Are. You. Coming?!
2012 is practically here. The end of the world is upon us. Have you checked out our Upcoming Events Page!? If you haven’t, you probably should, like right now. Really, stop reading this post, move your pretty little eyes over to the right hand side of the screen and click on Brooklyn Museum FREE Teen Night Event January 12, 2012 (you owe it to yourself, this could be your last year on Earth). There you will find exciting updates about, you guessed it, the Brooklyn Museum Free Teen Night Event on January 12, 2012! Installation artist Erika Sabel as well as Brooklyn-based design studio Hot-Sundae have been added to the roster! This means cool things will be happening at the Teen Night Event and cool people will be attending (like you!).
If you have a short attention span, you hate reading or you’re really just too lazy to move your pretty little eyes to the right hand side of the screen and click on our Upcoming Events, just remember this: BROOKLYN MUSEUM. JANUARY 12. All the cool kids are doing it.
Elliott
I’m lucky I already had my kids before I got HIV. I became HIV-positive June 16, 2011 in Florida. It was with a real female and the condom popped. She knew she was HIV-positive but didn’t tell me. I was so angry.
Then I came to New York in August, because it was too slow with the medicine in Tampa. My homeboy said he’d get me one of his private doctors, but then someone told me in New York they have a program to help with benefits.
When I came to New York, my girlfriend Honesty and I were looking for a shelter. I stopped at Housing Works, because I heard there was a shelter on Pitkin. I met Johnny, and I asked if it was a homeless shelter. He said it was for people with HIV and AIDS, and asked if I was HIV-positive. I said, “Yes, I am.” After my test results came back, he got me signed up for HASA to get me into housing, and offered me a job. He said I can do outreach to the youth.
Exciting News For 2012!
We are thrilled to officially announce our partnership with the Brooklyn Museum in presenting a Teen Night Event in conjunction with the HIDE/SEEK exhibit currently on display! The event will be FREE to all LGBTQ Teens & Allies and will include a rad DJ (to be announced), a photo booth (presented by yours truly), voguing lessons, refreshments, gallery activities and much more! We’ll be posting all updates here as the event draws closer, but in the mean time, GET EXCITED, TELL YOUR FRIENDS AND GO WORK ON YOUR DANCE MOVES.
Thanks to Steph Peller for her (as always) great designs!
Maya
Maya, Age 17, New York, New York
I was just elected student council president. My platform is that the school is not as perfect as we think. People are racist. Some people are racist. Some people are like “She’s black and a lesbian and she’s our president.” Some people are really up in arms. There’s a lot of people who have been against it. The kids that don’t really like me wrote “secession” on their Facebook status. If prep schools are like the houses in Harry Potter, I’m friends with Gryffindor and those kids are Slytherin.
When I first got to Lawrenceville I was a lot different. I wasn’t out or anything. I was super-femme. I was kind of a mess. I hooked up with a lot of guys. I got in a lot of trouble and had a bad reputation.
I was never by any means homophobic, but I never really thought of being gay as an option. There would always be these really, really pretty girls in the grade, and I wanted to be their friend. Now I’m like, “Oh, that girl was really hot.” Then there was a girl freshman year and we clicked and became really good friends. One day we just kind of hooked up. It was one of those things where I thought I must not have found the right guy. Then I hooked up with a girl and was like ‘Oh, that’s why.’ (more…)
Q&A with Nick Burd, The Vast Fields of Ordinary
We Are the Youth Book Club: An Interview with Nick Burd, author of The Vast Fields of Ordinary.
For We Are the Youth’s first book club, Brooklyn-based author Nick Burd, 31, talks to us about his award-winning debut novel The Vast Fields of Ordinary, a coming of age young adult book about Dade Hamilton, a gay teenager in Iowa exploring friendship, relationships, and family drama during his “last real summer” before going to college.
The Vast Fields of Ordinary is in the early stages of being turned into a movie to be directed by Bruce Cohen, the producer of American Beauty and Milk. Nick talks to us about sexuality, gay literature, and the to-be-named quasi-sequel.
Did you have any books about young gay people to read when you were growing up?
I really didn’t. I grew up in a religious environment. The things in the library weren’t gay or lesbian oriented. My sexuality was forming in my mind in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, and I couldn’t find any young adults geared towards gay kids. When I found adult themed gay books that was kind of a big deal.
Introducing a New Blog Feature!
We Are the Youth is starting a book club! To celebrate the inaugural book “The Vast Fields of Ordinary,” we’ll be interviewing author Nick Burd, and giving away three copies of the Stonewall Book Award winner. Enter the raffle to win a free copy of “The Vast Fields of Ordinary” by tweeting at @wertheyouth with the hash tag #ilovefreebooks or by liking us on Facebook and leaving a comment on our wall by Friday, November 25. We’ll announce the winner the following Monday.
Joey
Joan Rivers made an absolutely ridiculous comment that there are no gay men at Occupy Wall Street, because we care too much about how we look, or whatever. She might just be trying to be funny, but it got on my nerves a little bit. When people say things like that, sometimes I want to be like “Oh my god, shut up. I know you’re trying to be funny. But it’s incredibly disrespectful.”
A teacher at Pratt didn’t think there was enough of an openly queer presence at Occupy Wall Street, and we wanted to show that’s not the case. That’s why I was under the rainbow banner at Zuccotti Park last week chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping!” The 99% includes everyone, including us.
Occupy Wall Street has been the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved in.I’ve always been ultra-liberal, and wanted to get more involved with activism, but there were never things going on around us. I helped with phone-banking for Obama, and I was involved in queer activism at my high school in Baltimore. My high school had a gay-straight alliance, and the Westboro Baptist Church protested us. No one knows why. They do it kind of arbitrarily. But it brought the school together. The school did a huge counter-protest. But life happened and activism didn’t feel like the priority.
We Are the Youth Occupies Wall Street
Re-energized after a short hiatus, We Are the Youth is back on the proverbial “profile-wagon.” New profiles coming soon, stay tuned!
Today is National Coming Out Day
In honor of this holiday, some thoughts on coming out from We Are the Youth participants:
“I was kind of scared to tell my dad. But he was like, “Whatever tricks your trigger. Just don’t be tricking it too early.” Then we’d be checking out girls at Wal-Mart.”—Audri, 15, Laurel, MS
“I just officially came out to my sister yesterday. On Twitter. My sister told my mom “Marina’s never actually come out to me. I know, or I think I know.” But it seemed to my mom like she wanted me to tell her. So last night I sent her a Twitter direct message being like, “Hey, mom said you wanted me to tell you this but you probably already know, so yeah…” She wrote “Haha. Thanks, I guess.”–Marina, 21, Atlanta, GA
“For a few weeks I wanted to go to the LGBT club at school. But I can’t. I can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t want to be out. I feel like if I come out, there will be stigma attached to me. Like, ‘Oh, there’s Chase. The guy that used to be a girl.’”—Chase, 19, Brooklyn, NY
“I definitely want to come out to my parents, but I want to wait until I get a better foothold and can support myself. I’ve mentally dealt with it and made peace with how it is with my parents. But sometimes it’s hard. My home life feels like it’s a lie.”—Dohyun, 19, Atlanta, GA
“In a way, I was pissed off to even have to come out. I think it’s stupid. Heterosexual people don’t have to come out as straight.”–Ana, 18, Blauvelt, NY
To share your thoughts on coming out, email hello@wearetheyouth.org. We’ll post responses on this here blog.
GET IN TOUCH!
We constantly receive emails from youth around the country looking to get involved in the project. Although we’d love to profile every one of you, (and we really do hope to visit your town in the near future!), lack of funding sometimes prohibits us from immediately meeting you face-to-face. In the meantime, here’s a few ways you can get involved:
- Spreading the word about We Are the Youth = always awesome. Friend us on Facebook, follow us on Tumblr, join our mailing list, you get the idea.
- Since the launch of our new site, we’re looking for more youth-write ups. This means if you go to a LGBT-youth related event, you can submit a short write up about it and we’ll post it on this blog. Here’s a good example.
- We’ll be looking for guest bloggers in the near future. This is a new idea for us so we’re still working out the kinks, but send us an email if you have a cool idea for a guest blog post, we’re open to all sorts of ideas.
- If you’re involved with an LGBT-youth related organization we’d love to publicize the group on our Resource Page. Let us know.
We love to hear from youth around the country, so don’t be shy, shoot us an email!
NEW WEBSITE (FINALLY) LAUNCHES!
The big day has arrived. After months of hard work (and loads of help from James Dodd, web-coder extraordinaire), We Are the Youth has launched its newly redesigned website!
New features include a Resource page showing a map of area-specific groups and organizations for LGBT youth. Our resource list is constantly expanding, so if you’d like us to include your organization, contact us and we’ll put it on the map. We are also expanding this blog to include more youth write-ups, posts by guest bloggers, and more LGBT youth-related news items, so email hello@wearetheyouth.org if you’d like to share your story, contribute a write-up, or just say hello.
In other news, we’ve recently opened a We Are the Youth Etsy shop, where you (generous supporter!), can buy a custom print. In addition, although we’ll still be posting profiles to the blog portion of the website, you can now view all We Are the Youth profiles in our archive.
Other business is continuing as usual — stay tuned for more profiles and exciting news!
As always, thanks for all the support,
Laurel & Diana
Gender Reel Festival!
If you’re in Philly the weekend of Sept 9th-11th, come check out Gender Reel, an annual festival dedicated to enhancing the visibility of gender non-conforming, gender variant/queer and transgender identities. We Are the Youth will be showing 4 portraits and accompanying interviews Friday night and all day Saturday!
