Browsing Tag

LGBT Studies

Teaching Queer Houston: Houston We Have History

Posted on December 15, 2017
A photo of the Houston We Have History Banner Project.

I first visited the Montrose Center, Houston’s main LGBTQ community center, in 2016 for a playwriting workshop. During one of our breaks, I snooped around, checking out the schedule of events. What caught my eye most, however, was the Houston We Have History Banner Project—a colorful timeline of queer Houston history that stretches down the third floor hallway. As I mentioned in the first installment of this series, during my second year of teaching Intro to LGBT Studies at the University…

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Teaching Queer Houston: Part One

Posted on October 4, 2017
A photo of queer Houston participating in a Pride march against Anita Bryant.

When I began teaching Intro to LGBT Studies at the University of Houston in Fall 2016, I barely took the local queer community into consideration when I designed the course. Aside from having my students watch the documentary A Murder in Montrose about the Paul Broussard murder in 1991, my course was largely void of queer Houston content. This was surprising given my focus on local communities in my research and advocacy work. Even so, while discussing the events following Paul…

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Exploring Identity: How Spectrum South Inspired College Students to Embrace Their Truths

Posted on August 4, 2017
Illustration of diverse people exploring identity.

Shortly after my summer class began, Spectrum South launched with its series of narrative pieces in which the publication’s core group of writers explored their own queer and southern identities. While each piece was unique to the writer, all of them spoke to the intersections of identity and journeys of queer self-discovery. This inspired me to use these pieces—written by queer millennials—to get my students thinking about their own identities (queer and not) on a deeper level. Each student was…

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