Mid-Atlantic LGBTQA Conference Schedule - 2025

Please join us for an informal welcome reception hosted by Commonwealth University Interim President, Dr. Jeff Osgood, at Buckalew Place. Light refreshments will be served.

Parking is available in the Swisher Circle Lot.

Driving Directions (Google)

Parking is available in the Tri-Level Garage.

Driving Directions (Google)

McCormick Center, East Wing Lobby

Parking is available in the Bakeless/McCormick Lot.

Driving Directions (Google)

McCormick Center, East Wing Lobby

Menu includes pastries, fruit, juice, and coffee.

McCormick Center, Room 1303

Join our conference committee for an overview of the day's events and available resources with special welcome remarks from Commonwealth University Interim President, Dr. Jeff Osgood.

Session 1A - Rest, Rage, and Resistance: Tools for Queer Student Organizers - Room 1303
Queer student leaders face the challenge of driving change while managing the personal toll of activism. This interactive workshop equips participants with tools to balance “rage” and “rest”. Students will identify which campus communities need the most protection, practice inclusive discourse and conflict repair, and create a personalized “Resilience Menu” of strategies to prevent burnout. Attendees leave with practical, actionable tools to organize effectively while caring for themselves.
Cameron Wein, Assistant Athletic Director, Kutztown University

Session 1B - Let’s Get Juicy: Queer Trivia Experience - Room 1316
This interactive session is anything but a typical lecture! Participants will dive into a high-energy Queer Trivia game, testing their knowledge while learning about the resilience and history of the LGBTQIA+ community. Through laughter, teamwork, and friendly competition, attendees will explore how LGBTQIA+ individuals have resisted and remained resilient in the face of harmful laws, policies, and societal pressures. proving that joy, strength, and “juiciness” can coexist.
Jacob Kelley, Sex Educator, Mx. Kelley Queer Education LLC

Session 1C - Identity, Loss of Self, and Gender Diversity - Room 2303
An exploration of gender identities and common struggles across the gender spectrum. A look at the presenter's personal experience with self and identity as a nobinary, transmasculine person. Discussions on gender liberation, grappling with masculinity through a feminist lens, societal perception of gender, and gender euphoria.
Ray Palmer, Graduate Student, Commonwealth University - Bloomsburg

Session 2A - Sidelines to the Spotlight: Queer & Trans Narratives in Sports - Room 1303
This interactive workshop explores how storytelling can amplify trans and queer voices, foster pride, and create inclusive athletic communities. Participants will craft personal narratives, analyze representation of queer athletes in media, and develop strategies to make space for marginalized voices in teams, classrooms, and campus initiatives.
Cameron Wein, Assistant Athletic Director, Kutztown University

Session 2B - How to Start Doing Drag as an Act of Resistance - Room 1316
This session aims to focus on helping people improve their drag skills from somebody who has only performed within a school setting. It aims to discuss performing in under 21 settings, how to do your first drag show, and how to create a “dragsona”. The objectives of this seminar hope to instruct people on how to create their own “dragsona”, teach the history of how drag has been used as an act of resistance to gender roles, and teaching those under 21 how to get involved in their local community.
Oswald “Ozzie” Priebe/Topaz “Tray Ni” Nines, Student of History and Political Science, Wilkes University

Session 2C - Let them see you - Room 2303
Let them see you is a presentation taking on the idea of presenting yourself authentically to improve your networking and interpersonal connections. The connections you make are stronger the more authentic you are. In this discussion we will discuss how to begin to safely and effectively navigate networking in professional, casual, and personal environment as some one in the LGBTQIA+ community.
Miles Cressley, Peer Educator of the Center of Trans and Queer Advocacy, West Chester University

Scranton Commons Dining Hall

A meal ticket was included with your name badge and is required for admission to the buffet.

Menu listing is available at the link above but is subject to change.

Parking is available in the Tri-Level Garage.

Driving Directions (Google)

The United States, 2025: probably not the best time and place to be trans. Part survival notes, part guide to downregulating panic, this talk explores the emotional texture of the present moment in relation to the broader project(s) of trans history. It asks after the impacts, both rhetorical and emotional, of reframing trans existence as a very old phenomenon, rather than – as many antagonistic critics have it – a novel contemporary form of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” sweeping both nation and globe. Framing trans history as a consolation in the wake of the decline of faith in narratives of progress, it argues that while situations of crisis are ordinary for trans subjects, so are ingenious and virtuosic tactics of everyday collective care and solidarity that make trans lives more possible.

Hil Malatino is Joyce L. and Douglas S. Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Penn State University. He is the author of Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (Minnesota 2022), Trans Care (Minnesota 2020), and Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (Nebraska 2019), and Climbing (forthcoming, Duke 2026). He is also the co-editor the t4t issue of TSQ alongside Cam Awkward-Rich and the "Care Ethics Otherwise" issue of Essays in Philosophy alongside Sarah Clark-Miller and Amy McKiernan. His essays have appeared in Hypatia, TSQ, Signs, and many other journals and edited volumes. He is a Lambda Literary Award finalist and recipient of the Leslie Feinberg Award in Trans Literature. 

Session 3A - Keynote Talkback - Room 1303
Join our keynote presenter for an extended Q&A talkback session following the keynote presentation.

Session 3B - Constructions of LGBTQ+ Identity in Pennsylvania Schools - Room 1316
Join us for a moderated panel discussing constructions of LGBTQ+ identity in Pennsylvania schools. Our first session examines how a Pennsylvania advocacy group has portrayed transgender identity in K-12 schools as endangering students. Our second session will explore how LGBTQ+ students have organized at Millersville University via identity-affirming clubs. Both presentations will explore how LGBTQ+ identity has been constructed across time and how students have created community.
Claud Kirchner, Student, Millersville University
Bryanna Nase, Student, Millersville University
Frank Vitale, Assistant Professor, Millersville University

Session 4A - Queer Youth - Room 1303
This session focuses on queer youth’s systematic marginalization within school systems. Through analyzation of the different levels of government oppression, this presentation will discuss the continuous harm being committed to queer students’ mental and physical health, as well as proposed solutions to help alleviate the daily struggles queer students endure every day.
Klaus Gittelman, Peer Educator, West Chester University of Pennsylvania's Center for Trans and Queer Advocacy

Session 4B - Hope is: An examination of LGBTQIA Resilience and its Current Application - Room 1316
The LGBTQIA community has had a history mired with oppression and fear. In such moments, however, our community demonstrates the compassion and strength necessary to withstand such scorn and vitriol. Through a closer look, we realize that dandelions bloom even through pavement. In this session, we will examine such examples of resilience to achieve a better understanding of what it truly means to remain hopeful in the face of persecution and fear.
Natalia Vazquez, Student, Commonwealth University - Mansfield

McCormick Center, Room 1303

Stop by the information tables provided by these organizations:

• Action Together NEPA is a 501(c)(4) organization dedicated to community action and political advocacy. We support bold progressive policies that will preserve our democracy and promote social and economic justice.
• Caring Communities is a non-profit, tax exempt charitable organization that provides confidential HIV/STI assessment and case management services.
• Columbia County Democratic Committee works to elect and support Democratic candidates in Columbia County, Pennsylvania.
• PFLAG Danville / Central Susquehanna Valley is a chapter of PFLAG National, the first and largest LGBTQ and family organization, offering support, education, and advocacy.

Feeling overstimulated? Stop by the quiet room.

• McCormick Center, Room 1214

Just need to get away but don't necessarily need silence? The chill room is for you!

• McCormick Center, Room 2314

During the conference events, restrooms in the East Wing of McCormick Center will be designated as gender neutral.

Please note: All other restrooms in the building will remain gender designated.