speech i gave for a lgbtq graduation
It's hard for me to fully speak on what queerness has done for me. I have always been visibly queer (my parents can attest to this). When I was young I felt deeply uncomfortable with being restricted, and when I was related to girlhood by others I felt out of place. It was confusing, because neither traditional box fit me. I loved wearing dresses but I hated being a girl. I deeply enjoyed playing in the mud, but the idea of being a boy was abhorrent. I had no language for what I was feeling, and this made it hard to move forward. There is a quote I love a lot by Ocean Vuong, a queer author. He says “Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as a deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me; it made me curious; it made me ask “is this enough for me?””. That idea of an alternative is liberating. The idea that queerness in itself is an act of creation makes my heart soar. I visualize queerness as a crepuscular ray, a bright, sharp, and joyful dagger through bleak and foggy times. There is great injustice in the world, but the way we choose to present our queerness, the act of being queer, is one of the greatest protests. As I move through the next chapter of my life I want to choose to be bold and loud in my queerness. I want to do so in a way that helps other queer kids, queer kids who were like me and had no idea that there could be an alternative, find a way to be loud, to speak over the smog that seems to permeate our landscape. In the movie I Saw The TV Glow, a neon message sprawls across a wet pavement. It reads: “There is still time.”