The APAGS Committee for Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity (CSOGD) is proud to introduce a forthcoming blog series exploring the unique needs of LGBTQ+ graduate students in psychology, including experiences at the intersection of multiple minority identities. The series, titled So Good, will showcase narratives authored by winners of the first-ever APAGS-CSOGD Writing Grant. The initial inspiration for this series was based in admiration of the consistent, timely, and informative blog posts shared through the CARED Perspectives series, sponsored by the APAGS Committee for the Advancement of Racial and Ethnic Diversity. The series was also intended to build upon prior blog contributions by CSOGD under the leadership of J. Stewart to support LGBTQ+ research and psychology.

Our vision for this series was to provide a space for LGBTQ+ students to share their diverse personal and professional experiences, with the explicit intent of amplifying voices that have historically been excluded from dominant narratives of the “typical” graduate student experience. Culturally inscribed understandings of leadership traits and styles are often grounded in white dominant norms (Ospina & Foldy, 2009; Parker, 2005) and APA leadership, including graduate student leadership, tends to be predominantly white. Such representation does not reflect the increasing diversity of psychology graduate students, who embody a range of racial and ethnic minority identities (Michalski et al., 2019; Bailey, 2020), as well as sexual and gender minority identities. As such, we were determined that this project go beyond an illusion of diversity, as is often true of institutionalized projects of “multiculturalism” (Ahmed, 2006, 2012; Stewart, 2017). Thus, this series reflects nuanced depictions of students’ lived experiences, integrating rich personal narrative with exploration of unique research areas salient to the student authors. Another goal of this series was to provide students with support in navigating the authorship process. As graduate students we are aware that it can be challenging to publish in a peer-reviewed journal as an early graduate student. We hoped this series would provide students with the opportunity to engage with a formal submission and review process, including built-in editorial support, and result in an additional item for their CV.

The Current Project

This series emerged from discussions with the CSOGD 2019-2020 members as students navigated a challenging year through the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing racialized violence targeting Black folx, and the 2020 presidential election – in addition to the typical stressors of graduate school. As we planned the series, we were aware that LGBTQ+ people, especially LGBTQ+ people of color, have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, across various safety and financial concerns (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020; Katz-Wise, 2020). Given the disproportionate impact on Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) LGBTQ+ graduate students, we prioritized these narratives in our call for submissions. We therefore also felt it important to provide financial support to the student authors for their time and for sharing their stories. Obtaining funding to pay people for writing is a complicated task, particularly in a large system like APA. We were lucky enough to work with APAGS staff who supported our vision for and values underlying this project, and through their dedication and ongoing collaboration we were able to secure a small grant to award the hard work and openness of our writers.