The LGBTQ+ Center

LGBTQ+ Research Jam

April 20, 2022
St. Augustine Hall, 2-145 (2nd Floor), Queens Campus
12 noon-3 p.m., in person

Please join us for our first ever research jam! If you are working on research related to sexuality, gender, identity, community, culture, or other LGBTQ+ studies areas— jam with us! Bring your ideas at any stage for interaction, feedback, and collaborative opportunities. All disciplines and faculty, staff, and students welcome. This is an in-person event and food and drinks will be served. Please register with the link in our linktree or the QR code on the flyer.

Safe Zone Level 1 Training 

The Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) is offering a re-vamped and completely new Safe Zone Level 1 training. Thursday, March 10, 5-7pm in the Inclusivity Resource Center. 

For questions about Safe Zone, please reach out to Kerlin Morales, Graduate Assistant For Student Equity Workshops.

RSVP for Safe Zone Training on March 10.

The LGBTQ+ Center Presents

No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics
documentary screening + Q &A with Director Vivian Kleiman
March 17, 2022 @ 5p EST
D'Angelo Center, Room 206 
In-Person or Virtual Attendance information available below

No Straight Lines tells the story of five scrappy and pioneering cartoonists who depicted everything from the AIDS crisis, coming out, and same-sex marriage, to themes of race, gender, and disability. They tackled the humor in queer lives in a changing world, and the everyday pursuits of love, sex, and community. Their work is funny, smart, and profound, and provides a unique, uncensored window into LGBTQ lives from the 1970s onward, beginning at a time in which there was no other genuine queer storytelling in popular culture. Equally engaging are their personal journeys, as they, against all odds, helped build a queer comics underground that has been able to grow and evolve in remarkable ways.

Please RSVP online. 

Virtual Attendance information and link provided upon RSVP confirmation.

For more information, contact Dr. Candice Roberts.

Download Event Flyer

The Power of a Line: LGBTQ+ Resource Center Book Talk by Dennis Tyler, Ph.D. 

Thursday, February 24, 2022

About Dennis Tyler, Ph.D.

Dennis Tyler, Ph.D., has published work on African American literature and culture, disability studies, performance studies, and popular culture, and his essays and reviews have appeared in African American Review, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, Gender: Space, The Feminist Wire, Oxford Bibliographies, American Literary History Online Review, and elsewhere. His first book, Disabilities of Color, is forthcoming from New York University Press. 

His work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies. He has taught courses on Oprah’s Book Club, African American autobiography, Black disability studies, Black women novelists, and the First Amendment right to protest.

The center was formed in 2021 due to the efforts and advocacy of faculty, alumni, administrators, and staff, including the Chief Diversity Officer, the Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the Vice Provost for Global Programs, the Director of the Academic Center for Equity and Inclusion, and a faculty member in the Department of English.

Many people had been working separately and together on LGBTQIA+ issues at St. John’s. They worked with SPECTRUM, the student-led group on the Queens and Staten Island, NY, campuses, as well as other students, faculty, and employees, on issues related to bathrooms, housing, and counseling. They also collaborated with the Office of Human Resources on issues related to employees.  

Candice D. Roberts, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Division of Mass Communication, and Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Black Studies, and Faculty, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, decided that a comprehensive approach to drastically improve the lives and experiences of LGBTQIA+ members of the St. John’s community was needed. They formed a small task force and began inviting undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, administrators, and staff to join in collaborating on policies and projects to fully integrate LGBTQIA+ community members into University life. From that work came the climate report from the Transgender Training Institute, which helped to galvanize and orient our work at St. John’s University across campuses. 

In the Spring of 2021, they proposed to Rev. Brian J. Shanley, O.P., President, and former Chief Diversity Officer Nada Llewellyn, Esq., the idea of a resourced and staffed LGBTQ+ center at St. John’s University. 

Candice D. Roberts, Ph.D. (they/them) | Associate Professor, Division of Mass Communication 

Dr. Roberts earned a Ph.D. in Communication, Culture, and Media from Drexel University. Broadly their work examines cultural narrative and identity in popular media and consumer culture, and they use critical queer theory to interrogate archetypes, sociality, and themes of class, sexuality, and space/place. Recent publications include articles in the Journal for Cultural Research and in Film, Fashion & Consumption and an edited volume entitled Consumer Identities: Agency, Media and Digital Culture.

Shanté Paradigm Smalls, Ph.D. (they/them) | Associate Professor, Black Studies, Faculty: Critical Race & Ethnic Studies

Shanté Paradigm Smalls is a scholar, artist, and writer. Smalls’s teaching and research focuses on Black popular culture in music, film, visual art, genre fiction, and other aesthetic forms. Dr. Smalls’ first book, Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City (June 2022, NYU Press), which won the 2016 CLAGS Fellowship Award for best manuscript in LGBTQ Studies, will be published in June.

Hip Hop Heresies is the first of its kind—placing queerness, hip hop, and black aesthetics in conversation with one another to argue that New York City hip hop cultural production from the 1970s to the mid-2010s inherently employs “queer articulations” of race, gender, and sexuality.

Temporary Office Location: D’Angelo Center, Rooms 124 A and B
Summer Office Hours:Email for an online appointment
Tel 718-990-7983 
Email The LGBTQ+ Center