Charlie Leppert is a guest blogger for Pride Month. This is his submission! The first time I saw Alok Vaid-Menon was in 2014, when I came across a video of them performing in the queer, South-Asian performance poetry duo DarkMatter with Janani Balasubramanian. Though the original video seems to be lost, I believe the poem they performed was “It Gets Bougie,” a piece that struck me to my core: the unrestrained, eloquent, and clever challenge to the “It Gets Better” Project was

Farrah Cukor is a guest blogger for Pride Month. This is her submission! Being a junior in college, as many people do, I decided to embark on a journey studying abroad in the Netherlands for the past six months. In that time, I went to 15 countries; seeing sites such as the Eiffel Tower, the Big Ben, the Colosseum, the Swiss Alps, and many more. But my trip had an major difference that many of my other friend’s abroad experiences did not have. I am queer. My sexuality is some

That is when he realized that a pen was the most powerful weapon. Despite the lack of educational opportunities, Garang joined the Catholic Diocese of Torit (C-DOT), and The Carter Center-South Sudan Guinea Worm Eradication Program (TCC-SSGWEP) a few years ago. Here, Garang helped eradicate Guinea Worm, and found his passion for helping people. To do so, in 2012, Garang went back to school to earn his undergraduate degree in Sustainable Human Development. This allowed him to

Reina Ashley Nomura is a guest blogger for Pride Month! This is her submission. In second grade, I remember seeing signs around my neighborhood about Prop 8. I didn’t understand what it was. When I had my first crush on a girl in the sixth grade, I desperately tried to tell myself that I just wanted to be friends with her; I didn’t have the vocabulary for the word gay. In eighth grade, I encountered my first queer community: the GSA club that my friends and I started. The onl

TW: suicide ideation, depression. In the past few days, we’ve seen a lot of discourse about mental health, suicide, and Your Role in it all. It’s impossible to avoid--the tragedies of this week weigh so heavily on many of us, and many of us are trying to figure out how to best proceed in a world that is clearly failing so many people who struggle with mental illness. As a person who has struggled with depression and suicidal ideation, I can only speak to my own experience--bu