SEAHO Report - Summer 2023 - 16

Safety Required:
Supporting LGBTQ+ Students
By Ryan Campen, Louisiana State University
The 2022-2023 Academic Year has been an eventful time for student affairs professionals who want
to help foster a Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive campus for their students. There has been a huge
increase in state and local governments attempting to and, unfortunately, sometimes succeeding in
reducing the rights for LGBTQ+ people. Specifically, looking at states within our SEAHO region and
bills that aim to take away LGBTQ+ rights, a grimmer picture starts to form. There have been 130
bills that have at least been introduced in our SEAHO state legislatures with twenty-one of those
bills being passed into law (Mapping attacks on LGBTQ rights in U.S. state legislatures, 2023). The
Human Rights Campaign has also issued a national State of Emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the
United States (Robinson, 2023). All of this is very frightening and forms an unsafe environment for
current and future college students. It also calls on us, as student affairs professionals, to ensure that
we are providing a safe space for our students. In order to ensure that we are providing a welcoming
home for our students, we must understand how LGBTQ+ students determine what is and what is
not a safe space. For the purposes of this article, a safe space is defined as, 'one where our students
feel safe from harm and have the freedom and comfortability to express how they feel and live
according to their identities'.
In 2020, I set out to better understand how LGBTQ+ students find safe spaces on college campuses
when there is not an already labeled safe space. I found it important to recognize that even though
LGBTQ+ students were not given a specific place on campus, there were still LGBTQ+ students who
felt safe on campus and expressed their identities proudly. While the sample size for this research
project was small due to limited time and the COVID-19 pandemic, I still think we were able to
uncover some valuable information that helps Residence Life staff better help and support our
LGBTQ+ students. The research was a qualitative study where I interviewed the students about their
experiences being LGBTQ+ at a rural university without a specific safe space. At the onset of the
research, I was looking to find similar traits of physical locations that students defined a safe space
but through my conversations with students I discovered that physical locations are a marginal part
in the decision-making process of determining a safe space. The conversations revealed that people
are the safe space (Campen et al., 2022).
The students I met with explained to me that people make a space safe or not. When LGBTQ+
students were able to surround themselves with people who supported them and praised them
for their identities they felt more comfortable and safer with them. These groups of people helped
the LGBTQ+ students explore their identities and to live out their true selves. These groups also
minimized harm for the students. This is also an interesting part as harm can be different for every
single student depending on their lived experiences. These groups typically are comprised of other
LGBTQ+ individuals or students that have shown themselves to be a safe space. As Residence Life
Staff, we should also strive to make ourselves an available safe space for students.
I believe that there is more than one way we can make ourselves available to be a safe space for
our LGBTQ+ students. I think at the most basic and fundamental level, we must educate ourselves
on the umbrellas and spectrums that contain LGBTQ+ identities. Through educating ourselves
on identities we can begin to feel more comfortable having conversations with LGBTQ+ students
surrounding their identities and their life experiences with that identity. On a more departmental
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SEAHO Report - Summer 2023

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