Students express themselves through Pride Week mural

We're doing a Pride Week mural. Just kind of creating some queer art with doodles that represent the LGBTQ+ community. I'm personally painting a lot of symbols that represent the transgender community. So I've done a bottle of testosterone. I've done a rose that's in the trans colors. I think it's really important to have that sort of representation, whether it be through art, media, or anything Pride Week on Virginia Tech's campus follows the tradition of the Pride month of June, happening at an earlier date so that our students can celebrate it during their academic year. So what usually takes place in June, we're taking place in April and spending a week just taking care of ourselves. So this week we've had free t-shirts, we've had free haircuts. We've been able to spend time watching films together. We have free and confidential STI testing happening upstairs, but really an opportunity to partake in self-care, to be in community with one another, and also celebrate queer joy. Being able to go to events where you bring in queer people. And you get to have these like really heartfelt conversations that you may not get to have with your peers here. I feel like that's really important. And just kind of having that visibility. As we get older, we forget that. That's part of the fun and enjoy being in community with one another is to be able to pick up a paintbrush and do whatever we want and kinda see where it ends up. So we think the students really enjoy it. I think it's a fun thing for them to participate in. And it's a wanted break from all of the hard sciences and interesting math that they're often doing.