Out of the Closet, Into the Campus

How can urban planning integrate queer culture and experience to design spaces that enable identity expression, social participation, and freedom in China? This project focuses on the spatial situation and possibilities of queer students in Chinese universities, and is located on a typical university campus in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province. In the context of rapid urbanization and educational expansion, queer students from rural areas often face serious identity challenges, like: intense academic competition pressure, and social role expectations under gender norms. University, a place that should carry self-discovery and freedom, often becomes a space of repetition, oppression and loneliness. The project combines personal experience, interview materials, spatial analysis and queer theory to reconstruct the interactive logic between queer individuals and campus space. Drawing on the resilience and self-organization of queer communities in historical cases such as the El Rosa Hotel and the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco, the project explores spatial strategies to create tenderness, intimacy and resistance in institutional gaps. "Home and identity", "Disorder" and "Queer Spirit" constitute the three conceptual pillars of this project. “Home and identity” is reframed as both a site of conflict and possibility; “Disorder” resists the logic of linearity and efficiency, while “Queer Spirit” becomes a method for penetrating norms and softness within institutional structures. By collating and coding multiple real queer stories, the project constructs a five-level spatial classification system based on visibility and privacy, and proposes a series of spatial intervention designs, from anonymous support spaces to individual expression workshops, to respond to the diverse needs of emotions, senses and bodies.