Harvard students staged a mock funeral for an LGBT office after its closure amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion offices on college campuses.
In July, Harvard announced it would shut down its Office of BGLTQ Student Life, as well as two other DEI offices. The university did not specify the reason but said it would continue to “embody our commitment to supporting our entire student body.”
Roughly 75 students, organized by the Harvard Undergraduate Queer Advocates (HUQAD) and the Queer Students Association, gathered for the event dressed in black. They wrote messages on rainbow-colored paper cranes and placed them in a coffin marked “RIP.”
“The death of the QuOffice is so much more than the loss of a physical space to be in community together,” said HUQAD co-director Amber Simons in a speech, according to the Harvard Crimson. “It represents the silencing and erasure of queer voices.”
HUQAD co-director Hannah Niederriter said the office had been an essential hub for queer students. “It meant a lot to me and to many people in our community to have physical recognition for our space,” she said. “I met some of my dearest friends through the QuOffice, and I was so fortunate to have found a place that encouraged me to embrace my queer identity loudly.”
Harvard lecturer Caroline Light, director of undergraduate studies in the Women, Gender and Sexuality department, delivered the final eulogy while dressed in all black with a “southern widow hat.”
“Our QuOffice, as we’ve heard, was far from perfect, but it was beloved by many,” Light said. “It stood for something powerful: the radical idea that LGBTQ+ students deserve not just to survive at Harvard, but to find community — to find care and joy.”
“While the QuOffice may be gone, queer students remain as loud, fabulous, and stubbornly visible as ever. May the memory of the QuOffice be a blessing and an inspiration to us, and may its ghost continue to haunt those who would mistake cowardice for neutrality,” she added.
