Pride Posters Promote Overlooked Contributions

Vibrant posters featuring famous people who identify as LGBTQ+ were recently hung throughout campus by the Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA) club in an effort to highlight social contributions of those often omitted from history books.

Club president senior Paige Love and vice president senior Maddie House have been making the posters along with their board of directors and club members since the end of last year. “We try to make our posters really artistic and fun just to draw people’s attention, and it’s also fun for us. We’ve been pretty successful in that. It’s a lot of work to get all of the posters made and up, but we’ve been successful in getting all of them up,” said House. 

The goal of these posters is to draw attention to the contributions made by LGBTQ+ throughout history, as they are notoriously overlooked. Love said, “We did it because we felt like we needed to recognize that it’s not just a new fad, which is something we hear a lot, and to prove that some of the most important figures in the world have, in fact, been queer.”

House explained that SAGA has made posters featuring men loving men, women loving women, and trans and non-binary figures. This year featured figures like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Ellen DeGeneres, Sappho, and Emily Dickinson.

The posters have not gone unnoticed by students. Sophomore Juliet Jones said, “I think it’s representing a new age of human tolerance.”

SAGA hopes the celebration of LGBTQ+ people will make its way into classrooms as well. “We just really want LGBTQ+ figures to be more involved in curriculum and to be taught about, talked about. We wanted people to be thinking about the people who are often left out of history, and LGBTQ+ people are often left out,” said House. 

“To me, it means recognizing the contributions that the LGBTQ+ community has made to our path of history, to the goodness throughout history. And it is meant for us to bring attention to how we’re present and we’re having good impacts throughout the world, and how we’re not just doing something for attention. We’re not just inconspicuous and innocuous to our history,” said Love.