About the Collection
Queer Centre is an oral history and archival project of the Centre College LGBTQ+ community and the college Archives. It aims to collect, feature, and share what has been the hidden (at times by necessity) history of the LGBTQ+ community at Centre College. The project is part of ongoing reparative work in the college Archives, focused on collecting and showcasing materials in the Archives which document the experience of underrepresented communities at Centre College. The Queer Centre Project collects the voices from both current and former students, administrators, faculty, and staff regarding LGBTQ+ history at Centre.
We want our archive to be a diverse collection that contains materials that are inclusive of all Centre students regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. It is frustrating when students come in looking for items that represent their history and nothing can be found. We want to fix that, and while we cannot materialize historic documents and artifacts we can do better moving forward by being proactive in ensuring that the diverse experiences of all of our students are collected and preserved. Everyone deserves for their story to be told.
Beth Morgan, Special Collections/Archives Librarian
Materials collected are available through the Grace Doherty Special Collections and Archives.
Project Timeline
The project originated in 2019, when Vati Pham ’23 (she/her) came to Jo Teut (they/them), a former Assistant Director of Diversity and Inclusion Programming, with the idea of raising awareness about the LGBTQ+ community at Centre College. At the time, Pham was a first-year student and she had no experience in archival work. Yet she was passionate about LGBTQ+ activism and was determined to preserve the history of the LGBTQ+ community at Centre College. Thanks to the support from Grace Doherty Library and Beth Morgan (she/her), Cataloging & Special Collections Librarian/Archivist, the project entered its first development phase.
Vati Pham became the first student interviewer for the Queer Centre Oral History project, and she conducted and recorded the first Queer Centre interview using the Zoom videoconferencing platform in June 2019. Zoom helped ensure that COVID restrictions and physical distance [Pham in Vietnam and interviewees in the U.S.] did not impede the collection of histories.
Dr. Mykol Hamilton (she/her) created a transcript with questions spanning all areas of student life. Pham and Dr. Hamilton decided that the initial interviews placed in the archive would be from alums as well as former and current faculty and staff who identify as LGBTQ+.
The interviews have highlighted how little was known and documented about the experiences of LGBTQ+ students prior to the 2000s, and how the recent graduates lacked a space to voice their experiences.
The Queer Centre project continues. If you are interested in being interviewed or donating images or items from your time at Centre, please use this form.
Content Note
All materials in the collections have research value and reflect the society and time period in which they were produced. They may contain language and imagery that are offensive because of content relating to: ability, gender, race, religion, sexuality/sexual orientation, and other categories. The documents, images, publications, and other materials have been preserved in order to present the materials in their original state and context, and do not reflect the values of Centre College. We are aware that finding aids, catalog records, and other descriptions created by staff at these institutions using standard vocabularies may contain offensive or harmful language. We are actively working to address this problem. In some instances, we will supplement but not replace the offensive terms that come from authorized sources still in use for searching. If you come across offensive language in a finding aid, catalog record, digital collection description, or other material description, please contact library@centre.edu to bring this to our attention.