Unfinished Business

Each photo is intensely personal, each gaze piercingly direct, each sentence strikingly raw: “My blood is too gay to save a life.” “How much did your gender cost you?” “My identity is not a sin.” “No girl is too pretty to be a lesbian.” “Where are the queer Asian stories?”

“In the Making,” a new photography initiative from LGBTQ activists Curtis L. Lahaie ’15 and Kyle J. McFadden ’18, spotlights these thought-provoking lines and dozens more like them, challenging stereotypes about queer issues one handheld chalkboard at a time. What began as Lahaie’s class project for WGS 1211: “Queer Practice” has blossomed into a phenomenon that has garnered over 77,000 notes on Tumblr, includes more than 60 student portraits, and has collected upwards of $4,000 for LGBTQ charities via Indiegogo.

Over dinner in Dunster, Lahaie and McFadden explain that “In the Making” aims to advance the conversation about LGBTQ rights beyond the fight for marriage equality.

“There’s this misconception…that marriage equality means full equality for the LGBTQ community and that supporters of the movement might believe that once we have nationwide marriage equality, which I personally think is basically imminent, then we’re just done,” Lahaie says. “But in reality there are so many other issues that haven’t been fully addressed. So I wanted to come up with a way to make that message really clear, and I think one really powerful way is to do that through photos.”

The epicenter of the project is Lahaie’s Fairfax dorm room, where McFadden, a freelance photographer since high school, conducts the photo shoots. Participants write their own messages, all of which explore, in various combinations, topics such as sexuality, race, gender, and religion. The individuality of the statements is crucial to their power. “It was especially important that people chose lines that personally resonated with them so that...these aren’t just random lines chosen by us,” Lahaie says.

Our conversation turns to the broader ideas that have emerged from the photos. “Some things that did stand out to me as themes were making the movement more intersectional, specifically with regards to race,” Lahaie observes. “There are a lot of people who really feel that the movement needs to take into consideration their race, and I strongly agree with that.”

McFadden adds, “One of the overarching themes is normalizing not just being gay but the whole idea of sexuality in general.”

The photo shoots can be as emotional for those behind the camera as they are for those in front of it. “There was one model yesterday who on the chalkboard wrote three boxes and wrote ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘other’ and put an X over the ‘other’ box because this person doesn’t identify as either male or female,” Lahaie recalls. “And there was just this passion with which this person wrote it, especially when writing ‘other’ in all caps and writing that X….It was something very important to the person. Giving an avenue to these people to express what’s important to them has been really impactful.”
Not all of the photos affiliated with the project come from these photo shoots. Supporters of the campaign outside of Harvard have submitted their own “In the Making”-style snapshots, which Lahaie and McFadden feature on their website.

But Lahaie and McFadden are on a mission to raise more than just awareness. Using Indiegogo, an online crowdfunding platform, they offer a variety of incentives for donations. $10, for instance, will buy you a social media shout-out, and for $100, McFadden will autograph the portrait of your choosing, among other prizes. Now close to halfway to their $10,000 goal, Lahaie and McFadden plan to divide the donations between three charities that tackle LGBTQ issues other than marriage equality: Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, National LGBTQ Task Force, and Sylvia Rivera Law Project.

“It’s been incredibly exciting,” reflects McFadden. “Social activism was something that I focused on a lot back home prior to coming to Harvard, and having this kind of opportunity brought up so early the first semester, the first month I was here has…been fantastic.”

Harvard’s Open Gate Foundation has already awarded Lahaie and McFadden a grant that they put towards promoting the project, and they plan to apply for additional funding in the near future. Going forward, they also hope to use Mather House’s art gallery to display their portraits, and on Nov. 19, they will exhibit their photos at an event run by the Association of BGLTQ Faculty and Staff. Just like the LGBTQ movement it supports, the project is, in and of itself, still in the making.