Thoughts from the author

Creating this website has been an experience unlike any others in my academic career.

Most of my learning at Bowdoin has taken place in classrooms, in books, in academic journals, in seminar discussions and in my own writing for understanding concepts and theories. This learning has been a step back from the jargon and a step toward the modes of knowledge and community-building that exist outside of academic spaces.

Like the students I focus on in this project, I am a young queer person. This is what initially drew me to this topic. But unlike the students I learned about for this project, I am white and from an affluent and suburban background. Seeking out work and organizations by and for urban queer youth of color has introduced me to more ways of thinking, means of organizing, and modes of resistance than I had encountered in my college education and in my life outside my college. It is one thing to read an academic article about urban students’ responses to police violence, and it is another thing to see the stories as they are best told: through the youth who live them. Reading the messages from youth-led and youth-supporting organizations about ways to effectively resist police violence or how to throw a party that is monitored through community-based means, how to have safe sex, and how to be an activist is a direct way of seeing what it’s like to be in that community. It’s a way to see where community lies, where struggles exist, where joy flourishes, where pain is felt communally.

Yes, some of these needs can be expressed in an academic paper. For example, Ed Brockenbrough’s “Becoming Queerly Responsive: Culturally Responsive Pedagogy for Black and Latino Urban Queer Youth” pointed to the need for respect for students’ cultures and modes of care that are familiar to the students and work that builds off of students’ existing knowledge. I saw this reflected in FIERCE NYC’s ball events and Buried Seedz of Resistance art and storytelling collectives. In Moore, Satter, Stewart-Winter, and Strub’s article “A Community’s Response to the Problem of Invisibility: The Queer Newark Oral History Project” I saw the urgent need to create spaces of intergenerational sharing between queer people of color–ideas that I saw come to life in bklyn boihood’s mentorships and BreakOUT!’s Healing as Resistance Together nights of intergenerational community-building.

Seeing the ideas of academics and activists/community organizers intersect was an incredible merging of ways of thinking that I’d never experienced so tangibly before. It shows me that these scholars are doing their work with the real needs of queer youth of color in mind, and that the grassroots organizations, although they might not use academic language, build off of strong theoretical roots that lead toward a collective liberation of marginalized identities.

These organizations center queer youth of color in a way that seems radical for those used to a world of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and transphobia–the America that exists today, in 2017. But hearing the voices of so many queer and trans people (especially young people) of color fighting for the representation of their bodies, and the recognition of their rights shifts the narrative in my mind. If America is great, it is not great because of individuals climbing their way to the top, and it is not great because of public schools that are some sort of equalizer. It’s great because of communities that come together–either formally or informally–to mourn, grow, learn, organize, and act collectively. It’s communities like the ones I highlighted on this website–though this by no means an extensive list.

Reading the coming-out stories of these young people reminds me of my own. I realized I wasn’t straight in high school, but I didn’t say come out until well into my college life. The world in many ways was not hostile to me in high school: I lived in a liberal town with a well-attended Gay-Straight alliance and accepting family members. I was white in a majority white town; I had the privilege not to be thinking about money all the time. Despite these positive circumstances, It wasn’t until college that I found myself able to use the word “queer” to describe my identity, even though “straight” hadn’t felt right for a long time.

Hearing and seeing the stories of queer youth of color all across the country fills me with a sense of admiration and a deep respect. In a country built on racism that enacts racist policing policies everyday, in a place where activists need to assert that “Black Lives Matter” (to violent opposition) because a large percentage of the population disagrees, in the context of school systems that actively displace students of color to the streets or to prison–seeing out queer and trans youth of color existing, loving each other, and finding community is seeing magic happen. Lives that continue to persist despite so many systems that try to suppress them–try to change them, try to kill them–are beautiful, and they sure as hell matter. This website is a celebration of all the trans and queer youth of color who have survived against all odds. It’s also a memorial to those who haven’t.

Rest in power.