The University of Michigan has a long history of providing its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students with resources and initiatives intended to improve the quality of their experience on campus. In 1971, under pressure from activist members of the Gay Liberation Front, the University took its first steps toward institutionalizing what is today one of the nation’s oldest and most active student service offices dedicated to the support of LGBT students. Now, nearly four decades later, under the auspices of its Program on Diversity Initiatives, the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies continues to reaffirm this university-wide commitment to LGBT students by sponsoring programs and events intended to encourage discussion among faculty and graduate students about such critical topics as professional mentoring, personal growth, and prejudice and discrimination in the academy. All of these initiatives are evidence of a real commitment on the part of the University of Michigan to create a tolerant and supportive environment in which its LGBT students can live and work. These initiatives are an essential component of the effort to maintain an open and diverse campus.
The University of Michigan is a community organized around the common project of rigorous debate and intellectual exchange. One of the greatest gestures of support it can show its students and faculty (LGBT and non-LGBT alike) is to encourage innovative research and scholarship in all fields, including gay, lesbian, and queer studies, across the disciplines and schools. LGQRI plays a crucial role in this domain, filling an important function performed by no other campus unit. The university-wide faculty group UM Gay Lesbian Bisexual Faculty Alliance (UMFA) worked to attain domestic partner status for lesbian/gay couples and now holds annual meetings. The LGBT Studies minor instituted in LS&A in Fall 2000 through the Women’s Studies Department has provided a critical curricular resource for undergraduates in that College. And in 2006 a graduate certificate program in LGBTQ Studies became available to all graduate students at the University of Michigan, also through the Women’s Studies Department. But there were no comparable resources to address scholarly interests in lesbian-gay-queer (LGQ) studies on the part of graduate students, professional students, faculty, and professional staff at the University before LGQRI was founded in 2001. LGQRI’s purpose is to foster intellectual conversation and interdisciplinary connection among faculty, graduate students, and staff engaged in research and scholarship on the cultural production of sexuality.
A significant development was the advent in 1999 of the Lesbian/Gay Studies Workshop, a monthly joint faculty-graduate student forum for sharing work in progress and hosting guest lecturers. Its speakers have addressed enthusiastic audiences comprising students, faculty, and staff from numerous departments, programs, units, and professional schools throughout the University. The workshop events have been of crucial importance, not only for the commitment to extra-institutional intellectual collaboration they represent, but also for the opportunity they afford students, faculty, and staff for interaction across divisions of personal and professional interest, and across lines of institutional hierarchy, all of which too often isolate and divide members of this particular public from one another. The events sponsored by the workshop from 1999 to 2001 increased the University of Michigan’s national and international visibility as an intellectual community dedicated to the serious consideration of sex and sexuality as powerful and significant objects of critical inquiry and scholarly research. LGQRI continues to build on this record of growth, and in March 2003 it hosted the international conference “Gay Shame,” which drew to Ann Arbor 50 prominent speakers and 200 guests from around the world.
In Fall 2001, LGQRI became a program area at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. In 2005 LGQRI received a $25,000 grant through a private donor and the Women’s Studies Program to support public events and programming on LGBTQ themes. Since then, LGQRI has pursued its strategy of developing a more formal identity for the abundant resources that already exist on campus. UM has not lacked breadth or depth of resources, student interest, or faculty expertise in this area, only connections and central organization. The field of LGQ studies is still evolving, and existing resources have developed in separate disciplinary domains. LGQRI aims to foster interdisciplinary scholarship and conversation, and to provide a locus from which to facilitate the consolidation and dissemination of information and the development of new collaborative ventures. Toward these ends it pursues the following goals: