queer youth

Put This on the {Map}: East King County

mandy — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Directed by Megan Kennedy, Sid Jordan Peterson

Part education, part cinema, all honesty. Put This on the {Map}: East King County gives a youthful face to gender and sexuality through its twenty-six compelling high school narrators. Filmed in Washington State on the east side of Seattle, where there is seemingly no visibility of queer youth, the strength of these young people to comes out on camera. Celebrating who they are is astonishing for any high schooler, let alone a queer one in a community where they are often isolated.

With the explicit goal of “reteaching gender and sexuality," Put This on the {Map} opens by defining the term gender itself. Some of the more useful educational exercises include a visual of a football field to explain the spectrum of gender and clarifying sexuality and gender through personal stories. Biology versus gender is difficult to grasp for many adults in our heteronormative society, and this film explains it to youth in simple yet never patronizing terms.

Shifting from an educational lens to the stories of the youth dealing with many familiar themes like depression, drug abuse, and bullying, one that was especially powerful was of a young, FTM transman explaining the challenges of returning to his school among the classmates who previously knew him as a girl in middle school. The dating difficulties segment in particular seemed really useful and unique. It provided a space to not feel so alone while going through all the trouble of self-discovery and disclosure, and still not being able to find a date.

From the personal to the political, the youth in this film move to speak directly to a wider audience. Peers, parents, friends, families, and the universe are called upon not for pity but receptivity and support, even if folks aren't sure whether a young person truly needs their help. Harboring wisdom beyond their years resulting from deep self-exploration, the young people seek a world where all people can marry in any state, bathrooms no longer succumb to assumptions of sexual violence if a woman’s pants are down within three feet of a man, and a country where comprehensive sex education is the norm. Obvious to some, but it is the privilege of hope amongst youth that gives it so much power. Watching a teenager explain genderqueer as limiting is absolutely phenomenal.

You can find this thirty-four-minute film at www.putthisonthemap.org, with other educational tools soon to follow.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, February 28th 2011

Leading Ladies

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:58:00 +0000

Directed by Erika Randall Beahm, Daniel Beahm

It may seem quite an impossibility, but the film Leading Ladies is, simply put, a quietly revolutionary dance musical. While most dance musicals (think Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) center on the boy-meets-girl heterosexual love match, Leading Ladies is a beautifully wrought girl-meets-girl story. It is simultaneously a dance musical, coming-of-age story, and coming-out narrative. The power of the film comes from its ability to maintain the generic conventions of the story while completely rejecting the hetero-normativity that is typically the narrative thrust of the genre. What’s perhaps even more amazing is that Leading Ladies succeeds at thwarting convention within a conventional structure while simultaneously being a whole lot of damn fun. Lesser films would sink under such weight.

Helmed by first-time directors Erika Randall Beahm and Daniel Beahm, this joyous film tells the story of the Campari women. The matriarch of the family is ballroom-dancing stage mom Sheri, played by Latin and Ballroom Champion Melanie LaPatin. Sheri has two daughters: like-minded drama queen and dancing champion Tasi (Shannon Lea Smith), and Toni (Laurel Vail), Tasi’s practice partner and the wallflower of the family. The film centers on Toni’s relationships, particularly with the emotionally volatile Tasi, and an unexpected romantic attachment to Mona (Nicole Dionne), a bubbly and outgoing woman Toni meets at a dance club. While LaPatin’s acting is a bit stiff, Smith’s neurotic and self-obsessed Tasi is played to high-pitched perfection. Vail might be the real star of this film, however, as she says more with her eyes than many actors can express with a word. She artfully plays the Ugly Duckling, the quiet witness to familial squabbles and the glue that keeps the Camparis together.

Leading Ladies has an ebb-and-flow, alternating between slow and quietly stirring scenes and vibrant, fast-paced dance numbers (most notably a hysterical and boisterous number set in a grocery store). The heart of this film beats loudly and quickly, and it leaves the viewer invigorated and deeply moved. To learn more about her hopes for the film, its generative process, and the ideological concerns that lead to its creation, I recently spoke with co-director Erika Randall Beahm.

Beahm co-wrote the film with Jennifer Bechtel, a friend and LGBT youth advocate in Champaign, Illinois, and Bechtel was struggling to find mainstream films that spoke to the young gay community. As Bechtel and Beahm perceived it, most gay and lesbian cinema tends towards violence or explicitness, while mainstream cinema features gay characters as “the sidekick.” Beahm and Bechtel thus sought to create a “family-centered gay and lesbian film for the mainstream market.” Their hope is that Leading Ladies provides gay youth with a positive portrayal of gay romantic love and thus “open a dialogue within themselves” and perhaps between gay youth and their families.

The film eschews aggressive and explicit representations of gay love for a romantic and “joyful falling in love which... straight kids get to experience in movies all the time.” Indeed, Leading Ladies treats its same-sex couple as any movie musicals’ heterosexual pairing: they meet, they dance, they fall in love. The romance is beautifully articulated through an artful juxtaposition of two dance sequences. Toni and Mona’s meeting is shot like a typical dance movie sequence—bright lights, loud music, and overhead shots looking down on the dancers. This film could be Dirty Dancing, if it weren’t for the same-sex couples dancing on stage and in the audience. Indeed, this is the goal of the film: to illustrate that dance (and by extension, romance and love) is the same for same-sex couples as it is for heterosexual partners. Toni leads Mona through a raucous, enthusiastic dance, and as convention dictates, the two find love while dancing. In a beautiful inversion of this sequence, we next find Toni in Mona’s lush apartment, where the more romantically experienced Mona takes the lead in the dance of romance. The lovers’ embrace is gorgeously shot in sensual blush tones and shadow.

For choreographer and dancer Beahm and youth musical programmer Bechtel, dance served as an obvious choice of backdrop for the love story. Beahm choreographed the film’s dances with Melanie LaPatin and Benji Schwimmer, the former So You Think You Can Dance! winner who also plays Toni’s best friend in the film. For Beahm, dance has an inherently transformative power: “There’s this kind of kinesthesia with dance that gets people to literally be moved on a physical level, and I believe also on an emotional and intellectual level.” The love scene between Mona and Toni, for example, is highly choreographed to match the non-diegetic music; Beahm suggests that this emphasis on “energy shifts… and the musicality” of the scene helps the spectator “lose sight of this being a gendered duet, and it just becomes two people moving together, falling in love.”

By emphasizing the movement and musicality of the scene, then, Beahm hopes to ease the fear of spectators who are uncomfortable with same-sex coupling and perhaps open a space for internal dialogue within the spectator: “For people who might have a hard time seeing two women... make out, it becomes this kind of transference of two bodies going through these really emotional and tender but also choreographed spaces, and so gender becomes less important.” By shifting the spectator’s focus from gender distinction to the movement of the body the film illustrates how little gender matters and how love—like dance—is a universal language. Thus the film utilizes dance to open up a space for shifting “people out of the fear they may feel if they’re watching from an outside perspective.”

Though the idea of dance as a catalyst to ideological and personal transformation may seem unusual, Beahm is quick to point out that dance has often added a “queer element” to the movie musical. In West Side Story, for example, the spectator sees groups of men “snapping and skipping” and yet the dance isn’t “sexualized, it’s charged and it’s activated.” Dancing is particularly subversive in moments of unison dancing, she suggests, when members of both sexes dance the same movements, suggesting a unity of the sexes and the democratization of the body. Leading Ladies takes this democratization one step further, rejecting the hetero-normative ballroom dance structure of male lead and female follow and replacing it with same-sex couplings. In doing so, Beahm simultaneously feeds off of the democratizing nature of dance while rejecting the rules of a dance form that reinforces gendered performance.

It is the inherent queerness in dance that Beahm finds so appealing and in tune with her views on feminism. For her, dance and feminism are “compatible” because they are both “hard to pin down” terms; their “slipperiness” as terms allows them to create spaces for dialogue and questioning. She likes her feminism to work “from the inside out,” enjoying the notion of becoming part of a system, and breaking it down from within. This is why her personal mantra is the cheeky suggestion to “wear pearls to the country club and then talk dirty.” Ultimately, Leading Ladies represents a filmic expression of this mantra—by placing non-conventional characters within a conventional generic structure, the film wears its pearls but then lets out a glorious, enthusiastic expletive as it sits down to dinner. Swearing has never been so much fun.

Written by: Joanna Chlebus, July 15th 2010

Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America

admin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:49:00 +0000

By Mary Gray

New York University Press

The town I grew up in—Athens, Georgia (pop. 100,266)—is generally known for two things: indie music (a la REM, Elephant 6, and Kindercore) and the University of Georgia, both of which play a major role in maintaining the town's liberal leanings. However, Athens doesn't lean too far. It's still a place where college football dominates from Labor Day to Christmas, and if you're not in church on Sunday morning, you are assumed to be riddled with sin.

Coming up in an environment rife with contradiction, I learned a lot about peaceful co-existence through plausible deniability. (He's not gay; he's just eccentric.) Sure, we had an annual human rights festival where the young and old listened to people like UGA law professor Eugene Wilkes speak about the need for student activism to combat the world's ills, but mostly they were there for the music. One can only ask so much from a small town in the South, and once my identity as a radical queer feminist began to set in, Athens began to feel stifling. So as soon as I was able to, I did as gay rights icon Harvey Milk instructed, and fled to the nearest city.

The city, however, was not the activist paradise I'd imagined it would be. I did find a lot of feminists and socialists and anti-racists and queers with whom I could link arms and "fight the good fight," but I lost that sense of community I'd always known at home. What good was knowing someone would show up at a protest if you couldn't count on them to show up when your car dies and you need to get to work? What good were late night conversations about Spivak when you couldn't tell someone you were late with the rent (again)? I knew I'd lost something in the transition from small to large, and while I was happy with what I'd gained, I still questioned whether it was enough. I wondered if it were possible to reconcile being in a place where no one is a stranger with the benefits one gains when one is able to be anonymous.

Enter Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. I recently interviewed Mary Gray for WireTap Magazine after reading her groundbreaking new book about the myths and mysteries of being queer in small town America. The book resonated with me deeply, as Gray (herself a former queer rural youth) explains how the current gay rights movement excludes rural LGBTQ issues and constructs a queer identity that increases rural queer invisibility. She provides strategies for altering the course to address their needs without requiring re-location (a luxury that is not always attainable or desired) or conformity to a falsely homogeneous queer standard.

Out in the Country was like a breath of fresh country air—just what this Georgia girl needed.

Cross-posted to Bitch Magazine's On the Map blog

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, September 4th 2009

Spell Albuquerque: Memoir of a “Difficult” Student

admin — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:27:00 +0000

By Tennessee Reed

AK Press

I found Tennessee Reed’s memoir of her educational and professional life to be inspiring and informative. In her memoir, Reed shows the difficulties that learning and physically disabled students encounter in the public and private educational system, and provides suggestions about what can be done to combat racism, institutional authority, and insensitivity.

Between the age of eighteen months and two years of age, Reed, the daughter of writer/choreographer Carla Blank and novelist Ishmael Reed, was diagnosed with a speech and language-based communication disorder, aphasia. Similar to a condition that stroke and head trauma victims experience, this condition prevented Reed from developing normal speech patterns. In addition to aphasia, Reed had difficulty with reading comprehension, three dimensional perception, and tasks that require small muscle control and hand eye coordination; she was also diagnosed with a math disability and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in 1998.

Despite having several learning and physical disabilities, Reed was able to navigate through the school system from pre-school through graduate school. In Spell Albuquerque: Memoir of a “Difficult” Student, she writes about her experiences as a student, a published writer, and a candidate for the Oakland, California School Board.

Reed encountered difficulty throughout her educational experience, due to insensitive administrators and inexperienced instructors. She gives several examples of being humiliated and ridiculed by school principals, classroom teachers, and other students when she did not perform according to their expectations. As a child, Reed was powerless against the inconsistent behavior and teaching methods of her instructors. But as a teenager and as an adult, she began to question and challenge her teachers and professors. When she encountered racism in addition to discrimination based on her disabilities, she fought back against assumptions that others made about her.

Despite her difficulties with the traditional educational system, Reed became a success. A talented writer, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Mills College; worked as a tutor in the AmeriCorps program between undergraduate and graduate school; and has published five books.

In 2008, she decided to run for a campaign for a seat on the Oakland School Board. The focus of Reed’s campaign was to inform voters of the issues that affected minority, poor, and learning-disabled students. Specifically, she focused on standardized tests, textbooks and curriculum, overcrowded classrooms, school closures, the need for physical education and the arts, creativity, charter schools, and teacher credentials. Although Reed did not win the seat, she received ten percent of the vote and was able to put issues affecting minority, poor, and disabled students on the table.

Reed demonstrates in her memoir that at times minority, poor, disabled, and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transsexual students may have to work harder to succeed in society and she provides a great example of what can be accomplished when we focus on students’ strengths.

Written by: Rekesha Spellman, July 7th 2009

Queer Youth Cultures

admin — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:46:00 +0000

Edited by Susan Driver

SUNY Press

Queer youth are often absent from discussions about adolescents, popular culture, and even the queer community. Susan Driver, an advocate and expert on LGBTQ youth, puts together a thoughtful and diverse collection of work that gives voice to queer youth without pathologizing them. Queer Youth Cultures, edited by Driver, is broken down into three parts: selections about building queer youth cultures and community, the impact of popular culture on queer youth, and queer youth political advocacy.

My favorite essay, by far, was Judith Halberstam’s “What’s That Smell?: Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives.” Halberstam, a rock star in the world of queer theory, presents various queer subcultures (dyke punk music, drag king performances, slam poetry, etc.) and discusses the importance of archiving these subcultures without exploitation. The reading also features some pieces of Halberstam’s theories found in her groundbreaking book-length work In a Queer Time and Place.

Mark Lipton’s “Queer Readings of Popular Culture: Searching [To] Out the Subtext” is an in-depth study of how queer youth are capable of creating queer storylines and characters out of seemingly heterosexual popular culture. Since Lipton originally researched this topic in 1990 and again towards 2000, it is interesting to see the progression with the addition of Will and Grace and The L Word—texts that actually include LGBTQ characters.

But not every reading in this collection is theoretical in nature, which makes Queer Youth Cultures that much more accessible and important. “Redefining Realities Through Self-Representational Performance,” by Jama Shelton, features best practices on how queer youth can harness their own experiences and individual voices to build their self-esteem. Shelton discusses the artistic programming at Houston-based LGBTQ youth organization H.A.T.C.H. (Houston Area Teen Coalition of Homosexuals), and shares powerful examples from works created by youth in the program.

Queer Youth Cultures is a beautiful photography collection by Cass Bird that gives visibility to queer youth. I particularly enjoyed “I Look Just Like My Daddy” and “I Look Just Like My Mommy”—two juxtaposed photographs of one youth displaying both typical feminine and masculine characteristics. Since queer youth are often judged based on their appearance, I appreciate the editor’s decision to include photography in this text.

Written by: Kerri Kanelos, March 22nd 2009