The cadence of queer voices | Maura Lee Bee | TEDxCUNY

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Queer voices are a novelty in the literary canon, but aren't exactly hard to come by. Writer Maura Lee Bee discusses how, if we pay attention to these voices, we can connect with the characters and each other on a deeper level.

Maura Lee Bee is an English and Media Studies major at Queens College. She is a writer based out of New York City with a focus on queer narrative. Her work has been featured in the How We See It... book series, a collection of independently published books whose proceeds benefit charities. With her theatrical background, she writes to stimulate the senses, often manipulating language and form in order to do so. She is currently working on a collection of poetry from the LGBTQIA perspective. She also works in advocacy, teaching people how to create safe spaces for the LGBTQIA community, as well as expanding the nonprofit theatre group she co-founded, NPTC.

"Finding shelter"

He built a house around him
made of sticks and wood

and a sheet from the hall closet
that mother told him no.

And he went to grab one from the dryer,

and his brother said, "Mom will kill you,"
and Peter said, "Good, let her."

Because the thing about Peter
is he was never afraid.

He built a house around him made of
cardboard and wood from the garage.

And his father never blew it down,

even though it shivered when Peter
crawled out of it and said,

"Look, Dad. Look what I made."

And his father got down
on one knee and said,

"Son, you can't fit your life
into tiny boxes."

One memory that really sticks out to me

is when I was about six years old,

and there was another boy
in my first grade class

who had gotten a tap dancing solo.

And he was very excited to tell
the rest of our classmates.

And the rest of the kids in my class,
unfortunately, started making fun of him.

So little six-year-old me,
with all the voice I can muster

stomped her foot and said,
"Hey, tap dancing boys are cool."

And what sticks out about this memory

isn't the fact that I thought
tap dancing boys were cool,

but it was the fact
that I was a very timid child,

and I couldn't even stand up
for my own self,

yet here I was, standing up for
some other boy in my class.

Little background: I didn't grow up
in a very traditional household.

My mom was the only mother
at Girl Scouts with a Mohawk.

Both of my parents were artists,

and you could very much say
that I was not a child who fit into

any sense of what
we would call the norm.

So, needless to say,
I got made fun of: a lot.

And I didn't have very many friends.

But, in order to deal with that,
I read a lot.

And I became friends
with characters in books.

I became friends with Hermione Granger
and Junie B. Jones and many more.

And all of this reading inspired me

to want to become a writer
from a very young age.

And as a writer, I focused mostly
on queer youth narrative.

I'm going to break this down:

queer meaning people,
characters, or voices

that don't identify
as heterosexual or cisgender,

meaning not identifying as the gender
that you were assigned at birth.

And in my writing,

I focus on the ages between 11 and 10,
as young as that,

or as old as 25 and 26.

And we all know that reading is often
associated with this form of escapism.

A lot of us use reading
to escape our reality.

I did. I'm sure many of you did as well.

And, there's another form of escapism
in the time that we live in,

which is celebrity culture.

You know, and we live in a time
where we can go online

and find out anything we want to know
about any singer, actor, entertainer

In a matter of seconds.

And it's wonderful
that we have out queer celebrities

who are active within the community.

We have Neil Patrick Harris,
we have Ellen DeGeneres,

we are also, luckily, live in a time

where we have
queer characters on television.

We have Mitch and Cam from Modern Family,
Callie and Arizona from Grey's Anatomy,

and both lists continue to go on.

But the difference between queer
youth narrative and celebrity culture,

there's a big difference.

In celebrity culture, you have
these stories of these older celebrities,

but a lot of their coming out stories
are from 20 years ago

--so they're not experiencing it now--

and their experience may be very different
because of the time that they lived in.

Whereas queer youth literature,
in a book, the character never ages.

Harry Potter was always 14
in Goblet of Fire,

and will continue to be 14
for the next 20 years.

He doesn't age in that book.

Also the fact you don't often hear about

young people coming out in the public eye.

You don't hear about young celebrities
coming out of the closet.

And there's a couple reasons for that.

Often they get brushed under the rug,

and they don't come out
until they're much older,

or they come out in the public eye

and authority figures
do not respect their identity.

Their authenticity is often
questioned and doubted.

And for a young person to hear that
from an authority figure:

a parent, a relative, or even
a stranger on the street,

it makes you think,

"Well, if they don't respect
this famous person's identity,

how can they respect mine?"

And the age thing and the experience,

experience and having them coincide,

having someone around your age
experience the same thing you are;

you can connect.

They can be inspired by the stories of
Neil Patrick Harris and Ellen DeGeneres,

but they can't connect.

And it's a necessity
to be able to connect.

So that they can move forward
in their lives

and feel as if there is someone else
going through the same thing they are.

I decided to become a writer
at a very young age.

I was about 13, and at the time,
I was still reading a lot.

And I read a mixture of voices:
queer voices, non-queer voices,

and I was lucky enough to have access
to all of these different types of voices.

And deciding to be a writer
at a very young age,

I was going through a very difficult time.

And these books were helping me

get though questioning my identity

and discovering who I was
as a young person

In my more formative years.

And I made the decision
because I had felt this obligation,

I felt an obligation to my future readers,

that I needed to give back this sense of
hope and longing that reading gave me.

Which is why I started writing
"Peter and the Concrete Jungle".

"Peter and the Concrete Jungle"
is a project

that I've been working on
for about 6 months,

and it's a collection
of poetry divided into two parts.

The first half are all third person poems
about Peter, a trans man,

and his experience through his childhood,
and his transition, and his adulthood.

And the second half is about Wendy,
a young queer woman,

through her childhood
and her experience coming out,

and their relationship together.

And the reason I started writing it
was to create this understanding

for people who may not be familiar with
the struggles of the LGBT community

to be able to understand
and empathize with these characters.

So I played a lot
with visual form and language.

All of Peter's poems
are right-hand justified,

all of his poems in his section.

And many of you are probably not used to
reading on the right-hand side of the page

and it would probably be
very uncomfortable.

That discomfort is to mimic
the sense of discomfort

that he feels within himself
through much of his life.

All of Wendy's poems, while they're all
left-hand justified as we may be used to,

all of her poems are
a little more chaotic.

There are no form poems,
and most other poems lack punctuation

because her experience, unlike Peter's,
is a little bit more chaotic,

and a little bit more disastrous.

And as I was writing this project,

I brought some poems
to my professor to review them,

and she said to me and my classmates,

"There aren't many voices
like this out there.

And this really needs to turn
into something much bigger."

And it did.

And while I was writing it,
I felt this excitement

about writing it
and being closed to finishing it,

but at the same time,
I felt this frustration and anger

and I was very upset because it's not
that there wasn't a lack of queer voices,

it's just that they weren't talked about.

they weren't accessible to everybody,
they weren't respected.

And I continued writing, pursuing that,
pursuing this connection

not just with the LGBT community,
but with a larger community of readers.

And we all have these connections:

to each other, to characters
in books from our childhood,

to characters in books
we may have read last week.

And maybe if we listen
to these connections,

we would be able to understand

that it's a necessity
to have this variation of voices,

and that all of these voices
should be respected and listened to

because these voices all give us
the sense of understanding,

of longing, of hope that we need
to keep going as people.

And should we listen to these voices,

maybe we could change
and have an impact on each other,

and on the world,

But only if we pick up the book,
and listen to the voice long enough.

"Grocery shopping"

His hands corrode the wheel
with the sweat of ancient summers.

I can't tell
if the slick water lines are rivers

leading from his temples
or just under his eyes.

We put away the oranges,
the bananas, the whole wheat bread.

I don't want to talk about it.

And he wrings a dishrag
between his wrists and thumbs

mourning a conversation
that's just at the corner of his mouth.

The cheese goes in the shelf.

"That's where it always goes,"
he says, "And where it always will be."

He pulls out two slices,
kills the last of the rice milk;

tells me not to throw away the juice.

Not yet.

And he pours me a glass
as he examines the date again.

Garage sale plates clank
on the table from his mother's.

I don't want to talk about it.

And I comply, and he pats
his chest twice to feel its still there.

Thank you.

(Applause)