Peter
My mom said, “All artists are male and female. To be an artist you have to be psychologically hermaphrodite.” I don’t know if I agree with that. A lot of artists are really boring. I don’t necessarily think everyone who painted a ceramic mug on Etsy is a hermaphrodite.
But I really just want to use myself in my work.When I came to New York for my freshman year of college, I knew I wanted to do drag. In my early performances I played banjo. All the other drag kings were trying to be the cute boy, and I was the creepy uncle. I was more like Pete Seeger than ‘N Sync.
It’s great being in New York, just being able to be in drag and not get questioned. There’s so much freedom in being anonymous. There are times when I want to be passing as a guy, and times where I want to stop people a bit and slow ‘em down.
Teen Night, A Success!
Thanks to everyone who came, danced, performed, volunteered, helped with clean up, tabled, installed, and in general, supported We Are the Youth! MC-ed by (ever-charming) We Are the Youth participant, Kaden and with DJ AngelBoi spinning some hot jams, the Brooklyn Museum Teen Night Event was an enormous success! With 150+ teens in attendance, Archie Burnett kicked off the evening with an amazing Vogue tutorial, followed by 2 great performances by Shadow Lover and Julia Weldon.
HIDE/SEEK
As the Brooklyn Museum FREE Teen Night Event for LGBTQ Teens and Allies draws closer (this Thursday, January 12!) we’ve been fielding a lot of questions about the exhibition, HIDE/SEEK, the catalyst for the Teen Night Event. Here’s some information about the groundbreaking show to get you hyped up about attending the Teen Night Event! Hope to see you all this Thursday in the Beaux Arts Court in the Brooklyn Museum!
What is HIDE/SEEK all about?
HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire American Portraiture is the first major museum exhibition to focus on themes of gender and sexuality in modern American portraiture. The exhibition brings together more than one hundred works in a wide range of media, including paintings, photographs, works on paper, film, and installation art. Featuring work by artists such as George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol, HIDE/SEEK charts the under documented role that sexual identity has played in the making of modern art, and highlights the contributions of gay and lesbian artists to American art. (Brooklyn Museum)
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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.
Joey, 19, Brooklyn, NY
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 percent 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 counterprotest. But life happened, and activism didn’t feel like the priority.
I first got really involved in Occupy Wall Street the day people got arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. I just went to photograph it, and we thought we were going to be fine. Then we were walking too far. We just ran and got off, so we wouldn’t get arrested. After that it started to feel more real.
I’ve been going down to Zuccotti Park at least once a week. Me and my friends go there and yell so loud and so much, I’ve been losing my voice a lot. I’m trying to get other people active and not feel apathetic towards it. I’ve been beating myself up a little bit for not going more, but midterms happen so I can’t go as much as I want. I plan on going until it’s over, and hopefully it won’t be over for a long time. I don’t want it to fade away or be shut down.
A lot of people I know are very critical of Occupy Wall Street because they don’t seem to understand. People think it’s a group of lazy hippies who want to sit around in drum circles. But you see people of all different ages. A lot of people want to influence change.
At Pratt, we started a group inspired by Occupy Wall Street. We have general assemblies. We had the student walkout and march. Pratt’s a good school, but it has problems. A lot of us have issues with where the funding goes.
My family’s fairly financially secure now, but we’ve been in a situation where my parents were separated and my mother wasn’t working. A lot of people struggle and can’t get out of their situation. It doesn’t work that way, that everyone has the same opportunities as everyone else. I have an $18,000-a-year scholarship to Pratt, but I go to an expensive school and all my other costs are student loans. It’s all money we’ll have to pay back.
I want to be an artist. I study figurative oil and printmaking. It’s essentially the only thing I’ve been able to see myself doing. Almost all the time I think, “What the hell am I going to do? Should I switch to a different school? Should I switch to a more commercial major?” But I think I’m good enough that it’s going to work out.
As told to Diana Scholl.
Photo by Laurel Golio, taken in New York, NY, 2011
To tell your story, email hello@wearetheyouth.org
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.
Chris, 18, Auburn, AL
I love soccer. I could watch it for hours. I coached kids over the summer, and I love watching them develop as the season goes on. It’s exciting to see them get excited.
I used to play, but I broke my knee a year ago so I can’t run much. I was in a wheelchair for six weeks. I couldn’t use crutches because I had just had surgery on my shoulder from a four-wheeler wreck. I was right out of rehab and had to be stupid and go skateboarding. That’s me in a bubble: one accident after another. I want to go in the trauma field of nursing because of my life experiences.
I got hit in the face two weeks ago on the way to a football game with Arkansas by a group of drunk 40-year-old men. I had a rainbow belt on and they thought I was a gay guy. Then they saw my chest so they started backing off. And I had to open my big mouth and say, “I’m not a woman.” So I’m just lying on the ground getting the crap beat out of me, waiting for it to end.
Stuff like that bothers me emotionally, but I can get over it physically. When I’m wearing my chest binder and people think I’m a guy, I don’t get bothered as much. Yesterday I was in Wal-Mart and a woman called me “sir,” and was talking to me like I was a man. There wasn’t that usual awkward pause where people don’t know what to call me. That was the best moment of my life.
I’ve told everyone I’m transgender but my roommates. I’m sure they’ll accept me, but trying to get through the policies of Auburn University is more of a problem since the school doesn’t have a policy dealing with transgender students.
I haven’t legally changed my name for the university. I’m waiting until I’m out of the dorm, so I’m not homeless. If the university sees me as a man, what are they going to do with me, since I’m living in a female dorm?
I’m the only out transgender person I know of on campus. There are supposedly two others, but they’re stealth.
My given name is Kahley, and that’s what my roommates call me. Everyone else calls me Chris. I talked to my mom about it, and Christopher Adam was the name I was supposed to have because my parents thought I would be a boy.
I came out to my family this year, and they’ve been really good about it. My mom’s the one who set up the appointment to get me on hormones. My mom’s really OCD, so she said as long as I don’t grow sideburns, she’s fine with it. I was tired of hiding who I am. But I want to be happy. I’m ready to take the next step.
I didn’t even know what transgender was until less than two years ago, when I started looking on the Internet. I was an army brat and grew up in really conservative, small towns. I was pretty sheltered from the world until about a year and a half ago. But when I learned what it meant to be transgender, it made so much more sense to me.
Growing up, there were times I’d do things that little girls should not do. I tried to pee standing up for the longest time. And every time I was forced to wear a dress, I cried. By second grade, my mom stopped trying to make me wear a dress.
I have a girlfriend, Amber. When we first met last year, I identified as a lesbian, but the label never really felt right on me. But I came out to Amber as transgender and she’s been accepting. She just changed her orientation on Facebook to straight. She labeled herself a lesbian before, but now she labels herself as straight when people ask her. She doesn’t care what other people think. She doesn’t love me as a girl or as a guy. She loves me for me.
As told to Diana Scholl.
Photo by Laurel Golio, taken at Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 2010
To tell your story, email hello@wearetheyouth.org
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.
CJ, 19, Macon, GA
I told my grandmother I was gay last year and she made her religious convictions about it apparent, but she said it wouldn’t change the fact that she’d still love me. My grandmother’s always been one of the role models of my life, but I didn’t want her to change her morals just because I was gay. If she did that, then she could change them for any reason. But I understand her reasons, and I’m thankful she’s still supportive and still loving. We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.
I go to a Baptist church and to the Reformed University Fellowship on campus. I identify as Christian. I view the Bible as encouraging love and compassion for all. Those morals are the same. That’s more important to me than one or two Bible verses that condemn same-sex relationships.
I don’t hang out with that many gay people. I hang out with people who are gay-friendly. Since there was no controversy when I came out freshman year, I’ve stayed with those friends. I’ve been one time to the gay club in Macon. It’s not exactly my cup of tea.
I do like to hang out with friends and party that way, and I’m very involved on campus. You have professors and get to know everyone on campus. It’s a very active and loving campus.
If I was giving advice to other gays, I’d say it’s important to be self-confident. But I would also say not to advertise it. You don’t have to act straight, but when you meet someone don’t say, “Hi, I’m gay.” When I was meeting gay freshmen last year. I always thought it was weird if that was one of the things they said when they introduced themselves.
Mercer’s small, so everybody knows everybody. It’s a good thing sometimes, but when it comes to dating it’s not a good thing because you’ve known everyone so long. I dated someone freshman year and he moved to Florida, and after that I haven’t found anyone I’m interested in.
My first kiss was weird. Not because it was a guy; it was just weird because I had never kissed anyone before. In high school I was still straight. Well, I wasn’t straight, but I wasn’t out. I had girlfriends in early high school. I was still kind of young.
I went to a really small Georgia high school. The graduating class was 38. High school’s never good for anyone unless you’re a football player or cheerleader, and life’s pretty much over for them after high school. I was asked a million times if I was gay, and I had a cracking voice, so I got picked on for that.
I think people thought I was gay partly because of the voice. Because my high school was so small, you were categorized. I wasn’t the only person thought to be gay. The other people who were thought to be gay weren’t gay. They were just different.
As told to Diana Scholl.
Photo by Laurel Golio, taken at Macon University, Macon, GA, 2010
To tell your story, email hello@wearetheyouth.org
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!
