What is Lavender Graduation
In 1995, Ronni Sanlo, at the time the Director of the University of Michigan’s Office of LGBT Affairs, designed the first Lavender Graduation, an event specifically for LGBT and ally students. Lavender Graduation has since become an annual ceremony conducted on numerous campuses to honor lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students and to acknowledge their achievements and contributions to the University. Graduating students, including undergraduates, graduates, and professional students, are invited to take part in Lavender Graduation, which occurs each year in conjunction with university-wide commencement events.
Details of this year’s ceremony
This year, Lavender Graduation will be held on Wednesday, April 25 at 4:30pm in the Pendleton Room of the Michigan Union.
Why hold Lavender Graduation
For decades, students at colleges and universities around the country have been celebrating both their academic achievements and their cultural heritages at specialized commencement events. Many of these events are student-initiated and usually occur during the university-wide commencement weekend. These events provide a sense of community for minority students who often experience tremendous culture shock at their impersonalized institutions. For many students they are the payoff for staying in school, and friends and families find the smaller, more ethnic ceremonies both meaningful and personal.
Lavender Graduation is a cultural celebration that recognizes LGBT students of all races and ethnicities and acknowledges their achievements and contributions to the university as students who survived the college experience. Through such recognition, LGBT students may leave the university with a positive last experience of the institution thereby encouraging them to become involved mentors for current students as well as financially contributing alumni.
There is scant literature that describes celebratory experiences within LGBT culture. Indeed, there is little that describes LGBT culture at all. Most LGBT students experience the culture of their racial, ethnic, national, or religious backgrounds, but rarely experience a university-supported event directly associated with celebrating their lives as LGBT people and LGBT students. Lavender Graduation is an event to which LGBT students look forward, where they not only share their hopes and dreams with one another, but where they are officially recognized by the institution for their leadership and their successes and achievements.
The significance of “Lavender”
Lavender is important to LGBT history. It is a combination of the pink triangle that gay men were forced to wear in concentration camps and the black triangle designating lesbians as political prisoners in Nazi Germany. The LGBT civil rights movement took these symbols of hatred and combined them to make symbols and color of pride and community.
