Signs, Songs, and Dr. Seuss: The Activism of LGBTQ College Students Challenging the Hostile Messages of Campus Preachers

ABSTRACT LGBTQ youth participation in activism on university campuses helps students to build resiliency and thrive as college students. Campus preachers are a catalyst of such activism among LGBTQ students and their allies. Sociological research has largely overlooked LGBTQ activism aimed at localized conditions such as campuses. Additionally, the phenomenon of campus preachers is largely absent from the social science literature. The current study targets this gap by examining the tactics college students use to contest the anti-LGBTQ messages of campus preachers at their universities. The dataset consists of articles drawn from online student newspapers at four-year, public universities in the United States, published between 2010 and 2020. Centered in the framework of contestation, intentionality, and collective identity, our analysis reveals the LGBTQ students asserted their agency and visibility by challenging the anti-LGBTQ messages of campus preachers through intentionally selected tactics, and in doing so, they often built solidarity with non-LGBTQ students. We conclude that by engaging in such activism aimed at the localized campus culture, LGBTQ students used the visitations of the campus preachers as opportunities to engage the intrapersonal and interpersonal components of thriving, employing agency, creativity, resilience, and social connectedness to counter the messages designed to denigrate and oppress them.