Annual Events

The Trans and Queer Fall Mixer has become a beloved annual welcome (back) event for LGBTQIA+ students, staff, and faculty at UCSC. Typically, the event is held during Fall Welcome Week and includes a resource fair where students, staff, and faculty can connect with both on and off-campus resources for queer and trans community, a raffle, dancing, arts & crafts, and lots of fabulous queer community. The event is particularly exciting for the new and incoming first-year and transfer students in the LGBTQIA+ community. 

The Stonewall Speaker Series is an annual event hosted by the Cantú, which centers artists, activists, and storytellers working toward the liberation of trans and queer people of color. The inaugural event was established in 2019, fifty years after the Stonewall riots in June of 1969. The event’s namesake is a reminder of our community’s legacy and resilience in the ongoing fight for racial, economic, and gender justice. The Stonewall Speaker series aims to inspire collective action to ignite transformative change for the LGBTQIA+ community at UCSC and beyond.

In 2019, The Cantú established a programmatic partnership with the UCSC American Indian Resource Center with an annual commitment to partner together and bring UCSC students to the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirit Powwow, held in San Francisco every year. In addition to providing transportation to students to make sure they can attend this special event, the centers collaborate to do teach-ins and education around the meaning of Powwows as well as Two-Spirit and other expansive gender identities in American Indian cultures. This event is important because it serves as a reminder that gender-expansive people have always existed and have meaningful roles in many traditions outside of a U.S. colonial context, and most importantly serves as a reminder that so long as we are on this land, we should always honor, center, and uplift American Indian ways of knowing, celebrating and being in community. 

For over 20 years, The Lionel Cantú Queer Resource Center has been proudly celebrating and honoring the accomplishments of graduating LGBTQIA+ students at UCSC. In 2018, The Cantú established the “Lavender Awards” which honor graduating undergraduate and graduate students, as well as honor a Staff or Faculty member who has gone above and beyond to advocate with and for LGBTQIA+ community at UCSC. Originally conceived as the “Rainbow Ceremony,” the title of the graduation was updated in 2019 to align with the sentiment of the Lavender awards and the long history in higher education of these ceremonies being called Lavender Graduations. At the annual Lavender Graduation, LGBTQIA+ graduates are celebrated in a uniquely queer way. Friends and family are invited to cheer on graduates, and there are keynotes given from guest speakers as well as student speakers.