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You’re Not Alone: A Video Project for Queer Youth
There’s been a lot of talk about the It Gets Better project and how “It Gets Better” is mostly true for cis-gendered, white, gender conforming, able bodied, middle-class gay and lesbian youth. This is an alternative project aimed at youth for whom it very well may NOT get better.
The You’re Not Alone Project asks for video contributions from everyone, but especially those who are queer, trans, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, people of color, immigrants, disabled, or any other often-ignored part of the queer umbrella. The message is not that it gets better, but that queer youth are not alone. We’re a large, diverse community that can offer support and understanding, even when change is slow in coming.
To participate, upload a short video (less than 10 minutes) to the video service of your choice. The goal is to communicate your own experiences in your own “words”–speaking, singing, signing, using art, dance, whatever medium you prefer–with the theme You Are Not Alone. All languages and means of communication are encouraged. Focus on queer youth in general or on a particular population. You might tell a story, talk about your identity or your community, or provide resources for support. Don’t forget to tag your video with You’re Not Alone and any keywords that are relevant. Once you’ve uploaded, submit your link to me at one of the following:
You can also e-mail the link to yourenotalonevideos [at] gmail [dot] com.
If interest is high, I will buy a domain for the project and post an index of all these videos on the web. Please reblog and share widely! This won’t work unless we get a diversity of voices to contribute.
Something's fundamentally wrong here
There’s been a story circulating around the Internet about how the principal of a South Carolina high school chose to resign when students chose to form a GSA (Gay Students Association). Now I personally don’t have a problem with the man’s choice. It seems like he handled it very well – he made it clear that it was for personal and religious reasons that he was leaving, he decided to stay out the term until 2009, and he indicated that he wouldn’t be mentioning to the students his specific reasons for leaving when he made the announcement to the school. He also, as far as I can tell, didn’t block the formation of the GSA in any way.
The part of this news that made me think, though, was something in his letter of resignation. What troubles him is that this and no other club deals with students’ “sexual orientation, sexual preference, and sexual activity” and that the way he sees it, the club requires acknowledging that students are sexually active with a certain sex, whether the same, different, or both.
Wait, what? Back that train up, please. Besides the obvious problem that others have pointed out in blogging about this article with sexualising the gay movement in general, I’m a little concerned about this specific context. Coming out, to yourself or to others, doesn’t mean anything about how sexual you are. Whether or not you are attracted to someone of the same sex is relevant, but sexual experience is in no way required to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or anything in between – including straight. If sexual experience were the only indicator, I’d be straight, and I’m sure as hell not.
But it’s not just that alone that bothers me, it’s the inherent assumption here. In order to be gay, he seems to be saying, you have to admit that you’re sexual with someone of the same sex. Is the same true in order to be straight? I actually think it might be almost all right if we just said, no one is anything until they have sex (putting aside the obvious huge problems with basing orientation entirely on experience). It wouldn’t really be accurate, but at least it would be equitable. Instead, I think what we obviously say in society is that everyone is straight by default. Straight is the presumption, that has to be rebutted. How do we rebut it? By having sex. Hmm.
So what we’re saying, I suppose, is that people are straight until they have a same sex experience. You can’t have an abstinent gay person. And I suppose it would be problematic to require straight people to have sex to prove their straightness, because, well, if you fall into a certain religious group, they’re not supposed to be having sex in the first place until they’re married. Queers can’t get married, so they might as well go have sex? Oh, I don’t even know.
Thinking back, I realise that I encountered this attitude quite a lot when I was younger. I said I was bisexual (which is how I identified till I was 21 or so) and people would say oh, okay, that’s great, well you don’t really know until you’ve tried it, but good luck! Even people who were completely okay with LGBT folks, my family included, would put it that way. This may have been because I very aggressively tried to be cool as a kid, and cool included being girly and boycrazy, so I seemed rather obviously straight, but even so, I think all this really does is encourages kids to go out and have sex to prove you wrong (whether they’re ready or not). Now that I’m older, people assume that, because I say “I’m a lesbian,” that I’m sexually experienced with women. The fact is that I’m not really, mainly because of timing (my one serious relationship with a girl was in high school) and the fact that I’m very picky about relationships and enjoy being single, so I’m less experienced than some people my age. I don’t really mind that assumption so much, but I think that in general it’s a good rule of thumb not to assume. Sex and sexuality are obviously related, but there’s no correlation between sexuality and how much sex you have.
Just food for thought.
Radically Queer 