Penn's range of LGBTQ groups serve intersecting identities

Penn’s queer student organizations encompass a full spectrum of the school’s diverse population. There are groups for students who fall into many intersections of the LGBTQ spectrum by race, religion and interest — a total of 25 groups are affiliated with the LGBT Center, Director Bob Schoenberg said.

Penn’s large amount of niche LGBTQ groups might just be an extension of Penn’s propensity for niche organizations.

“There is this view that if there are a few Penn students who, if they don’t find a group that exactly meets their needs, they start one,” Schoenberg said. Citing the Pan-Asian American Community House, which has 75-plus groups under its umbrella as an example, he added that the LGBTQ community is similar to others at Penn in its breadth.

Many of these niche LGBTQ groups are founded because students feel that a larger organization isn’t meeting their needs.

For example, Penn Q&A was created last year when “we felt the Queer People of Color group didn’t really cater to the Asian population, in that there weren’t that many Asians involved,” College senior and Penn Q&A Co-Founder Victoria Chen said.

Likewise, these niche groups also often blend multiple identities that wouldn’t fall under the LGBT umbrella, such as ethnicity, race and religion. They are also often affiliated with other campus organizations outside of Lambda Alliance or the LGBT Center, creating a conduit between cultural or religious and LGBT groups.

For example, QPOC, Penn Q&A and J-Bagel, along with other groups, fall in this category.

“We are officially affiliated with Lambda and Hillel. We have a unique partnership between those two houses,” College senior and J-Bagel Co-Chair Eliana Yankelev said.

Groups such as Wharton Alliance serve the professional goals of some in the LGBTQ community, offering “corporate networking with our sponsors, LGBT-specific professional development and community building opportunities,” Wharton senior David Hirschy said.

Compared to other schools, Penn has both been a leader and a follower, but isn’t an outlier in the number of groups that it sustains.

Chen says that “we aren’t the first Ivy League to have a queer Asian group,” and that a lot of universities, especially the UCs on the west coast, had queer Asian groups before Penn did.

On the other hand, students at other universities have looked to Penn’s examples in forming niche groups. “We are even occasionally contacted by students at other schools looking for advice on how to create similar organizations at their own,” Hirschy said.

The number of groups offers more opportunities for students to get involved, but fragmentation makes it more difficult to communicate or coordinate events.

“It does create some challenges, such that if there’s an issue that you want to bring many groups together on, a shared goal or shared concern, it’s more challenging to bring together two dozen groups than two groups,” Schoenberg said.

“If you have a small contingency its hard to throw events, and events are kind of how you get your word out,” Chen said.

Students acknowledge that there is a trade-off.

“Does it detract from our overall cohesion as a queer community? Perhaps. You can’t have your cake and eat it too,” College junior and J-Bagel co-chair Cody Sherman Smith said. “If we were to sacrifice these niche groups for some larger LGBT group, a lot of voices would get lost in the conversation. In order for the community to be as large as it is, it needs to be have these things.”

Being part of one group, however, doesn’t prevent students from becoming involved in others.

“You don’t have to be part of the double, triple or quadruple minority to be part of the group,” Yankelev said. “You can choose to go to one, you can choose to go to five, you can choose to go to zero.”

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