The College Fix

‘A safe space for those people who feel they need it’

One of the most gay-friendly universities in the country is becoming even friendlier, by offering to shelter its LGBTQ students from the rest of the school.

Indiana University-Bloomington is opening a “thematic residence hall” this fall for students who don’t identify as straight men or women.

It will have a particular emphasis on transgender students and those who don’t “subscribe to conventional gender distinctions,” the Herald-Times reported, citing GLBT Student Support Services Office Coordinator Doug Bauder.

IU’s Residential Programs & Services (RPS) is less specific than Bauder. It says the so-called Spectrum area, housed within another dorm, is “designed to make all students of all gender and sexual identities feel comfortable and supported,” including “allies,” meaning supportive heterosexuals.

Spectrum uses “shared locking, individual bathrooms,” according to its RPS listing. The Indiana Daily Student reported in December, as Spectrum was in development, that it was specifically placed within a preexisting dorm that didn’t have a single-gender arrangement, given that its residents “are on a gender, identity and sexuality spectrum.”

Spectrum has a “connection” with the Gender Studies department at the school and a “direct partnership” with Bauder’s office, RPS says.

Students who live in the dorm will enjoy opportunities such as forming a delegation to the Midwest Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Ally College Conference and attending campus events “such as a campus film screening, guest speaker, Kinsey art exhibit, etc.,” RPS says.

Recent winners in the Kinsey Institute Juried Art Show include an artist who made a “self-portrait” of her own sexual intercourse and climax, and another who designed a wooden sculpture of male genitalia in the posture of a rodeo bull.

“This creates a safe space for those people who feel they need it,” Barry Magee, assistant director of residence life and creator of the Spectrum proposal, told ABC affiliate rtv6. “And a specific space for them to have intentional conversations as opposed to serendipitous conversations that might come up.”

Students of different gender and sexual identities won’t necessarily have to room together, either.

Bauder told the Daily Student that the school would make “an effort to room students of similar identities together.”

Created to ‘provide better support,’ not in response to students being harassed

The Spectrum plan is just the latest in a wide array of programs targeting students who aren’t straight or don’t identify as their birth sex.

IU-Bloomington makes regular appearances on Campus Pride’s list of the most LGBT-friendly schools, cracking the top 25 in 2012, and its LGBT alumni association offers academic and “emergency” scholarships. It hosts a library solely dedicated to LGBT materials.

Mark Land, a public affairs vice president for the university, told The College Fix in an email that Spectrum “wasn’t necessarily born out of problems being faced by the GLBT community on campus but rather as an opportunity to provide better support and services to a portion of the student population.”

Land said Spectrum was a “natural outgrowth” of the LGBT center’s work to support students.

Not all applicants will get in, though: WHAS 11 reports that some have already been rejected from living in Spectrum. The station said IU was the 10th school in the Big Ten to have an LGBT dorm.

Magee, the assistant director of residence life, told The Fix he didn’t have time at the moment to answer questions, such as the criteria his office uses to evaluate Spectrum applications.

Other schools give LGBT students the option to request separation from straight men and women in other ways.

Illinois Wesleyan University, which is no longer governed by the Methodist Church, lets students request to live with a person who identifies not only with a traditional LGBT category, but also queer, pansexual, “fluid,” questioning, “straight ally,” genderqueer, “trans man” and “trans woman.” It also asks them how they identify, including their “preferred term.”

Students can also request to be added to “support communities” – the Pride Alliance or Safe Zone.

The University of Maryland-College Park is about to start its second year of a pilot program to offer gender-inclusive housing, in addition to mixed-gender housing. It projects that just 1-2 percent of housing will be gender-inclusive.

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE: Steve Baker/Flickr