set of lived experiences.
There's what I saw as needs as a student,
and then I addressed those needs
and we built those things,
and now folks get to bring
a whole new perspective in
and continue to grow the program.
So I'm really excited to see what they come up with.
I think it's going to be a lot of fun and they have
some really great ideas
with the new leadership in the area.
In terms of growth of the physical space,
that's something in the assessment
really played a key factor in.
Our first space was, I think,
374 square feet, was the area for students.
I think I have a office in the back that I
shared with another my coordinator,
Nasa, her and I shared an office.
I think we were one of the few people in
the entire division that shared an office,
but there was physically not enough space for us.
It quickly became apparent that we
did not have enough room for the students.
My office became a backpack storage,
just so we could shove more students into our office,
had to find out what the fire code was
because it was the first year of the center,
we had a grow 528% growth in usage at the center.
I would take pictures every day of
all these bodies crammed in the center.
Quickly became apparent that this was not
sustainable and that we were going to
cut our own growth because the demand far
exceeded just physical the number of chairs that we had.
And so we worked with Student Government Association
and students from the center,
work to actually get SGA passed
an amendment supporting that we needed to
explore the reallocation of
space in the Student Center in order
to get new space for the LGBTQ Center.
And so we went from 300 something square feet,
this one little office of the conference table
to moving up to
the second floor and having two full offices,
a conference room, a lounge space, and a lobby.
Being able to really have this full space and then
we were able to advocate for a budget to
actually renovate it so that we weren't
using surplus leftover furniture.
But that it was quality furniture again,
thinking about the dignity of students.
What message does it send to
students when they have half broken furniture?
It's a population that already
feels like they're forgotten about.
That's not something that I wanted
our office to perpetuate.
So we fought really hard to make a case
for why we needed to have matching furniture.
Seems superficial, but when
you think about representation
and folks feeling like they are seen and important,
having a half broken chair says a lot
more than we just couldn't buy a chair.
>> So in a previous interview,
you mentioned wanting to create
a network of visibility on campus and
to integrate LGBTQ Resource Center
with other campus services.
Could you reflect a little on how far the center
came in achieving those goals during your tenure there?
>> Yeah, I think, like I said, I was mentioned earlier,
these things would not exist
if they just came from the center,
look at it just with two staff people.
It's physically just 80 hours a week.
KSU paperwork can sometimes take 80 hours a week.
So how do you actually get these things to grow and
not have the obligation of just one department?
So we've been extremely successful,
so I think the coming out monologues,
that's an example of, they take it on now.
The LGBTQ Resource Center
isn't responsible for that programming anymore.
We support it and participate and help promote it,
but they've taken that on
as an extra thing to their plate.
And so it's been institutionalized
into the Theater Department.
We look at housing. Now housing has
responsibility for queer inclusion
and creating spaces on campus.
They've taken that ownership on and help us.
They provide the RAs,
the training, and all of that.
Again, the center is not having to
carry that all by itself.
We've worked with KSUPD to look at
how do we have inclusive RAD training?
We have worked with our community affairs office?
I don't know if it's still there, but when I was there,
we had an officer that got
called that even if they
weren't the first responding officer,
if there was an incident on campus that involved
an LGBTQ student or an LGBTQ related issue,
that officer got called to the scene.
So that student felt like there was somebody there that
was seeing and understanding
the world from their perspective.
So we were able to think
those relationships into that space.
The bob bus being in the parade,
we negotiated out where they can donate some
of those services and have somebody come
into work on a Saturday and take a bob bus
down so that it
was transportation responsibility was no longer on us,
but they were participating in that.
And so we found a counseling.
We have counselors that they obviously see all students,
but they have a special set of training,
and they're one of those folks
that when I ran the center.
If I had a student in crisis,
which unfortunately happens a lot,
I could pick up the phone and they
could jump the line and say,
I need this student to be seen now, this is a moment.
I could walk that student over and they
can be seen in a moment of crisis.
And so again, that takes that responsibility and shares
that and institutionalizes it into another space.
I think that we were really
effective at looking at how do
we not have all of it
just come from one place because if it's just coming
from one place and that one place is the Queer Office,
we're not really telling that student that
the institution fully embraces them,
but if they're seeing it come from
everywhere and all these people
who are willing to give up their time and
to support their success,
that sends a very different message to the students.
We have a All Star and Trans Inclusive care
on campus that students can start hormone therapy
on campus and have that pricing.
Then they work with the counseling office.
We have a psychiatrist who can do
the W Path letters so they can then start home
wal care on campus and receive
those services and they don't have to worry about driving
to Atlanta to start that service.
We have with care, our housing,
so we have the emergency housing where we
have a relationship with them
that when we have students in crisis,
we can get them placed into a home.
I had a student call me one time and say,
hey, I've been sleeping on the camp screen.
No, we don't sleep on the camp screen.
We got people. We got resources.
You are eligible for
these resources and the institution cares,
so we can get those students
placed and give them the resources that they need.
So really identifying where are these support points.
We work to get that put in.
I think we've been wildly successful to say that it
doesn't all have to come from one office.
It really should come from the institution as a whole.
Inclusion is everyone's responsibility.
University has been really responsive to that.
>> That's wonderful. So a little bit
about just life outside KSU.
>> Yeah. There's life outside of KSU.
>> So one of the major events that has taken
place since your previous interview in
2014 was the Supreme Court ruling
for marriage equality in 2015.
Could you say a bit about your memories of
that event and the impact of the ruling on your life?
>> Yeah. So, we always joke about you're like,
oh, what's your marriage anniversary? Well, which one?
Like our ceremony that we had
before any marriage was
legal on a federal or state level.
That was just really about me, me and my wife
and our family seeing that.
But then when was it Windsor,
the Windsor case happened,
then we were able to fly to California.
That's where my family's from.
My brother was graduating
college and while we were there,
like, what the heck, let's get married.
We went and got a marriage license.
That's how I officially got my name changed,
which was a whole process because
the State of Georgia didn't
recognize the marriage at the time,
which created taxes were not fun to do,
just so you know, it was a mess.
But then when the full cetadoma
got pulled back in you said 2015,
I remember I was at work.
And obviously, this case has been going on.
We've been having oral arguments.
Every day I was printing
the transcripts and having them set on the desk.
I was listening to the Supreme Court cases in my office.
Not a lot of actual work happened those days
because that's where I was focused in on.
I mean, it was my job to know these things.
And then when the decision came out,
I was sitting at my desk
in the little 374 square foot office,
and I just cried.
I was like, you knew it was coming.
You felt like you knew it was
going to be a good outcome, but,
like, I know queer history
and a lot of times it doesn't go that way.
So there was this feeling of relief.
It wasn't even an ecstatic,
it was just a relief and tears of joy.
And then my wife called me.
I and was like, Oh my gosh.
And then I jumped up.
I was like, I can't be here.
I'm not sitting in an office on this day.
I need to be with my people.
And I wanted to be with my people in a way that was
not me being a mentor,
not me being with
students in that relationship because again,
I think it's one of the challenges when you do
DEI work is that you're teaching things that are
you and you're creating mentorship for things that are
your own salient identity and trying to see
those me space versus providing for other space.
And I decided that was a day that was a me space.
Both my wife and I left work and we
met and went to midtown
and just wanted to be in midtown where queer community
was and surprisingly,
there wasn't a lot going on.
We thought it was going to be like, pop up Pride,
but it really wasn't then went to
the Center for Civil and Human Rights
and they had something going on there.
And so we went there just to be with people.
And it was a really wonderful experience.
We talked about that as
our third time that we got married.
We didn't actually have a ceremony,
but it got recognized.
So it was a pretty powerful moment that I
don't know that I thought would be as
powerful for us as it was.
But it was nice to be seen to be legitimate.
>> So you were saying you
filed to change your name in California,
is that right? Because Georgia didn't?
>> So to change my name in
Georgia without a marriage license is a whole process.
You have to go before a judge to file for a name change,
you have to post your name change in the local paper for
30 days so that somebody can test your name change.
And then even then the judge has to
decide that you have a legitimate
reason to change your name.
Being queer in Cobb County,
you don't always trust that the judge is going to think
that that's the case because there's been cases,
not necessarily in Cobb County where judges have
decided that they have not
approved name changes to match
the name of a partner because it would
be misrepresenting yourself as married.
Judges have said that that's a form of deceit
and therefore they don't participate in it.
And so that's not something that I wanted to go through
that process of the fees,
but also the humiliation of being
told that you're being deceitful,
and so that's something that we
just chose not to go through
the court system and go through a legal name change,
which we're fortunate that was
something that we could do.
Our trans students don't have that same latitude.
So for students wanting to change the first name,
that's not an option,
which reminds me to do a preferred
name policy as well at KSU.
We're the first to have a preferred name policy,
so students can change their name on
campus without legally changing their name.
We've set up systems so they can do that.
But so we decided not to go through the court case,
but then once marriage,
Article 2 of DOMA got struck down,
that the federal government would
recognize same sex marriage.
What we were able to do was go to California,
get a marriage certificate and get married in California.
Which then allowed the federal government
to recognize my name change.
Then I could get my passport changed and request
a new Social Security card
because those are federal documents.
So I can get my name changed on
those documents without question because they would
recognize my marriage certificate that Georgia wouldn't.
But Georgia does recognize federal documents.
So once I can get my Social Security,
my passport changed,
then I could bring that into the DMV
in Georgia and then they would allow me to
change my name on my driver's license because
federal documents that recognize my name change.
So a whole lot of extra steps and
processes in place to get to the same result.
But that time period
between the Windsor case
and all of DOMA being struck down,
it was a gray area.
Taxes were not fun to file.
I had to file five sets of
tax returns in a single year
just to get my taxes done properly.
Then after marriage became legal,
the state of Georgia tried to come after me for
taxes because they said,
You were married at the time.
I said, Yeah, you didn't recognize it.
And they would not recognize my federal tax returns,
but Georgia files taxes based off the federal status.
They tried to say that I owe taxes.
I said, well, no, actually, here's your policy
from the time that said you don't recognize my marriage,
so I had to file as a
single for the state of Georgia
for those years. And then they never called me back gain.
>> Wow. That's quite a journey.
>> So there's a lot of just intricacies
of things the way that life played out.
>> Can you say a bit about
your personal experience as a member of
the LGBTQ community living in Cobb County.
And I think for a while you were in Cherokee County.
>> So what I consider my Dalton years post college.
I was mostly in Cherokee County,
so we lived in Woodstock for a long time,
and then we bought our first home up in Canton.
Was where my wife and I bought our first home.
It's where we started our family at was in Canton.
And we loved it up there. We had a new build.
It was our first time like American dream.
We're doing it.
We're like adults. Long way
from getting my water shut off in college too,
and not being able to afford food.
So now I bought a house and I get a new construction.
Like, what? I can do that. That's great.
It's wonderful, and we really enjoyed it.
We got along really great with our neighbors.
We had a few moments of,
like, where queerness came out.
There's always like when we go to this grocery store,
we wouldn't hold hands
and be fully out, but we also weren't in.
It was like just don't ask,
don't tell kind of environment.
And our neighbors were really great.
I do remember one time going to the HOA meeting,
because I was a grown up and I've go to HOA meetings.
And there was another lesbian couple
that lived about three houses down from us.
And at the time, she was like,
Oh, you cut your hair.
This one of the ladies in the neighborhood
walked up and she was like, Oh, my God.
How are you doing? She's talking like she knows me.
This is my first HOA meeting. I don't know you.
But she's very familiar with me.
And she said something about my hair.
Did you color your hair? Something's different.
And I was like, Oh,
you think we're the other lesbians.
Because we're all the same.
She just knew a lesbian,
and so I look like a lesbian.
And she's like, Oh, you must be the same lesbian.
I was like, I did not cross her mind that there could be
more than one set of lesbians in this neighborhood.
But apparently, we exceeded the quota,
and that couple moved a couple months later.
So they live back to being the only gays in
the village. It's a still reference there.
But then, with politics being what politics are,
and with the 2016 election and those kinds of changes,
things started happening in the neighborhood
that were not things that we wanted to
be affiliated with and it's not what I
wanted our children to be affiliated with.
Our daughter was getting older.
She was getting close to the age
of having to go to school.
Luckily, my mother in law
stayed with us and still does with our son.
So she didn't have to do school.
She was at home. But she was getting closer to the age
where she was going to
start going to school and we started
really looking around and saying,
What does the school look like?
I didn't want my daughter to
have the experience that I had at Harrison.
It's not the world I grew up in,
I didn't want her to be in that environment where she was
not intrinsically and authentically
engaged with people that are different than her.
I realized that she wasn't going to get that in Canton.
And then we had some situations in our neighborhood.
Particularly around Black Lives Matter
and Blue Lives Matter and
the HOA signed the entire subdivision up for
a political event that
was not in line with my belief system.
And when I voiced that,
there was quite a bit of threats
and things that were happening in our home,
things that are being posted online,
threats to our house.
So we decided, you know what we thought we were okay.
We'd always thought like Canton
is not as bad as we thought it was.
And then when those things really came pushed to shove
and people were challenged on their belief systems,
it no longer felt like an environment
that we wanted our family to be about.
And so we went ahead and
we sold our house and we moved to Marietta,
and we're very happy with that choice.
And so now we're part of Cobb County officially.
But that was a year ago in
February, that we moved to Marietta.
>> So markedly different experience.
>> Markedly different, yes.
And intentionally, so that's something that we wanted,
my wife is from Blue Ridge, Georgia,
and she grew up where nobody was ever different than her.
And so there was a lot of
culture shock for her when she came to
college to see all these different people
from different experiences.
Whereas I'm walking going, This is not all that diverse.
So we had a very different set of experiences.
And that was something
that was really important for me and
our children was that diversity is not the novelty.
It's not the exception,
but it is truly part of the holistic experience.
I also wanted her to be inclusive included.
She's a little girl with two moms.
I didn't want her to feel like odd and different either.
And I didn't want her to make
other people feel odd and different.
And so being really
intentional about where she would be going
to school and what that community looked
like was really important to us.
We're in unincorporated Cobb County. That's where we are.
>> So what changes would
you still like to see in this area?
I think Cobb County has changed some over time.
But what changes would you still like to see in terms of
the area being more accepting and affirming?
>> I don't know that I know.
I think I'll know once my daughter gets into real school.
I think that's for me and that's where I am in life.
I think your perspective changes
where you are in life and what you see,
because we're all narrowed in on our own vision.
I think politically speaking,
I enjoy following Cobb County politics
and the history and how the changes of politics have
happened in the county because it's had
such a direct impact on my lived experience in
terms of the work that I do and
where I do and how I do and who has to say,
and who supports and doesn't support that work.
A lot of my understanding of
belonging in Cobb County
revolves around my KSU experience.
Because I'm a home body. Once I'm
at home, I don't leave home.
I got my little neighborhood and I'm fine.
So I think there's been a lot of positive change in terms
of the representation of
Cobb County and then it's not as it has been,
so Cobb County had a lot of
transition in around the Goldwater campaign.
And then it became so normalized
that we assume that's always what it's going
to be and there's a lot more diversity and
political identity inside of Cobb County politics.
But there's some interesting things that are
going on East Cobb cityhood.
That's a really interesting debate.
My neighborhood is on the line,
so half my neighborhood is up for
cityhood and my half, thankfully, is not.
So It's a really interesting divide to
see how people see that and the reasons that they
find for wanting to
go into cityhood I think it is an interesting idea.
It has nothing to do with queerness.
But again, queerness is an extension of
all other forms of
marginalization and underrepresented identity,
and so you can't look at one without looking at the
other and this concern about
apartments and things like
that and lowering of property values and
all these things as reasons for advocating for
cityhood to advocate for people to not be included.
I don't know if that's a positive move
for Cobb County. But that's just me.
Those are things that I think that
pushing people to see beyond their
own lived moment to see the bigger picture
of how and why they feel certain things are happening,
I think it is still an important thing to do.
Which is why I love teaching.
And helping people engaging in
those critical thinking skills to
question the moment at hand.
But I don't know if there's locally any policies.
I think there's a lot going on
nationally and a lot of trying to undo changes
that were made very swiftly in
the previous administration and
trying to figure out how do
you pull those things back
and get them back in alignment.
>> How would you compare
the KSU campus and community to the rest of
Cobb County when it comes to being
accepting and reforming space for the LGBTQ community?
>> I don't know that I know. I'm not involved.
[LAUGHTER] Like I said,
I pick up my daughter from school
and I go home and I cook and I do.
And so I'm not really necessarily very actively engaged
in the community, now.
There's not enough hours in the day between work
and keeping up with a four-year-old,
and a one-year-old,
there's just not enough time in the day.
All I know is I feel
welcome and included and safe in my neighborhood.
I've met my neighbors.
I'm also at a stage in my life
where I'm much more comfortable with who I am.
And so I'm not apologetic
about who I am and what my family does.
And it's not a space where
I feel like I'm going to give that ground.
And I think overwhelmingly,
I chose to live there knowing what I was
leaving and what I was coming into.
And I think those are things that
I made that decision thinking I would be comfortable.
So I've not experienced anything bad yet.
I put that yet on there. I think
that's indicative of the experience.
I expect that at some point
somebody's going to treat me badly.
And that's why I tell my students,
when I was in the center, sometimes it sucks to be gay.
People are going to treat you badly.
People are going to do mean things.
And that's part of life.
It's not right, but it's true.
People are not always treated fairly.
>> Is there anything else you'd like to share about
your personal experience working
for KSU that we haven't covered today?
>> I think we've covered a lot of ground.
I think it's cliche and I feel like,
Oh, she works here.
But I think the reason I keep coming
back to KSU was like,
this is a place that I felt like home.
And that's something I didn't expect
coming from somebody who didn't like school,
didn't like rules and assignments and
homework and didn't like [inaudible].
But now I'm at a place where I'm the person giving
those things out [LAUGHTER]
and I have a voice that makes change.
That's really powerful to me
from where I started to where I've come and KSU has
played a huge role in that and my sense of
identity is intertwined with
that moment in that time of my experience at KSU,
so I think that they're hard things to
separate and make distinct.
I met my wife at KSU,
I worked at KSU,
learned who I was at KSU.
They're all very deeply intertwined.
>> Well, that's all the questions I have.
Thank you so much for sitting down with us today.
>> Awesome. Thank you.