LGBTQIA+ community advocates share stories, passions after VCU award

Varsha Vasudevan, Staff Writer 

“Joy is a quintessential part of the queer experience; like joy and freedom and self determination,” VCU graduate student Beck Oh said. 

Oh, who goes by she/they pronouns, is also the interim program manager for LGBTQIA+ Initiatives for the VCU Office of Multicultural Student Affairs, or OMSA, and said planning and hosting big events of celebration for students within the queer community is a passion of theirs. 

Oh is one of the recipients of the Equality VCU Burnside Watstein Award, given annually to individuals who positively impact and provide community to LGBTQIA+ students, staff and faculty, according to its website. 

Intersection between racial and ethnic identities and queerness is also something that is interesting and important to Oh, they said. 

“I think that’s definitely an issue that a lot of queer people of color face where you go to your ethnic, cultural, racial space, maybe you kind of don’t talk about your queerness,” Oh said. “When you go to queer spaces, they tend to be predominantly white, and then you feel pressured to downplay the ethnic cultural parts of yourself.” 

One of the biggest focuses in their work is creating community and “very specific spaces” for queer individuals of color, Oh said. 

“I think my personal philosophy when it comes to this work is that if you don’t intentionally, from the beginning, create and make space for people of color, then typically, what happens is that you end up with a space that’s mostly white, and you’re confused as to why the queer people of color didn’t show up,” Oh said. 

Oh said they like to organize panels and social events for queer people from specific minority groups, such as Black and Middle Eastern. 

“I think it’s emotional in these specific spaces that we’ve had,” Oh said. “It gets emotional because I think folks of color are so unused to having the space that is specifically just for them.”

Providing possibility models to young queer individuals is another one of their passions, according to Oh. 

“Being able to see someone who’s older than you and have lived the life that you would like to live as well, being able to see a possibility,” Oh said. 

Oh started graduate school at VCU in August 2021 and was a student at New York University before that. Oh said she was burnt out due to academic pressure in high school and took the time to prioritize her mental health during her college years. 

“It wasn’t until towards the end of college, I had the energy and capacity to, think about, ‘Oh, how can I serve my community?’” Oh said.

She wasn’t always involved in LGBTQIA+ activism, her work began in college through community organizing, Oh said. 

“When I got to college was when I came out to friends and in college is when I actually did some community organizing where my friends and I started a club at NYU, called the Coalition for Minority Journalists,” Oh said. “I was sort of overseeing the LGBTQ aspect of that.”

Julian Kevon Glover, assistant VCU professor in the gender, sexuality and women’s studies department who goes by she/they pronouns, said “embodiment” is a more holistic term for understanding their identity because their identity can never fully describe all that they are.

“My embodiment is always changing. I’m very much, a kind of a shapeshifter,” Glover said. “There are that many selves that I really do believe reside within me, and they come out when they feel like coming out and so that’s very much aesthetically embodied.”

She said she tends to be a model of possibility to students and encourages them to embrace their “complexities” and accept their “contradictions.” 

Building and encouraging community for LGBTQIA+ individuals is at the core of Glover’s passion and activism, according to her. 

“It’s about cultivation,” Glover said. “It is about being willing to come and do the work day in and day out.”

Glover said she sees this cultivation of community as a commitment and practice that she remains dedicated to. 

“It’s not just something that you identify with, and you come and go as you please, not for me at least,” Glover said. “It’s really a practice that requires diligent and fervent kinds of supplication and intention.”

She worked for nonprofits early in her career, but they didn’t allow her to do the depth of work she wanted to, according to Glover. 

Glover said she discovered and “fell in love” with gender, sexuality and women’s studies, Black studies and performance studies during her graduate school career at Indiana University. These were the fields in which people were having the conversations she wanted and where she felt she had the most to contribute, Glover said.  

While they had heard of the award before, being part of the gender, sexuality and women’s studies department, Glover said they were surprised to receive it. 

“The notification just came as a random notification in my email inbox one day,” Glover said.  “It really surprised me because I know I do quite a bit of work on and off campus and all of that. But I still feel like to some degree, I just got to Richmond.”

Glover said they also worked at Indiana University and Northwestern University. They then were successfully recruited into VCU’s iCubed visiting scholar program.

She is part of Intersections in the Lives of LGBTQIA+ Communities Transdisciplinary Core, a VCU initiative that invests in academic and research programs to understand the effects of discrimination and emphasize activism and resilience, Glover said. 

Glover works with community organizations such as Black Pride RVA and also larger issues like youth homelessness. 

“The other thing that gives me an immense amount of joy for the work that I do, has nothing necessarily to do with VCU,” Glover said. “Work looks like for me showing up and supporting, LGBT folks doing really interesting work.” 

She was extremely surprised by the award, partly due to her “complicated” relationship with recognition as awards and honors were one of the only ways she felt loved by her parents growing up, according to Glover. 

“A few years ago, I really began to see that my own sense of self became pretty tied to the kinds of recognition I was receiving,” Glover said. “So as a matter of redeveloping, relearning, recalibrating, my relationship to recognition, it’s something thatI don’t necessarily look for anymore.” 

Recognition from members within the LGBTQIA+ community is what matters most to her, making this award more meaningful, according to Glover. 

“Pretty much everybody who is on the board [for the Burnside Watstein Awards], or who decides to make the decision every year for who gets it, they’re pretty much all queer themselves,” Glover said. “It is a kind of honorific within community or by community.”

Glover said recognitions such as the Burnside Watstein Awards is important because it gives value to marginalized people, such as LGBTQIA+ and Black and brown individuals, that society assumes has “no value.” 

“One of the things that I think is so important about these kinds of awards, is that it speaks back very powerfully to a society that tries to tell us that our lives are wholly devoid of meaning,” Glover said.

It is also significant to recognize queer individuals while they’re alive through honors such as this award, Glover said. 

“Too often LGBT people become aware to other folks in our deaths. Far too often,” Glover said. “So it is meaningful to be able to receive a kind of honorific kind of award while we are alive, to celebrate ourselves and to be celebrated within and by our community.”

Van Vox and Melissa-Irene Jackson were the two other recipients that received the award.