{shortcode-96d5e972576a587a2392f7dfa034b85f9f696a2f}

This past Thursday marked National Coming Out Day, a holiday that commemorates both the difficulties of coming out and awareness of the BGLTQ community and its history. This year, the celebrations at the College were colored with multiple festivities. Students across campus celebrated the day with rainbow cake in dining halls, yoga, and an open mic event.

The day was also highlighted by the release of a preliminary information guide for BGLTQ-identifying individuals, the product of a joint effort between the College’s Office of BGLTQ Student Life and the University’s Title IX Office in an effort to disseminate resources clearly to BGLTQ students. It includes contact information for both administrative offices at the University (such as Office of Sexual Assault and Response and the Office for Diversity Inclusion and Community Partnership) as well as particular school affinity groups (such as Harvard Law School Lambda and Queer Rites Harvard Divinity School). A more comprehensive guide for BGLTQ students will be released in the spring.

We commend Harvard for making efforts to make the College a more accommodating space for BGLTQ students. Both the celebratory events held by the College and the University-wide information guide will work toward making BGLTQ students, faculty, and staff feel welcome and appreciated in our community.

While these events were organized primarily by the College’s Office of BGLTQ Student Life, we would urge Harvard to expand these initiatives to all the other schools of the University. This may manifest itself in the form of a centralized affinity space for BGLTQ graduate students where members could interact. Such a space could also support the graduate BGLTQ community by hosting events similar to the ones debuted at the College’s National Coming Out Day celebrations. Institutionalizing festivities that celebrate days like National Coming Out Day and other BGLTQ-awareness days would further demonstrate University support for BGLTQ individuals in any and all spaces on campus.

As the College’s BGLTQ Office and Title IX Office work together to compile the new and improved information guide, we are hopeful that they incorporate information about mental health resources both at the College and throughout the rest of the University. Being BGLTQ can present its own challenges, and including this information in the guide would start an important dialogue concerning how being BGLTQ can affect students’ mental health.

The information guide should also be more widely publicized to all students, both now and again upon completion of the new guide, so that those who comb through the BGLTQ website looking for these resources or are members of the appropriate email lists are not the only ones accessing this information. All students — BGLTQ-identifying, questioning, or otherwise — should be made aware of this guide so that it can better inform their decisions and experiences as they navigate their time here at Harvard.

This staff editorial is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.