Meet Lindsay Ellen Metzker!

I am a third year PhD student in the Policy, Organizational and Leadership Studies PhD program at the College of Education and Human Development and primarily am interested in ways in which students’ religious and cultural backgrounds and sexualities impact both their experiences in college but also the ways that higher education institutions shape their identities, brands, and policies. I just passed my comprehensive exams this summer and will be starting my dissertation writing this Fall.

Where does Pitch, Please fit in with my work? Good question. Last year, I became interested in looking at the ways in which multisexual – or bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual folks – college students build community and foster a positive sense of identity while attending college. As an openly pansexual person myself, I have a lot of experience feeling “too straight to be queer; too queer to be straight” and wanted to see what an affirming space for multisexual people might look like. I found Pitch Please through what can only be called a happy accident. PP Alumna Robyn Friedman was a server at a restaurant in my neighborhood. We started talking once we realized we both attended Temple, and when I told her about my work and interest in studying LGBTQIA+ college students, she made the necessary introductions for my research to begin in the Fall of 2022.

The best part of working with Pitch, Please was seeing an affirming and unique queer community where all members are truly valued for who are they are. So much of the literature around the experiences of multisexual college students is really bleak – a lot of isolation, not feeling like they have a community, and not being sure where they belong. The culture in Pitch, Please really challenges those findings – being “queer enough” means being exactly who you are in Pitch and it was a really beautiful and meaningful thing to witness and share.