Dively Rainbow Graduation

To all of our amazing graduates,
We celebrate you and your accomplishments! While we are sad that we could not hold our annual Rainbow Graduation brunch this year and celebrate you in person, we hope that you can feel that we are holding you in our thoughts and sending you best wishes and all of our support on your journeys. We look forward to planning and celebrating with you on a joyous occasion soon!

 

Queers of the Class of 2020 -

Congratulations on your graduation.

The fact that Pride and graduation seasons align has always made a certain kind of sense to me. Some of my proudest, fiercest moments have existed at the intersection of my queerness and my own academic achievement - something that I suspect may prove true for many of you as well. Right now it can be difficult to celebrate, to feel proud alongside feelings of anger, confusion, grief, guilt, pain. But, at least to me, bringing queerness to this moment means to challenge the binary assumption that negative and positive emotions are opposite forces that can’t, don’t co-exist. It isn’t either we feel guilt or we feel pride, rather our emotions are multitudinous, overlapping, and constantly shifting. This is the queer reality of existence: our anger and our pride are siblings, each feeds the other. And so I am writing to let you know how proud I am of your queer excellence, and how much simultaneous anger, pride, and hope I feel at the reality of your class entering a new chapter when the tome of humanity is upside down and on fire. I genuinely believe that each one of you is magic, and the world could really use an influx of queer magic right now.

If we were together, this moment would be Dively’s gift to you - a chance to feel yourself enveloped in the queer community you built at Williams. Instead, we are all separated, and by some estimation alone. So I offer to you a collection of queer zines from the new circulating zine collection in Sawyer - you can find these zines here by signing in with your williams.edu login information. I hope that these queer stories fill your heart and mind with the community. And though times are strange, you don’t have to be a stranger - I’d love to hear about your adventures beyond Williams. In fact, I can’t wait.

 

Take care of yourselves, take care of each other.

Hale Polebaum-Freeman (hop1)
First-Year Outreach & Reference Librarian