Twinged: The 2007 Gay Straight Youth Empowerment Summit

The drive to Kansas City is frustrating. It feels like losing to a farm. But that doesn't make the flash-frozen flats of nappy wheat dotted with old bare-black cotton wood trees any less beautiful. They are the forgotten surprises of loss.

My girlfriend and I had stayed up late, typing.

We drifted out of bed, early, making mandatory doggy concessions: puffs of white breath standing in the back yard. Then I cooed in a haze of hurried encouragement when the new puppy came side-trotting my way.

Then the drive. And silence. The news. A singer had died. Odd election time reparations. The low, blinding Eastern sun and smokestacks with clouds like icicles - frozen in place.

At the summit the breakfast hall was all color. Young people armed in periwinkle, robin's egg, fuscia, tangerine and sunshine mingled beneath UMKCs bending murals by Thomas Hart Benton. One young person sat stitching an ancient wintertime panacea: a rainbow scarf. He sheathed his knitting needle in his large natural hair to shake hands with a new friend then again to take a sip off his purple juice box.

The group, crazy-haired and gender-fucked moved to the next building. The first speaker was my friend Wick, who is 20 years old. When he was in high school his parents found a photograph of him kissing his boyfriend. They threw him out of his home. It was when he was living off the streets of his small hometown in Missouri at 16 with only a part-time job for money and a high school as a guarantee of shelter that he decided to brave death threats and form a Gay-Straight Alliance at his school.

"We love you," shouted a girl in a snap-pea green sweater and dark glasses. She is the leader of his fan club.

When I first met Wick he told me, laughing, that when he is walking home at night men stop their cars and call to him. They think he is a woman. More accurately, they think he is a female prostitute. And those of us who listened and know the danger in passing for the other sex shifted a little in our shoes.

"What do you do?" I finally asked.
"I keep walking." He said.

He has weighed the choices. It is safer to be a female prostitute and ignore a John than to be a gender-bending fag that has had the audacity to turn on a straight man.

After Wick's speech we broke into groups. Our mission: design the ideal high school and draw an icon of what we bring to the school to make it a better place. In my group one youth brought ears, to listen to others with, one brought arms, to hold people in, one brought a "really big fucking mouth," to speak up for the people who couldn't speak for themselves. Our school had a lot of windows and an atrium in the middle. The center-piece of the atrium was a fountain in the shape of a peace sign with a giant disco ball. We added a library organized by the LGBTqIQA (and XYZ) decimal system. We added a free expression art and music room, a theatre, a truth in history department, a free-trade coffee stand, a public bath house and a 24-hour safe house. We decided to let "old people" attend our school as well.

Our group presented first, then we sat. And group after group got up and showed their schools all resplendent in glorious peace signs, rainbows, theatre and art departments, outdoor class rooms and more peace signs. This is what the youth at the 2007 Gay Straight Youth Empowerment Summit wanted: peace, acceptance, truth and art in their educations. ("And sex," says The Activist, raising her eyebrows.)

If only we could give it to them.