When Elee Ballinger decided to leave her small town amid the redwood forests of northern California for college, she opted for a true urban experience: attending Hunter College, living in Brooklyn, and working for the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). Being a part of SLU’s Community Semester program this spring, however, is connecting the NYC dots for Elee in a whole new way.
She is interning at The Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she plays a key part in efforts like launching the new Advanced Certificate in LGBTQ Studies and conducting research in the new CLAGS archive. Doing that work and being in the halls of the Graduate Center, plus taking Urban Studies courses at SLU, has immersed Elee in a world of queer and urban studies whose elements keep reinforcing each other.
“I think my favorite thing this semester has been seeing the threads tied together from each class,” she said. “In one week in all of my classes, we were talking about the same couple decades — like we watched the film ‘Decade of Fire’ about burning the South Bronx, and we learned about the Young Lords and their takeover of Lincoln Hospital. I did some research on ACT UP and it tied into the acupuncture clinics that the Young Lords started. And then the person who made this AIDS archive won a fellowship honorable mention from CLAGS. Just the same names popping up over and over has been the coolest thing ever.”
That’s what the Community Semester program is all about: a 20-hour per week internship where students can “put their passion for social justice to work” in addition to taking four classes at SLU. Anna Zak, SLU’s head of internships and experiential learning, matches students with local organizations for the program, just as she matches them with union opportunities for the Union Semester program. This is the first time in memory that an SLU student has interned at CLAGS, which was founded in 1991 by gay activist, historian, writer and CUNY professor emeritus Martin Duberman.
Elee’s passion for social justice is centered in women’s rights, queer rights, sex education and intersectionality, and her major at Hunter is Women and Gender Studies. She identifies as a queer cis woman, but is used to being called “sir” by mistake, probably due to her height of 6 feet 3 inches. (Her father and brother are even taller.) In fact, that’s what led her to the field of women’s studies.
“Because I stand out, I’ve gotten a lot of attention from strange men in public since the time I was 13. I think that having those experiences so frequently directed me toward women’s rights. Like, ‘why do you feel empowered to say this thing about my body? I’m literally just living my life,’” she said. “Just the feeling of powerlessness — how do I respond without endangering myself? And it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. So all those feelings spurred me into action.”
That action includes traveling via Workaway to South America and Africa, where she worked for a nonprofit organization in Tanzania supporting young girls. It includes serving on the associate board of the New York Birth Control Access Project, as well as holding an internship with NYPIRG last year, where she was involved in a variety of advocacy and engagement efforts. NYPIRG “was a great time, but that was mostly on campus. This is the first semester that I’m not deeply entrenched in the Hunter community,” Elee said.
“It’s definitely been more rigorous. I’m pretty academically oriented — I’ve got straight A’s. But especially combining the classes with the internship, I’ve definitely had to be more organized,” she said. “The classes are all interesting, they all kind of play off of each other.” She’s taking Work, Culture and Politics in NYC with Prof. Penny Lewis, Introduction to Nonprofit Leadership with Prof. Anushay Said, Community Organizing with Prof. Elena Conte, and Urban and Community Studies Fieldwork with Prof. Rebecca Lurie.
Elee values getting to know New York City but doesn’t see herself staying here. “I need trees, I need real nature. The climate is different. There have definitely been some big shifts — there’s a lot of people here! But some things have been nice. I like that it’s flat, so I can walk everywhere, and the public transportation is really nice. I also feel like I’ve created a lot of connections here, through my professors and the advocacy I’ve done. I’ve met so many people.”
One of those people is Matt Brim, a professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island who’s in his second year as executive director of CLAGS. Based on being Elee’s boss, he welcomes future Community Semester participants.
“Elee’s quite smart and independent and has the ability to do the work. She’s very self-motivated. She’s also a delight to be around,” Brim said. She’s been one of the first people to do research using the new CLAGS archive in the Mina Rees Library, to compile full lists of fellowship winners over the years. “It required a lot of digging on her part,” he said.
The semester that Elee is working at CLAGS happens to be the semester when a reelected President Trump is rolling back advances in women’s and queer rights, but that’s not getting her down.
“One of the things I like about being in this space, and among the people I’ve chosen to surround myself with, is it’s like there’s doom and gloom — but here’s what we’re doing about it,” Elee said. Referring to unprecedented federal intervention in higher education practices, she said, “At CLAGS, we’ve discussed doing what we’re doing until we are forced to do otherwise. So we’re going to continue uplifting trans voices and taking strong stances to support immigrants and like, just letting people live their lives, until we’re absolutely forced to do otherwise. And even then we’ll probably still resist, because what the heck.”