Oral history from Curt McKay: the LGBTRC's beginnings

Oral history from Curt McKay: the LGBTRC's beginnings

LGBTQ centres

This oral history details how Curt McKay became involved with the LGBT Resource Center and how the center grew.

Curt McKay

Curt McKay

History Harvest 2021

2021-04-29

Kiley Boerema

.m4a

English

sound

Urbana, Illinois

Champaign, Illinois

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

.m4a

10:14

Curt McKay: My boss, then Dean Leigh Estabrook, thought I was getting bored. That was not true, but she thought I was, so when an opportunity came up to take over the quarter-time male position in the Office of LGBT Concerns, she thought that was a good idea. And so again, because I’d been involved by that point, I’d been involved in a number of campus kinds of LGBT things, she said sure, and then Dean of Students Bill Riley said sure, and off I went. So again another accident um, and what, six years later? Yeah I think six years later, when, then Chancellor- oh, not going to remember his name, it'll come to me-granted funding for a full-time position and funding for programming and funding for an assistant director and some more space, Bill Reilly asked me if I wanted that job and I said well yeah, of course. And so I did that, for the next three years, so that's how I got to where I was. The Office for LGBT Concerns was its first title. It started I think in 1993 as a halftime position that was held by a male, a gay male faculty member in Spanish and as we thought about who should do this job, the decision was that a faculty member would have more clout. Oh, I remember the Chancellor. The Chancellor who made it full-time was Richard Herman. And so, Jim, Jim- oh I’m not going to remember his last name yet- the Spanish faculty member held the position I think for three years. When he left to return to Spanish and then eventually left campus, it was taken over by a quarter-time male Jim Hall who's now an associate dean in the medical school on campus and Terry Rhodes, who was then a clinical counselor in the Counseling Center was a lesbian. And each of them was quarter-time because we by then thought, oh, maybe it would be more welcoming if there were both a male and a female involved. You know, make it more welcoming to students.

Now, all of this time, space was nonexistent. We shared an office that's a small part of the current side of the LGBT Resources Center. We shared it with the grad assistants of the ombudsperson, whose office was right across the hall. And that space was up on the third floor of the Illini Union back by the Tenants’ Union and Campus Legal Services. So, it was really hidden away, but there wasn't any place to do anything either. Eventually the ombudsperson left. The decision was made to not replace that person, so we got her office. So we had two little offices, one of which had a window, and so we had a little bit of space. And by that point, Jim and Terry had both left and I was, I was, I replaced Jim and- and, oh, gonna lose this one too. And the female was the director of Women's Programs- Pat Maury. And so she and I split things up. You know, in terms of being at things and helping students and stuff. But, again, we really didn't have any space to do anything. So when Richard Herman created the full-time job and Bill Reilly found more space, the space that we had, plus an additional space that was right behind it- that was a closet, I think, mostly. In about 2005, some money you know, Bill found money to remodel that space and we turned it into a big room with two little offices, one on each end, one for me one for the assistant director, and I figured since I made the big bucks he should get the window. And what I really wanted to have happen, was to create a space that students could gather in. Not a space necessarily to-to have meetings in, although certainly lots of groups did that. But a place that they could just be, and know that they were safe, and know that they were welcome, and, and feel good, and also a place where resources could be gathered. So we started a library of just popular materials, you know- got a TV, rented lots of movies for that for entertainment- because they had a really good LGBT collection- bought a few things of our own, and started doing programming. And out of that programming- before that, up to that full time status, we did things you know we supported whatever Pride was called, whatever other group might have wanted to exist. We'd help them however we could, but they'd end up having to have meetings elsewhere in the Illini Union. Pride and its predecessors usually had a space in the student complex down at the other end of the building, so they had an office space, but it was tiny. So they could get free space in the Illini Union for meetings. If we wanted to sponsor something ourselves, we would have to pay rent so mostly we would get the students to sponsor programs that we wanted to have happen,
or give them ideas about programs if they didn't come up with ideas themselves and then do it. About that time, also once we had some space for them to be, the other things I thought we needed: we needed comfortable furniture, not office furniture, so I went out and bought a couch. Eventually, we got a couch- it turned out to be a sofa bed from the, from the student group when they lost their space for a year. Bought a refrigerator because we needed to have a place to store pop and drinks, you know and food. And created this space- got a couple of computers that were hooked up to the campus internet and started advertising and started doing programs. Now we'd always done things like rallies for the Day of Silence, rallies for National Coming Out Day, that kind of thing, but once we started having lots of student groups, in addition to private groups that were smaller that met individual students’ needs- like now there's a STEM group. I don't think that existed when I was there. But there was a Colors of Pride group for students of color. There was a religious group that I think also started after I left. There was at one point I think a grad students’ group. There were just a you know, a whole bunch of groups. And I think one of the- one of the pieces of ephemera that I sent down was a bulletin that we put out every fall, and maybe every spring if it had lots of changes, that gave listings of all these different groups and when they generally met, who the contact person was, and that kind of stuff. So that made me realize that, instead of just having one group, Pride, with a big rainbow flag at Quad Day, we could get lots of groups. So we started encouraging the different student groups to apply for space for Quad Day, so we'd have rainbow flags spread throughout the Quad. And maybe it would be a little easier for a brand-new student who is still feeling a little, you know, especially a student who is feeling uncomfortable about coming out or letting anybody know that they were part of our family, it might make it easier for them to approach somebody somewhere. And you know we never did any data collecting, to see if that works, but more and more students did get involved more and more students did come out.

Kiley Boerema

Marcelo Vargas

Anna Rataj

Zach Batio

Curt McKay

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