Several students were welcomed into the university’s first gender-inclusive residence hall last weekend, at the Campus Pride Living Learning Community in Mae Smith Hall.

The LLC is a program through the LGBTQ Resource Center and University Housing that is “designed to provide a welcoming and inclusive space for students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and or queer,” its website states. The floor allows students to live on campus without disclosing their gender.

Quentin Harris, a freshman from Lebanon, Ind. studying art education, said SIU providing a gender-inclusive housing option was the main reason he chose the university.

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“It was either this or Alaska,” Harris said. He was planning on attending the University of Alaska Fairbanks had it not been for the LLC.

Les Billing, a senior from Batavia studying fashion design, who lives in the LLC, said he had roommate trouble while living in traditional dorms last year.

“At the beginning of last year, I started going by a different name,” Billing said. “It was really hard to deal with my roommates because they were not respectful of me being me.”

Billing identifies more as male than female, which made living with female roommates particularly difficult.

“I just felt so uncomfortable that I didn’t even live in my room for a while,” Billing said. “I was couch surfing.”

Billing said the gender-inclusive dorms were appealing because of bullying experiences in the traditional dorms.

“[Bullying] was the biggest reason that I wanted to be on the floor,” Billing said, “I wanted to be able to be myself around people without having to worry about judgment.”

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Billing appreciates names not being specified on the dorm room doors in the LLC because typically the gender of given birth names do not match the gender of students’ chosen names.

“I knew if they used birth names [on the doors], some of us would get really offended,” Billing said. “I know if they had our chosen names my mom would have freaked out.”

The absence of names helps students avoid disclosing their gender identity to their fellow residents.

Brett Shoemaker, a senior from Watseka studying mechanical engineering, who also lives in the LLC, said he is unsure about his gender identity, but appreciates the opportunity the new dorm arrangement gives him to explore who he is.

“It’s nice to be in an environment where [gender] doesn’t really matter,” Shoemaker said. “Where you can kind of be yourself or try to figure out who you are. You’re not expected to be one thing and that’s kind of how it was always growing up.”

He said he lived in an engineering LLC last semester, but mostly kept to himself.

“The worst part was that I felt I had to hide my feminine clothes,” Shoemaker said.

Athur Scoleri, a junior studying music performance from Calumet City, who lived on campus before the LLC was founded, said although the new housing option is a good idea, there is more housing can do to make people like himself feel welcomed.

He said while applying for housing, he had to specify he was transgender in the disability box in the application, which negatively affected his on-campus residential experience.

“I went going into it like I had some sort of like hindrance or like disability even, because I had to put it in a disability box,” Scoleri said. “There was literally no other space for my existence to be [proposed].”

SIU is not the first state public university in Illinois to introduce this type of housing.

Mark Hudson, the director of University Housing and Dining Services at Eastern Illinois University, said there are eight gender-inclusive floors in two buildings on EIU’s campus.

“Our philosophy is that we work with the LGBTQ community to see what’s best for them,” Hudson said. “We try to be as flexible as possible.”

Illinois State University is currently working on a gender-inclusive housing proposal, Hurdylyn Woods, the assistant director of residence halls, said.

To apply for the gender inclusive housing at SIU, each student had to submit a maximum 500-word essay describing their interest in the LLC, as well as an application form that can be found on the LLC website.

For more information about the LLC, and applying for next semester, visit the LGBTQ Resource Center in room 318 of the Student Center or contact Justin Schuch at 618- 453-7535.

Marissa Novel can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @marissanovelDE or at 536-3311 ext. 268.