Cheering, pop music and love echoed across the quadrangle on the evening of Thursday, April 10 as hundreds of students gathered to celebrate queer and trans joy at the 35th annual Celebration on The Quad (COTQ).
“I think that it’s so Smith,” said Riko Mukoyama ’26, a dancer in Celebrations Dance Company. The company always closes out COTQ. “I’ve always really appreciated the opportunity to perform […] and watch and support my peers.”
The event, which began in 1991 as a candlelight vigil in response to a homophobic and transphobic hate crime on the quad, is a beloved Smith tradition. It has since transformed to include energetic and joyous performances like that of Celebrations Dance Company, becoming an evening recognizing both the weight of queer experience and the importance of queer joy. This year featured the beloved traditional performances by the quad houses, the Smiffenpoofs, Blackapella, Spitfire and Celebrations Dance Company, as well as more unique features like the Ice Hockey team (who danced with their hockey sticks). The event also supported Safe Passage, a local domestic violence shelter, as well as the Zakat Foundation of America’s 1 Million Meals for Gaza.
While in some years the revelry of the event has outweighed the reflection, this year’s remarks were more bittersweet. In light of sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ legislation across the country, Smith’s recent compliance with new NCAA regulations barring transgender athletes from competition and an incident involving hate speech that occurred on campus early last month, the planning committee emphasized the event’s activist origins more heavily, and considered student safety more than usual.
The opening remarks spoke to the increasing precarity of LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. During their statements, members of the committee who asked to remain anonymous said “The Trump administration has made us afraid, but tonight is not a night to be afraid, it’s a night to be celebrated. And everyone here deserves to be celebrated […] you will always have a place in our community and at Smith.”
Aria Ramanathan ’25, the chair of COTQ and one of the co-presidents of Emerson house, said, “I wanted to make sure that whatever we were doing, we were doing it in a way that we’re continuing to take care of eachother and continuing to uplift one another, because we’re going into a lot of uncertainty.” Celebration is her favorite Smith tradition, as it is for many students. While she understands and appreciates that it’s largely adored for its ‘fun factor,’ she felt it was very important to honor the event’s origins, especially now.
“When people are thinking about Celebration, they’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, the big shake ass event on the quad’ But […] this event is fundamentally rooted in activism […] It is our job as a student body to continue to stand up for trans people [on and off] campus, no matter what Smith is doing, and to remember our commitment to each other as a community. That is what Celebration is about,” Ramanathan said.
Via Sussman ’26, the head of tech for COTQ, agreed that this year’s event was more weighty. “We’re in a really weird place both on and off campus. This year it felt a lot more bittersweet, in the way that I think it kind of is supposed to…especially in light of Smith’s compliance with the NCAA rules,” Sussman said. They felt that it was important the committee took the time to acknowledge that, “especially when the college hasn’t.”
Safety was the number one concern when it came to planning the event, especially following the incident last month in which a local man placed pamphlets full of hate speech in Neilson Library and onto houses with Black Lives Matter banners displayed.
“Other than random weird incidents that would happen, I don’t remember ever being as fearful as I was that week,” Ramanathan said. That incident contributed to the decision not to advertise the event publicly this year; the committee emailed to students instead of displaying flyers. They also worked with Campus Police to come to a compromise that was respectful to students but also maintained enough safety considerations. The committee members expressed frustration that these precautions were necessary, feeling that it served to reiterate the need for continued resistance.
Sussman said that this year there was a lot more mention of the community beyond Smith, including the students at UMass who have been impacted by the Trump administration’s crackdown on student protesting related to the ongoing crisis in Palestine.
Sussman and other committee members shared the feeling that Celebration provides many students an accepting environment. “As somebody who grew up in the South, whose loved ones and myself and a lot of my family are being really impacted by a lot of what’s going on, it is so powerful to get to see a collective mourning and also a collective joy […] I was holding a lot of my friends from home really close to me during that, and thinking about how excited I am to be in a space with so many other queer people who get to be joyful, and how sad that not everyone gets to experience that.” Muyokama echoed their statement, appreciating Celebration as a safe space to perform in community. “I thought about it a lot as I was up there on those steps, like ‘wow, when else am I ever going to feel like this and do this?’”
Celebration is the second most attended event of the year, after Convocation. As an entirely student-run event, Celebration provides a space for students to express their opinions separate from the Smith Administration. Amidst the tension between the student body and the administration regarding the best response to the Trump administration’s actions, this type of space serves as an outlet for the students while protecting the school from receiving outside criticism. Eva Larson ’27, who also worked on the COTQ committee, said “This is 500 people on the quad cheering about how we don’t like the NCAA policy, there’s clearly a significant amount of people who disagree with this and I think having that space to resist in a group capacity is really important.” All students interviewed expressed frustration about Smith’s decision, but also understood that the administration is trying to make decisions with safety in mind.
Most of all, it’s clear that Celebration still holds a special place at Smith. Ramanathan said the biggest thing she wanted students to take away was a sense of belonging at Smith. “Not everyone gets to have that when they go home from Smith, or when they graduate, or before they got here […] being able to come out together even on a chilly night and sit with your friends and watch your peers have fun and laugh is so important.”
She hopes that future committees will continue keeping the vigil portion present. “I think that this moment in time has reignited us to remember that we do have to hold each other in grief, and we have to hold each other in celebration,” said Ramanathan.
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