Clemson University is opening its first LGBTQ “living and learning community” in fall 2021, a project ten years in the making, according to LGBTQ students.
“Lavender Place” will be a group of rooms at Gressette Hall, with 16 beds open to both continuing students and incoming freshmen. The goal is to create a residential community where LGBTQ students can be “affirmed, where they can be supported and explore their identities,” said junior Tyler McDougald, one of the students who spearheaded the effort.
McDougald is the Clemson Undergraduate Student Government inclusion and equity chair and the president of the Clemson Rainbow Fellowship, an LGBTQ group on campus. He’s been advocating for Lavender Place for over a year.
“Coming into the university, and specifically on-campus housing, my queerness was always on my mind,” McDougald said. “I was concerned about how I would be accepted into the residential community, how those that I was living with would accept me, how I would be treated – and [I] really changed a lot of my behavior in order to prevent a lot of those anxieties. I wanted to create a space in which queer students didn’t have to do that.”
Lavender Place was “student-led, student-driven … This was a student effort through and through,” he added.
On Jan. 31, he and other LGBTQ students in student government’s equity and inclusion committee submitted a resolution to the student senate, which passed unanimously. On Sept. 30, an email from Clemson housing told McDougald that Lavender Place had been approved.
It was a long time coming, he said. Lavender Place isn’t a new idea. Clemson University has 17 living and learning communities – for ROTC, business students and others – and students called for an option for non-binary and trans students as early as 2010, but it didn’t happen.
