Co-organiser Emily Martin looks back on the Love and Pride Formal last week, and suggests queer liberation is as important a focus as it ever was.
February marks LGBTQ+ History Month, a time to remember the history of queer liberation and the people who fought to give the LGBTQ+ Community the freedoms that we have today. You may have seen the LRC lit up in a rainbow to mark the month, or posts on social media. Last Wednesday was the Love & Pride Formal, an event to bring the college community together to celebrate and commemorate LGBTQ+ History Month.
I’m Emi, one of the two college LGBTQ+ Reps alongside Imogen Harrison (a.k.a. Imy), and I’ve been asked by the lovely John’s Chronicle Team to write a short piece on the formal. In John’s we have a thriving queer community that I’ve had the honour of getting to know and plan events for. Last summer we hosted a John’s Pride event, and you best believe Imy and I will cook up something awesome for this year too. We’ve also been hosting a series of “Coffee, Cake, & Queers” events which are designed to be a chilled, non-drinking environment for Queer Students to meet and get to know one another. The Love & Pride formal has a slightly different scope. As much as it’s a joy to gather and celebrate the LGBTQ+ Community, the formal offers a chance to acknowledge that being queer is not always easy, and our history is not always cheerful. As the saying goes, “the first Pride was a riot”.
To mark such an occasion, Imy and I worked alongside the new Vice-Principal (locum), George Connolly, to invite a range of guests from different areas of our community. From the city of Durham, we invited Miles and Chris, the owners of Durham’s own queer bookshop, Bookwyrm; Gerard Loughlin, who works in Queer Theology in the Durham University Theology Department; and Lucy Lax, who works in the university EDI department. From within John’s itself, we had Rosie, a member of Cranmer and one of the Vasey Group Heads with their wife, Hattie; Lucas Mix, who works in the ECLAS team (Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science); and Leanne, who recently joined the reception team with her partner, Kay.
To begin the evening, Isabelle Evans gave a beautiful rendition of “I’m not Afraid of Anything” following her performance in the Durham Queer Cabaret a few weeks ago. Following this, the catering team put on a fabulous meal, with the grand finale of rainbow cake for dessert. However, the real highlight was Imy’s speech given at the end of the meal (even if she’s too humble to say so herself). Imy focussed her speech on our community: “the people around you, the people that came before you, and the people that will come after you.”
For much of Imy’s speech, she spoke about the queer community within John’s. From her own experience as a nervous fresher to that of Micheal Vasey, after whom the Vasey Room is named. He trained ordinands at Cranmer Hall, was openly gay, and in reading his book Strangers and Friends, published just three years before his death, Imy found a quote “especially pertinent in the world we find ourselves in: ‘Society needs gay people because they are human – they belong’.” Michael Vasey died of AIDS-related illness in 1998, at the age of 52. Later in her speech, Imy recognised the harsh reality of queer history, “as much as we celebrate the success of our community in the present, we must also mourn the premature loss, and recognise the great achievement of so many queer people in the face of adversity today.”
The resounding message of Imy’s speech was simple, and I shall let it be the final words of this piece since I could not do better myself: “It is our job as students, friends, allies – as adults emerging into the world – to confront the past, fix the present and take our place in shaping the future into a world where we, our friends, our communities, and the young people growing up into it can thrive.”
John's Chronicle 