For many people here, Explo wouldn’t be the same without them. Jason embodies the Explo spirit and brightens up students and staff throughout the six weeks that they have spent at Explo at Yale for the past three summers.
When you’re here six weeks, everything kind of blurs. But there are a couple of things that stood out to me this year. Most of them were connected with the leadership role that came with being an Ambassador. For example, I was put into a leadership-ish role at True Colors. The staff was like, “Hey, what do you think of that as a student? Do you want to help out?” I did not realize how many staff people would be interested in learning more about the LGBTQ+ community.
Without Explo, I’d probably be at a completely different place in my life right now, so this year I was trying to give back.
In years past, I associated with the staff members a little bit, but this year, I started to do that a lot more. It’s been really good to me, that risk that I took. I’ll go now and I wave to staff member and they go like, “Hey Jason, how’s that thing that you were doing?” I know all the staff members and they know me. It’s really nice. Some people don’t recognize how good the staff members are as people. You can learn a lot from them.
I’ve been going to the True Colors meetings for the past three years. The club’s really changed over the past years and I’ve changed with it. The goal of the club is to provide a safe space for students to discuss LGBTQ+ issues and to educate campus on those things. Usually that means we do a skit at Community Meeting and a One World booth. As one of the RDs calls it, it’s the “social justice night.” And even though we are not a class, we are very involved with social justice things.
Explo is a place where you can be whoever you are and people accept you for that. They encourage that. You can find people who share your interests, find people more like you. There’s always people here, you know?
I’m non-binary and wear dresses sometimes and what not, and people come up to me and ask questions about gender. And at the end of those conversations, I tell them that if they want to learn more, they should come to True Colors, because it is that place where you come to learn things. It’s actually where I learned all the gender stuff that I know. When I came here three years ago, I knew nothing. And now I am a gender queer asexual person living in the dorms that do not agree with my biological sex, which is really neat.
This summer especially, I’ve been looking to give back to the Explo community a lot, because in the past years I gained a lot from it. Without Explo, I’d probably be at a completely different place in my life right now, so this year I was trying to give back.
Mari Armei