2025 Lavender Graduates and Ceremony

The LGBTQ Center extends a heartfelt congratulations to the 2025 Lavender Graduates! Every year, the ceremony is a highlight for the Center and the community to celebrate your hard work and commitment. This year, our keynote speaker Joie Lou Shakur framed the evening with a reminder of inherent worth and possibility – may these words guide all our graduates along their new paths! 

The 2025 Lavender Graduation took place on the evening of Sunday, May 4^th in the Student Union Auditorium. Many thanks to oSTEM (Out in Science, Math, and Technology) for their presentation of the oSTEM awards.

Keynote Speaker Joie Lou Shakur

We are honored to welcome Joie Lou Shakur as this year’s keynote speaker. Joie Lou is a Black Trans immigrant from Jamaica and Carolina alum who is currently a Southern culture worker, medicine maker, and filmmaker based in rural North Carolina. Joie Lou is the executive director of Comfrey Films, a film fellowship program and production house focused on cultural organizing and narrative power through a Black feminist lens, led by and for Black Trans and gender non-conforming people. They speak English and Patois. They also run Fruitful Forest Farm, a Black food forest in rural NC.

2024-2025 Lavender Graduates

This is an incomplete list of participants in the 2025 Lavender Graduation ceremony. Nearly every year, some participants are unable to be publicly “out” about their membership in or allyship with LGBTIQA+ communities because of varying levels of stigma in their families, social circles, workplaces, religious communities, and/or geographical location. Part of our work is to mitigate and end this barrier so that people of every sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression can participate fully in their communities and societies without discrimination.