For Paloma Gomez (CAS ’28), finding queer community at Georgetown has not been easy.
“I have found it very difficult to find a lot of other LGBTQ individuals,” Gomez said. “In terms of actually connecting with them and actually being able to make those friendships and relationships, it’s very difficult. It very much feels like this is a very straight campus, when in reality it’s probably not completely the case.”
Gomez isn’t the only student who wishes that Georgetown had a more visible queer community. With this in mind, students at GU Pride are hoping to bring back Georgetown’s Living Learning Community (LLC) for LGBTQ+ students and allies. In the last month, GU Pride has been working to gauge student interest in the initiative.
LLCs are residential communities where students of shared identities or interests live together and participate in social, educational, and reflective activities. Georgetown has not had an LGBTQ+ LLC since the former community, Crossroads, closed four years ago.
Students like Gomez, who is nonbinary, say that having an LGBTQ+ LLC would help support Georgetown’s queer community.
“I wish there was just more visibility, and even just having a queer LLC is like, ‘No, there are queer people on campus here,’” Gomez said.
In 2016, then-executive policy chair of the GUSA LGBTQ+ Inclusion team Grace Smith (CAS ’18) spearheaded the effort to create Crossroads. When the team first submitted the proposal, the Georgetown administration denied it.
After continuous efforts from students and faculty, the LLC was reproposed, accepted, and launched for the 2018-19 school year. But Crossroads was short-lived: in 2020, the Georgetown campus shut down because of COVID-19, and the LLC did not return once restrictions were lifted.
“After we returned to campus from COVID, we were trying to get [Crossroads] started again and there just wasn’t interest,” April Sizemore-Barber, associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and former Crossroads faculty advisor, said. “I think just people didn’t know it was there.”
Now, GU Pride has been working to demonstrate student interest in the LLC, collecting information on demand for the space with an interest form that opened on Feb. 10.
“Generally, it seems that people want a more permanent and safe place on campus,” Jackie Early (CAS ’26), GU Pride’s director of outreach, said. “It’s odd to backslide and have this protected space for a community to be taken away.”
Early believes that Georgetown is a place for dialogue, which a queer LLC could help facilitate. She pointed to the February event about faith and sexuality hosted by Father James Martin in Dahlgren Chapel as an example. Entitled “Building Bridges,” the event discussed reconciliation between the Catholic Church and queer community.
“You’re constantly interacting with communities you would nowhere else see together,” Early said of Georgetown. “That is, I think, an example of what the queer LLC will bring—a space to collaborate with different groups.”
A reopened Crossroads also has support from the GUSA Executive team. GUSA President Ethan Henshaw (CAS ’26) and Vice President Darius Wagner (CAS ’27) included establishing an LGBTQ+ LLC as part of their campaign goal to support marginalized students.
“You would want to make a space where people feel more welcome, where people feel more comfortable, where people would actually want to live,” Wagner said.
The renewed efforts behind an LGBTQ+ LLC come after recent changes in Georgetown’s housing system. Georgetown introduced a gender-inclusive housing pilot program for the Class of 2028, which Georgetown students supported in a GUSA referendum.
“Georgetown deeply values the engagement of our students and appreciates they are making their voices heard on this important topic,” a university spokesperson wrote to the Voice in an email statement about gender-inclusive housing and GU Pride’s effort for an LGBTQ+ LLC.
Residential Living has historically worked on a case-by-case basis to find inclusive housing options for trans and genderqueer students, who had to reach out to request it. This year, freshmen could request gender-inclusive housing on their housing application. A new question on the CHARMS rooming questionnaire also gave students the chance to indicate that they would be welcoming to LGBTQ+ roommates and would be open to rooming with students seeking gender-inclusive housing.
Gomez, who lives in gender-inclusive housing, said that while creating a queer LLC would be a positive step, having a robust gender-inclusive housing system beyond the LLC is important for supporting queer students with different needs.
“I am very much in favor of a queer LLC, but not all students go to Georgetown looking to be an active member of the queer community,” Gomez said. “Some of them just want to have housing.”
Like Gomez, Early emphasized that gender-inclusive housing and the LLC are different initiatives, but both can help students find comfortable housing. Early added that she thinks it will take time before Georgetown has housing that feels safe and comfortable for all students.
“I think it’s a very slow and arduous journey to getting to somewhere where people can frankly room in a way in which is comfortable for every single person on campus,” Early said. “It’s just slow, because that is how university administration works.”
Even with the time it takes for changes to be made, Sizemore-Barber emphasized that having inclusive living spaces like these are critical. As the Trump administration targets diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in higher education, including identity-based campus housing, she believes a queer LLC would be a real space of “solace, community, and safety.”
“I do think that having this space on campus is also important in terms of the university’s commitment to its students—to diversity,” Sizemore-Barber said. “It could be something really, really exciting and powerful.”
