Approximately 20 supporters of Queer Awareness Month and the Columbia Queer Alliance gathered outside the Spectator office Thursday afternoon in protest of a Wednesday staff editorial.
“We came out to swiftly and powerfully get the message both to the campus and Spectator how offensive and incorrect the article was and how disappointing it was that it came from a staff editorial and not a submission,” said Everyone Allied Against Homophobia Co-President Ira Stup, GS/JTS ’09.
The protest, which was coordinated by an informal coalition of LGBT students and advertised by several related groups, took place on Broadway below Spectator’s 112th Street office. Participants held a large rainbow flag, distributed pink paper triangles on which messages could be written, and conducted a brief “kiss-in.”
The piece was written by the Spectator Editorial Board. The news section and opinion section function independently, and the news staff has no input in the writing of editorials.
The editorial, titled “Education, Not Jubilation,” criticized the organizers of QuAM for what it construed as an excessive focus on celebratory and explicitly sexual events such as the recent Genderfuck party. Many members of QuAM, CQA, and associated groups felt that the editorial was heteronormative and did not sufficiently take into account the month’s full scope of programming and events.
“We have just as much right to dance with boys if we’re boys or girls if we’re girls,” QuAM Co-Coordinator Joseph Daniels, CC ’09, said. “We don’t have to tone ourselves down.”
The piece also contained several factual errors, which were corrected online and in Thursday’s print edition.
“To read in print certain claims—and a lot of them were just incorrect—goes against the integrity of the newspaper,” said CQA Activism and Service Chair and President emeritus Peter Gallotta, CC ’09. Unlike previous staff editorials on QuAM, he said, it “stepped outside of any productive, intellectual criticism that could have been made of the program.”
Spectator Editor-in-Chief Tom Faure, CC ’09, published an explanatory post, also printed in today’s edition, on the paper’s “The Editors’ Notes” blog early Thursday morning. Faure and queer community leaders plan to meet next week.
Faure underlined the editorial’s intent to address partying, and not the sexuality involved with Genderfuck. “The point was to think about tactics. ... I don’t contest that a lot of that got lost [in the editorial].”
Faure added that he attended Thursday’s protest and thought it was a very positive event, and that he looked forward to meeting campus leaders and getting “a fresh start in the dialogue that we think should be taking place.”
In meeting people face-to-face, he said, “we can humanize each side here and realize we do have common goals and ideas. Hopefully next time it won’t take something that offended people before we can learn that.”
Daniels and others stressed that they did not intend the protest to be construed as negative.
“We are taking a stance against that article, but this is a celebration,” Daniels said. “This is education through jubilation.”
COMMENTS
Comments will be moderated in accordance with our comment policy