Sunlight streams into the LGBT Resource Center, in its new fifth-floor suite at Bird Library, through several large windows overlooking the Syracuse University campus. The light washes over a rack of dresses, jackets and other fashion pieces in calm blues, deep purples and fiery reds. Another rack filled with empty hangers stands next to the full one, ready to display more gently used items of gender-affirming clothing.

Berri Wilmore, one of the center’s half-dozen student assistants, was struck with the idea for a gender-affirming closet when she realized how many items in her own wardrobe she rarely wore. The freshman communication and rhetorical studies major has since spearheaded the closet’s development, working towards creating a space for queer people exploring their gender expression to feel validated and affirmed.

While Wilmore said the closet hasn’t gained much student attention, she’s hoping that’ll change after the center’s clothing swap event. On March 29 from 6-9 p.m., students can come in, look through, try on and take home available clothing. They are encouraged to leave items behind.

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“This is a space for anybody to come to, and we’re always really happy to see new faces coming in and out,” Wilmore said.

The LGBT Resource Center’s staff aims to boost its outreach with students through efforts like expanding the gender-affirming clothing closet. The center and its resources are part of a larger push by queer studies scholars to integrate LGBT scholarship and ideas throughout the campus community.

Colleges with LGBT resource centers across the nation offer similar spaces. University of California, Santa Cruz’s Cantú Clothing Closet, and Penn State University’s Clothing Transit, both offer accessories like shoes, bags, hats and jewelry, in addition to clothing. University of California, Davis’s Gender Affirmation Closet offers these items as well as shape-wear like compression binders. Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride, told NBC News that LGBT advocates have organized clothing drives for transgender and gender-nonconforming college students for roughly the last decade.

The closet at UC Davis has been open for a year and a half, LGBTQIA Center Office Coordinator Ness Nguyen, said in an email to The Daily Orange. In that time, she said, the center staff has changed up available closet items and organization and “only recently settled on a final version of the closet.” The center plans to do an assessment of the closet’s effects on campus this spring, she added.

Clothing drop-off boxes for the swap at SU can be found in Schine Student Center and at Hendricks Chapel. Community members can also bring clothing to the LGBT Resource Center at their convenience, Wilmore said. After the swap, donations will be sorted and any items that aren’t considered gender-affirming — meaning items that are appropriate for all genders, like T-shirts — will be donated to a local church.

Wilmore said she’s hoping anybody coming in to check out the closet, for the swap or otherwise, can also learn about the center’s other resources. Beyond the various discussions and events the center puts on, sexual health resources like free STI testing are available every third Thursday of the month.

Besides being somewhere to go for gently used wardrobe items, the center is a place for anyone to come in, relax between classes and seek any kind of help they may need, Wilmore said.

“I think a lot of people don’t know, and it’s really a hidden secret,” she said of the center and its resources.

At SU, the LGBT studies program is thought of as a three-legged stool, said director Margaret Himley. One of those legs is the resource center, with the others being the minor program and an LGBT-centric University Senate committee. Together, these components are meant to promote queer scholarship across student, faculty and staff communities, Himley said.

“The goal is to infuse the campus with that scholarship,” she said.

All the clothes in the center are donated items from when it was located on the 700 block of Ostrom Avenue. Not all of that clothing was of interest to students, Wilmore said.

Student assistant Alex Middleton recalled going through the old clothes before the center’s move and realizing how many items were dated and out of fashion. She’s looking forward to seeing “fresh additions” to the closet, she added.

Wilmore and the center staff aim to fill the new space with age-appropriate, stylish pieces that college-age people want to wear, she said.

“We’re college students, we know what college students are into,” Wilmore said. “One of the things that we definitely wanted to do was making sure that it’s things that people are going to want, need and actually get use out of.”

Wilmore envisions the closet as a cost-effective way for people to look for clothes they’re confident and comfortable in.

“What you wear … says so much about you and plays a huge role into how you feel,” she said. “If you’re not wearing clothes that you feel comfortable in, then you’re not going to be comfortable.”

Clothing is a way for queer people to reimagine how they relate to the world around them, Himley said. She pointed to queer people as fitting into scholar Sara Ahmed’s notion of an affect alien, or someone “out of line with cultural scripts and the public mood — they don’t fit in right, they don’t feel right.”

One way that queer people recognize themselves as affect aliens is through their clothing, she said, so a gender-affirming closet space gives them an opportunity to try something different.

“It’s an opportunity to play,” she said of the space. “It’s an opportunity to experience the embodied pleasure of what it means to put on different clothes and have people receive you and see you that way.”

Himley, who taught a course called “Fashioning Queer Lives” last fall, referred to fashioning as a verb, one that can involve pushing back on the pressures society considers to be the norm. Fashioning, she added, makes life “bearable” for oppressed people and allows gender to be less about biology and more about expression. This concept of gender performativity is most commonly reflected in the drag community, she added.

“There’s this capacity to feel affectively the pleasure and joy of bending rules,” she said.

Middleton, a freshman communication sciences and disorders major, hopes the on-campus center can be a place for others to explore, just as it has been for her.

“I want people to feel free to explore their gender and identity in general,” she said. “The space has definitely been a place for me to do that. I hope people feel that opportunity in this safe space.”

Published on March 20, 2019 at 11:57 pm

Contact Colleen: cefergus@syr.edu | @ColleenEFergus2