Black Queer Mentorship: Staff and Faculty Experiences in Mentorship Programs

Abstract

Black Queer Mentorship: Staff and Faculty Experiences in Mentorship Programs Quortne R. Hutchings (bio) It was interesting. I think I was just curious about how they were experiencing life. I’m always super intrigued by young people who just go through life naturally, you know, as a queer person. That felt so foreign to me, you know, in my teenage years and even in my early 20s, I was like, “Who are you? What do your conversations look like?” You know, because I think, for me, anytime I found someone who was secretly, like, gay or whatever, it was like we were talking about facts . . . talking about, you know, all the taboo things that we couldn’t really talk about openly because we had to present as hetero. So, I find myself super curious about their lives . . . other than talking about class. And the drama that exists in the community, and maybe from conversations to topics sprinkled in there. —Brendan This reflection represents the nuanced and beautiful meaning of queer mentorship among two Black queer men in higher education. I introduce Brendan’s narrative to highlight the importance of Black queer staff mentoring relationships with Black queer men of color. Brendan reflected on how he valued building strong connections with his queer mentees while also discerning how his college experiences as a queer person shaped his engagement with those students. This negotiation and meaning-making process is a reality for queer staff and faculty of color who are in mentoring roles in higher education. Queer staff and faculty of color experience higher demands and expectations to mentor students while maintaining various institutional responsibilities (Aguilar & Johnson, 2017). The plight of mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds is especially burdensome for queer faculty and staff of color who are inundated with requests to mentor and serve gay, bisexual, and queer students and students of color, experience microaggressions and limited acknowledgment of their intersectional identities by colleagues, and lack institutional support (Aguilar & Johnson, 2017). Institutional environments are often challenging to circumnavigate for minoritized queer faculty and staff, specifically for Black, gay, bisexual, and queer faculty and staff, who must negotiate their intersecting identities within institutional environments that are inherently heteronormative and hetero-gendered (Preston & Hoffman, 2015). As they wrestle with job responsibilities and the labor of “doing the diversity work” while existing in their Blackness and queerness, they continue to serve as mentors for students on college campuses (Aguilar & Johnson, 2017, p. 64). [End Page 589] MENTORSHIP RELATIONSHIPS IN BLACK MALE INITIATIVES AND MEN OF COLOR MENTORSHIP PROGRAMS Various institutional contexts in which faculty and staff support student mentoring relationships in college have been researched (Brooms, 2018; Smith et al., 2019). Mentoring settings that support academic and social success for college men include Black male initiatives (BMI) and men of color (MoC) mentorship programs. Although these programmatic interventions help men navigate college, they often lack an intersectional approach (e.g., race, gender, sexuality) to address the complexities of men who identify as gay, bisexual, and queer (Smith et al., 2019). Some work has examined mentoring relationships with faculty and staff in BMI programs (Brooms, 2019), but there is a need to explore the experiences of faculty and staff who identify as Black, gay, bisexual, and queer men (BGBQM) in this mentoring context. Consequently, these mentorship program settings fail to address and attend to the intersectional needs of supporting individuals who identify as Black, gay, bisexual, and queer (Hutchings, 2023). As mentorship is vital to the success of the mentee and mentor, I’m focusing on the unique ways mentorship and identity interplay in these relationships. As mentoring relationships can be inherently heteronormative, it is essential to highlight how power dynamics, race, and queerness directly influence how relationships involving BGBQM staff evolve over time. BGBQM staff mentors use their power to connect their queer students with academic, social, and career opportunities while offering them support to navigate the college environment as Black queer students. There is a shared balance of power between Black queer mentors and mentees that centers and cultivates notions of relationality and belongingness and creates new ways of understanding how queer mentoring relationships are distinct. METHODOLOGY AND METHODS In this phenomenological research...