Homo-hop and spoken word pieces are a few of the many ways Harvey Katz is able to connect with his audience.
As part of the Athens Boys Choir, Katz travels across the nation performing as a spoken word artist, poet and hip-hop artist to provide communities with a chance to understand his personal experiences and other identities.
The University of Idaho LGBTQA Office will host Athens Boys Choir during this month’s keynote address to give the community exposure to other identities as part of LGBTQA History Month. The address will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Vandal Ballroom.
In the keynote address, Katz will express his own personal experiences of being a transgender spoken word artist through different art forms said Julia Keleher, program coordinator for the LGBTQA Office.
“(The keynote) is a relaying of his life and his identity,” Keleher said. “He does that through a mixture of poetry and hip-hop, he’ll be doing a lot of poetry and talking about his identity as a trans man.”
Keleher said the address will be entertaining as well as informative for all who choose to attend.
“The purpose of this event is to entertain, but also to learn more about transgender people’s lives and their experiences,” Keleher said.
Athens Boys Choir is a one-man queer musician and spoken word artist who has been presenting music and spoken word for almost 10 years, Keleher said. Katz tours with other spoken word artists across the nation.
Keleher said the LGBTQA Office puts together a keynote address every year with different artists and subjects.
The LGBTQA Office strives to provide students with a safe space where open discussion for gender identities and sexual orientation is welcome.
“We provide a place to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity while focusing on the LGBTQA community,” Keleher said. “We also provide programs and community events, like our dinners and lunches and campus-wide education opportunities.”
Along with providing a safe space to talk, Keleher said the LGBTQA Office allows students a place where they can be who they are and always feel comfortable.
“We want it to be a place where people feel like they can be themselves and they can be at home and part of a community that focuses on the LGBTQA community,” Keleher said.
LGBTQA History Month gives the university a chance to remember the LGBTQA community’s past.
“It’s a month to observe and to talk about queer history, because I think in our national dialogues we don’t talk about it,” Keleher said.
Learning from the past and improving the community’s future is one way the month plays its role within the LGBTQA population said Monica Mills, vice president for the Gender and Sexuality Alliance at UI.
“LGBTQA History Month is so important, because the community has had such a rough time with it until now — it’s all starting to get a little bit better,” Mills said. “It’s important that people know some of the things that happened in the past, so they can learn from history.”
Savannah Cardon
can be reached at