Sivagami “Shiva” Subbaraman

Director of the LGBTQ Resource Center
Time at Georgetown: 6 years

What drew you here?
I came here to start this office. It was historic, it’s the first LGBTQ Center. I was the founding director.

What was the need you saw for a resource like this one?
It came as a result of student activism, which was the “Out for Change” campaign because of hate crimes on campus in the fall of 2007. Students really organized and said we really need to have a center. That’s how the center happened.

What would you say is the biggest difference related to the work you do now from when you started?
The student culture has really changed quite dramatically, and students are generally more accepting of each other. A lot of students are more willing to be out because there is more openness, and they’re more willing to serve in different capacities. That for me is the greatest joy: that students are willing to serve in various leadership capacities that they would not do when I first came. They’re doing what they love to do and what they’re good at doing and they happen to be gay. That was not true when I first came. Students self-selected out of a lot of things and did not take on leadership roles. It was most evidenced when Nate [Tisa] became the first openly gay president because that would have been unthinkable even four years ago; to even run for that position as an openly gay student. There were no openly gay RAs for example. That has been helped because a lot more faculty and staff are more comfortable being out, and we’ve been able to bring back LGBT alumni who are a very visible presence on campus. All that visibility has gotten the word out that Georgetown is very open. Incoming students now are not afraid to look for the center. 

When the center was founded, did anyone anticipate that degree of change in such a short time? 
No, I think what we all expected is that it would change enough that the hate crimes would stop happening, and at least there would not be what felt like a very vigilantly homophobic and hateful campus. It just felt like a very actively homophobic campus. I don’t think that’s where we are today, and I think that sort of rapid change is also somewhat the national change. No one would have believed that in five years we would have repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and that so many states would have passed marriage equality laws. So, it sort of mirrored some of the national change. The work, therefore, that I focus more on now is how to sustain this and how to do the deeper work with our LGBTQ students but also the allies. 

Do you have a proudest moment from your time here?
Oh, several. I think every year the Lavender Graduation is one of the proudest because it has grown and grown. This year we are going to have 120 graduating students. It now includes all campuses — the main campus, law school, medical school, and School of Continuing Studies — and every undergraduate school. Every year when we have the Lavender Graduation it feels like a huge affirmation of all that we’ve worked for, because it’s the only time the community sees itself together. And so many faculty and staff come. It’s such a joyous way to end each year. The other proudest moment for me is when students don’t drop out because they’re gay or because they’re transgender. The most significant, radical change has been around transgender issues. Our students have been courageous and taken a lot of leadership around it, but it’s also been that the culture has changed enough. I tell students that when I first came, I met the alum who when she was here in 2007 or 2006, she came out as trans* and her roommates actually set fire to all her stuff. They set fire to her books, and her clothes, her laptop. She had to go into hiding. Even the first three years I was here a lot of the trans* students transferred out or dropped out. Being able to retain students despite all the challenges they face because they feel comfortable here or because there’s a way in which we can help navigate the world here means so much to me. At the end of the day it’s each student who matters to me. Each and every student who stays.

What is one thing Georgetown could do better going forward?
What we could do better is to continue to understand that LGBTQ issues are part of the larger diversity of this campus, and to always see it that we have individual offices for a certain reason, but we have to always, always, always, pay attention to the fact that we are multiply identified, and therefore we should be looking at everything across those identities and not keep separating any identity out from anything else. We need to do a better job of understanding our diversity in a more holistic way, and make this part of that conversation. We really need to think long-term and more strategically about how we’re going to sustain all diversity work across campus over the next 10 years, and not to be afraid to reinvent or to get so complacent that we’ve done things well and there aren’t more things to do. It will decline if we aren’t willing to have the courage to reimagine ourselves every couple of years.

Interview by Danny Funt