Winner
E., 16, from Vancouver writes about T Magazine’s “The 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature”:
My bookshelf at home is a glass closet; Woolf and Wilde next to anthologies about Stonewall.
But it wasn’t always like this. My love for queer literature started with my ninth grade English teacher recommending Whitman and Lorde. Poems printed out. pocketed so they couldn’t be seen by anyone else. The shove of a book into my bag when met with a “whatcha reading?”; paperback covers creased with shame.
I read “Stone Butch Blues” in my tenth grade socials class, slamming my laptop shut any time anyone asked what I was doing. “Giovanni’s Room” was the only Baldwin my school library didn’t have, and my face was warm when I asked our librarian to buy it for me.
Pride overtook my shame, eventually, but I spent a lot of my (relatively short) life feeling alone in my body and experience as a queer person. Like the writers in this article talked about, I found something so powerful in literature’s capacity for helping me phrase my thoughts and shape my understanding of my identity.
Today, when someone asks me what I want to study in university, I’ll tell them I want to minor in Gender Studies. I’m usually met with laughter, which is why I want to study it in the first place. These stories, though formative to me and to the six interviewees of this article, are obscure to most. So is our history. I wonder what growing up would have felt like if I or anyone else had been told more stories about girls like me.