How organizations (re)produce inequality is of premiere importance to sociologists. Higher education is one institution with many types of organizations (i.e., colleges and universities) ripe for sociological examination of unequal systems. Although an appreciable body of work examines racism in higher education, the effects of heterosexism in higher education are still under studied. Further, hardly any studies analyze how racism and heterosexism intersect to marginalize students who are both racial minorities--namely Black--and queer. No scholarship to date compares the experiences of queer Black students who attend primarily white institutions to those who attend primarily Black ones. This qualitative dissertation intervenes by being the first comparative analysis of how queer Black students at an HBCU understand and experience diversity differently from and similarly to queer Black students at a nearby PWI. Through interviews with 26 current students and recent graduates, informal conversations with students and university staff, field observation, and secondary analysis of university-administered campus climate survey data, this dissertation makes a timely and necessary contribution to extant scholarship via two main findings. The first is that queer Black students, occupying the unique social location of Black queerness, use complex negotiation strategies to construct themselves as outsiders or insiders at the PWI or the HBCU respectively. I find that the racial context of the home university and personal identity salience factors helped respondents either stick out or fit in, despite how objectively inclusive campus was or was not. The second is that queer Black students, depending on whether they attended a white school or Black school, have diverging frustrations with diversity work and allyship done supposedly for their benefit. I attribute this divergence to diversity likely meaning different things in each context for students. Ultimately, queer Black students are, for the most part, unconvinced that their universities foster the creation of ally behaviors, identities, and ideologies necessary for them to feel wholly included as both Black people and queer people. In my conclusion, I discuss the significance of these findings as well as proffer several policy recommendations for educators and higher education administrators toward the end of making college and higher education more inclusive for everyone, but especially for Black queers. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]