TJ Klune speaks with students (Photo by Mark DiOrio)
New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune spoke to an enthusiastic crowd in Love Auditorium on Sept. 11, kicking off Queer X-travaganza, an evening celebrating queer and trans visibility, creativity, and the arts. Klune’s talk was followed by an exhibition opening at Picker Art Gallery and an artistic performance in Bernstein Hall. The events were in coordination with Colgate’s Arts, Creativity, and Innovation Initiative, presented by Living Writers, University Museums, and the Ryan Family Film Series.
Klune’s hit novel, The House in the Cerulean Sea, “is set in a fantastical world where magical youth are shipped off to orphanages and treated as dangerous. This book and its sequel, Beyond the Sea, illuminate the very real difficulties of children and their advocates in 2025,” Professor CJ Hauser, director of this year’s Living Writers Series, said in their introduction. As part of the series, Klune spoke to Hauser’s class earlier that day and participated in the Living Writers podcast.
“If I use my platform to just tell stories, then I’m doing it wrong,” Klune said on the podcast. “I need to speak up not only for myself, but also for my community.” He is a winner of the Lambda Literary Award, which celebrates LGBTQ+ writers.
The House in the Cerulean Sea was published at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 — bad timing that Klune joked about in his talk. However, eight months later, the novel landed on the New York Times bestseller list for eight weeks straight.
In Love Auditorium, Klune described his life growing up in rural Oregon and his personal struggles, including a mom and stepfather who didn’t accept him for who he was. The local librarian and his English teachers, Klune said, helped him realize his talents. Bolstered by their support, Klune said, he saw for the “first time in [his] life that … the written word has power. It can make people happy.”
During the Q&A, one audience member said, “House in the Cerulean Sea saved my life in a lot of ways. It was my first queer exposure to contemporary literature.”
Afterward, a shuttle transported guests to Picker Art Gallery’s opening reception of X: Gender, Identity, Presence in the Dana Arts Center. On exhibition were works of art by Cassils, Antonius-Tín Bui, and significant queer artists hand-selected from the Picker collection. Cassils (he/they) is a transgender multidisciplinary artist who describes his performances as “social sculptures that reflect on the histories of LGBTQ+ violence, representation, struggle, and survival.” On display in the gallery was the first of three “social sculpture” films to be displayed over the course of the semester, each of which documents or adapts a live performance. The films invite trans and queer individuals to question “how to be together in solidarity and create communities of care and empowerment.”
Featured artist Antonius-Tín Bui (they/them) works in various media, including performance, community-based works, and hand-cut paper portraits. These artworks “allow Bui to explore their multifaceted identity as a queer, nonbinary Vietnamese-American artist, while helping to liberate the voices of marginalized communities.” Their portraits also have meditative properties that create a space for reflection and resistance. In the act of creating each portrait, Bui looks back on their relationship with the subject and how they have influenced the artist’s life by crafting Bui into who they are today.
Selections from the Picker collection aimed to show how queer art has expanded throughout the past century. Artists included Claude Cahun, who described themselves as gender fluid, explored gender identity, and resisted fascism; and Yasumasa Morimura, who “challenged the male gaze and traditional beauty standards” in his self-portrait photographs. “Pairing this selection of works from the collection with those of Cassils and Antonius-Tín Bui underscores not only the historical contributions of queer artists to the visual arts, but also the range of creative responses to questions of identity, social constructs about gender, and resistance to repressive dominant ideologies,” explains Nick West, co-director of University Museums and curator of Picker Art Gallery.
The final event of the night was Death Spiral, a live performance by Nicki Duval and Robbie Trocchia, featuring figure skater Milk, in Bernstein Hall’s Experimental Exhibition and Performance Space. Death Spiral included live figure skating movements, media projections, spoken word, and choreography.
The “death spiral” in figure skating — which requires the male partner to hold his female counterpart inches above the ice, while spinning — served as a metaphor for trust and risk in the queer community. “Throughout the performance, the artist placed emphasis on their mistakes in making the piece, revealing how an embrace of both failure and queerness opens up new possibilities within the creative process and for navigating the world,” West explains.
Museum Operations Manager Darwin Rodriguez reflects on the night’s events: “Exhibition openings are special, because we as a cultural institution purposely fling the doors open and welcome our community into our spaces; they are evenings when museums are at their most accessible. It was humbling to find our program of events so well-received and supported across campus, especially in the current political and social climate. It’s a testament to Colgate and its pursuit of rigor and fearless search for truth that made this night possible.”