'Queer Resource Center' that hosted 'Gay Skeleton Wedding' organizes special graduation for LGBTQ students

A private college in Asheville, North Carolina, hosted a Lavender Graduation for LGBTQ-identifying students on May 8. 

Warren Wilson College’s Queer Resource Center (QRC) was in charge of organizing the event. “The Queer Resource Center will be hosting our 2nd Annual Lavender Graduation Celebration for queer seniors during Senior Week in May 2024,” it advertised. 

[RELATED: Salem State Lavender Graduation will symbolize ‘visibility and progress’ for LGBT grads]

The Queer Resource Center has hosted a number of LGBTQ-themed events this April.

On April 24, the Center organized a discussion panel run by Angela Harvey, the director of “Black Rainbow Love,” a documentary that allegedly “unmutes and amplifies the voices of the Black LGBTQ+ community.”

Other events that the Center hosted include a “Gay Skeleton Wedding x Drag Brunch” on April 7, which was advertised as a “wedding for our two wonderful skeletons Barb and Marl Karx” featuring “performances by local drag artists,” as well as a “Queer People of the Global Majority Meet-up” on April 9, and “Disability, Queerness, and Radical Inclusion” on April 18.

This year marked the second time that Warren Wilson College has hosted a Lavender Graduation.

In 2023, the year that Warren Wilson College inaugurated its first Lavender Graduation, Jonathan Gonzales, Director of Student Activities & Queer Life at the school, said: “With over 50 percent of Warren Wilson students identifying as queer it only made sense to me to offer a Lavender Graduation, a tradition that has been held at institutions across the country since 1995. There are at least 12 other NC colleges that hold Lavender Graduations, and I wanted Warren Wilson to be among those.” 

[RELATED: NY Catholic university plans second segregated ‘Lavender Graduation’]

In a November interview with The Echo Newspaper, Gonzales said: “The burden can often fall on queer and trans students to feel like they need to educate their professors and supervisors . . . I don’t want that to be the case for Warren Wilson students. I want to take on as much of that as possible as the supervisor of the QRC so that students have time for queer joy and don’t have to worry about the burden of correcting their professor about their pronouns or telling somebody to use the correct name for the nth time.”

Other schools that have hosted Lavender Graduations include Colgate University, Syracuse University, and North Carolina State University.

Campus Reform has contacted Warren Wilson College for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.