The Spectrum Center, a resource office on campus at the University of Michigan, serves to support students who identify as members of the LGBTQIA+ community. While the center has evolved over the years, it has always remained dedicated to advocacy, education and creating a home for the Queer community on campus.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Rackham student Ana Popovic, the center’s historian, said the office was established in the 1970s following a rise in political activism, the creation of the Detroit Gay Liberation Front and the efforts of leading activist Jim Toy.
“The center was established in 1971, and it’s called a ‘Human Sexuality Office,’” Popovic said. “That year there was a lot happening: a lot of anti-war rallies, huge gay liberation movements after the Stonewall riots. It started happening on the East Coast, it comes to Michigan (and) comes to Detroit. The Gay Liberation Front was formed first in Detroit in 1970, and one of the co-founders of the Ann Arbor chapter was Jim Toy. He was the first guy who allegedly came out in Michigan at a pride rally in 1970. So he comes out, he is in Ann Arbor and he becomes the first co-coordinator of the Human Sexuality Office.”
Popovic said the center began with two coordinators to represent two sexualities, gay and lesbian.
“It’s established that in the 1970s there would be two co-coordinators, one gay and one lesbian,” Popovic said. “Jim Toy was the main gay guy who was working there. He was there between 1971 and 1994. He was the gay co-coordinator, and the lesbian co-coordinators kept changing.”
Popovic also said the coordinators faced challenges before becoming full-time employees of the University, but administrative changes later reduced the center to one sole coordinator.
“Between 1971 and 1977, these co-coordinators would be paid only quarter-time positions,” Popovic said. “Then between 1977 and 1987, they’re paid a half-time position. Only in 1987 do they become full-time appointed co-coordinators, but then a few years later, (in) 1993, there was some sort of administrative overhaul happening at the University. Starting in 1994, they dictate that from now on we will only have one director.”
Popovic said many of the services provided in the past involved counseling, education on different Queer identities and resources for students affected by the AIDS epidemic.
“They did a lot of consulting with people who were afraid to come out,” Popovic said. “So they did a lot of psychological consulting, and of course, they did educational outreach as well. They were trying to raise awareness and talk to different constituencies at the University to advise advisors and counselors (on) how to talk to LGBTQ students.”
Popovic explained that, around the mid-1990s, the office began to include more programs supporting trans people. At this time, the center changed its name from “The Lesbian, Gay Male, and Bisexual Programs Office” to “The Office of LGBT Affairs.”
“In the mid-90s, you can definitely see that there is a shift at the University of Michigan … that people start being aware of things like the existence of trans people, the existence of trans history, the importance of incorporating these stories in these histories,” Popovic said. “In 1996, the office sponsored a talk by Leslie Feinberg, who is this trans writer and activist. 200 people attended the event, and there’s a lot of talk about … transrepression, trans liberation, what that means for different groups, what that means for women’s liberation, what that means for (the) Black movement in 1987.”
In an interview with The Daily, Gabe Javier, executive director of the Office of Culture, Community and Equity in the College of Engineering, said during the late 2000s the Center focused on education and activism surrounding the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ban and advocated for people to be able to have their preferred name on their University records if it doesn’t match their government name.
“I served as the assistant director at the Spectrum Center from January 2006 to July 2011,” Javier said. “We did a lot of ally trainings and then workshops on pronouns. A lot of the similar ones that we have today. During that time, we continued to make sure that people knew the importance of coming out, and the one that was a significant process for people. We were doing activism around Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, which (was) the military ban on LGBT people. We were doing activism around name changes and allowing people to have their preferred name on their records.”
Javier said the choice to change the name to Spectrum Center around this time in order was to include everyone on the evolving Queer spectrum.
“We wanted to move away from meaning identities by using the letters and thought it was going to be more important that people see themselves in the office along the spectrum of identities, of gender, sexual orientation and gender identity,” Javier said “So we wanted to sort of cast as wide as possible.”
Nick Pfost, the center’s communication strategist, said the center has recently moved some of its education tools to a digital format so even more students can access them.
“We used to offer a really foundational 101-type course on LGBTQ identities that we have since transitioned to become an online web course, and partly that’s because there is increasing existing familiarity with a lot of campus audiences anyway,” Pfost said. “People are increasingly using online and micro-learning opportunities.”
Pfost said the center has used this additional time and capacity to create Towards Solidarity, an allyship workshop.
“That, for example, allowed us to launch Towards Solidarity, which is basically a full day program … for teams or staffs … to come and learn more advanced topics about, ‘Okay, I have this basic knowledge, how do I put that knowledge into action? How do I make meaning of that for myself and for my community?’” Pfost said.
The Spectrum Center is working on its own interactive digital timeline on the center’s history. Popovic said the history of the center is recorded mainly from the gay male perspective and much of the history of Queer women is lost.
“When we try to reconstruct this history, so much of it is gay male history because all these lesbian advocates … their stories have not been recorded,” Popovic said. “Their stories are not in the archives. I cannot even find out the exact names of all the lesbian co-coordinators that were there in the 70s and 80s because there were so many of them. The question of ‘What is the history of Spectrum Center?’ is a very hard question to answer because we get one perspective being overemphasized over other perspectives.”
Pfost said the Spectrum Center today is a place where all students can learn about the community and find a safe.
“We want students to succeed in their goals,” Pfost said. “We want them to feel that they belong because we know that is a critical component of success. We want students to be able to thrive, and sometimes thriving means meeting basic needs and sometimes it’s about enriching in other ways, your community, your connection.”
Daily Staff Reporter Audrey Shabelski can be reached at audres@umich.edu.
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