As Princeton’s paper of record, The Daily Princetonian plays an important role in the creation and maintenance of the queer archive on campus. Unfortunately, given a history of violence toward and attempted erasure of the LGBTQ+ community, the archive of queer existence on this campus and beyond is often remarkably thin and marred by a lack of empathy for its subjects.
This issue, entitled “Queer Remembrances, Queer Futures” argues that, before diving into the present challenges and future aspirations of the queer community, it is essential to provide space for reflections back on queer narratives of the past. In potent prose, Professor Jeff Nunokawa and Dean of the College Jill Dolan reflect on their experiences as members of the LGBTQ+ community in the 1970s, documenting the vastly different reality for the LGBTQ+ community just a couple of decades ago. Engaging with the past can inform how the queer community tackles critical issues in the present and how they imagine a future where fear of plurality is subsumed by celebration.
In this issue, we do just that — exploring queer students’ experiences securing housing accommodations, the power of representation offered by campus queer student-athletes Abby Meyers ’22 and Marge Donovan ’22, and a reflection on living between worlds by a queer Muslim student. Together, their stories form a snapshot of Princeton’s LGBTQ+ community today.
But we are looking forward as well, challenging the design and content conventions of our paper in a digital and print product that incorporates the work of queer artists and their reflections on identity. In self-essays and profiles of LGBTQ+ students on campus like Josh Babu ’22 and Griffin Maxwell Brooks ’23, we offer a multiplicity of queer experiences that affirm the present diversity of queer voices, ushering in a future that embraces queer experiences and identities on their own terms.
We conceive of this more than anything as an invitation to the queer community on campus. An invitation can only be truly genuine when it goes beyond empty words: The content curated for this issue represents a public record — and a public commitment — to elevating the voices and stories of queer folks in our pages.
Our sincere hope is that this marks not a one-off product, but a catalyst for continued, consistent, and abundant storytelling in the ‘Prince’ for and by members of the Princeton queer community.
Omar Farah is a Managing Editor at the ‘Prince’. They are also a queer visual artist and curator who have poured their heart and soul into this issue. They can be reached at ofarah@princeton.edu.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman is the Editor-in-Chief of the ‘Prince.’ She has endless gratitude and admiration for the staffers and editors who made this issue possible. She can be reached at eic@dailyprincetonian.com.
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Isaac Barsoum“In the future, the history books — if there are any — will either remember a failure of American institutions to defend our democracy, or they will paint a picture of our universities, press corps, and public servants as the last line of defense against a petty tyrant who tried — and failed — to wrest from us our most fundamental freedoms.”
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