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The Dartmouth
March 29, 2024 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

PRIDE expands to two weeks

Dartmouth Hall lights up in rainbow in honor of PRIDE.

Dartmouth Hall lights up in rainbow in honor of PRIDE.

This past weekend, red, yellow, pink, green, blue and purple lights illuminated the front of Dartmouth Hall in honor of PRIDE 2016. The 10th annual PRIDE week will celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community, and for the first time, will last two weeks instead of one.

Francis Slaughter ’16, who was co-chair of PRIDE for the last two years but is taking an advisory role this year, said that the PRIDE committee decided to expand programming to two weeks to accommodate all the events they had in mind. Shivang Sethi ’17, Xander Johnson ’18 and Saba Nejad ’18 co-chaired PRIDE 2016.

Nejad wrote in an email that as the College does not have a strong LGBTQIA+ group on campus, the committee hopes that the longer timespan this year will help foster the community’s growth on campus.

PRIDE 2016 co-chair Johnson described the community as one that is often overlooked and relatively fragmented, since many subgroups such as Dartmouth Alliance and the Triangle House all exist independently.

“By centering the community for a longer period of time, we’re able to strengthen it, as well as allowing for more voices to be heard,” Johnson said.

Despite the change, PRIDE 2016 will largely feature many of the same events from past years like free HIV screenings and the TransForm show that uses fashion to challenge gender binaries. While members of the planning committee come up with some events, the committee also solicits feedback from the broader College community through campus emails and PRIDE Week meetings.

Rather than having a small number of well-known speakers, Nejad said this year’s goal was to host more events that the majority of campus could relate to. Michelle Kermond, assistant dean and advisor for sexuality, women and gender in the Office of Pluralism and Leadership and for sexuality, women and gender, identified three goals for PRIDE. One objective is for members of the PRIDE committee to gain leadership skills through the organization, marketing and execution of programs. OPAL also hopes to create spaces that foster a greater sense of belonging and helps LGBTQIA+ explore their identities, while focusing on how all members of the community can create an emotionally supportive campus environment.

This is the first year in which Dartmouth Hall was illuminated in rainbow colors. The lighting serves to advertise the week and to make sure that LGBTQIA+ experiences on campus are celebrated with a bigger statement than in the past, Slaughter said. PRIDE hopes to continue having the lights every year from now on, Johnson said, adding that next year there may even be a banner hung on Dartmouth Hall as a more public display of pride in the community.

Slaughter emphasized PRIDE’s intentional focus on representing the diversity of the LGBTQIA+ experience, the narrative of which is frequently centered on “gay men of privilege.” Slaughter pointed to deeper issues of homelessness and unemployment in queer communities, which are often ignored when too much focus is placed on issues like marriage equality.

Not all LGBTQIA+ students want to be visible, Slaughter said, a fact that has somewhat held back attempts to build up a widespread queer community on campus. He added that while there has been significant support from the administration, more support must be generated through a shifting in campus culture to create a genuinely inclusive atmosphere.

“It can be done through initiatives, but it mostly has to be taken up by students to create spaces that welcome people of different identities, not just those that easily blend in,” Slaughter said.

Planning for this year’s PRIDE events began late last fall, he said, adding that from his personal experience committee members can spend up to several hours a day on planning.

Nejad said that the most difficult part of the planning process this year was finalizing the event list, especially given the limited funding and the diverse audience that committee members hoped to reach out to.

Dartmouth’s PRIDE Week started in 2007, and that year the planning committee raised $27,830.20 for the events. As PRIDE events occur throughout the world, they frequently take place on college campuses.

“Most other schools have just a set PRIDE budget that they can use every year,” Johnson said. “I know that the other Ivies have larger budgets to bring larger speakers.”

However, he added that he did not think the lower budget at the College affected the overall quality of PRIDE programming.

Johnson said that PRIDE has a variety of sources for its fundraising, including Greek houses, academic departments, the administration and the Special Programs and Events Committee.

SPEC has traditionally provided most of the funding, but this year most of the funding came from senior associate dean of student affairs Liz Agosto, Johnson said.

In future years, Johnson said he hopes to keep PRIDE as long as possible.

“The goal is to continue highlighting these intersectionalities and by bringing more intersectional voices to PRIDE,” he said.

In addition to PRIDE, OPAL is also planning on hosting an LGBTQIA+ History Month in October, Kermond said. The history month builds on the two-week PRIDE celebration by continuing to explore queer history, culture and identity.

PRIDE 2016 kicked off this Saturday with a dance party in Sarner Underground and will conclude May 6 with a Lavender Graduation Banquet at the Triangle House.


Sonia Qin

Sonia is a junior from Ottawa, Canada. (That is the mysterious Canadian  capital that no one seems to ever have heard of.) She is a double major in Economics and Government, with a minor in French. She decided to join The D’s news team in her freshman fall because of her love of writing,  talking to people, getting the most up-to-date news on campus, and having a large community of fellow students to share these interests with.