This year, Sentinel hosted our Creative Writing Contest for the second time. Inspired by the GUARDS value statements, Sentinel students were tasked with writing an essay about what they cared about and why, a prompt taken directly from the UBC Personal Profile. Congratulations to Maya Krieger for being a winner the Sentinel Creative Writing Competition! The Sentinel Sun sat down with Maya to learn more about her essay, why she likes creative writing, and her favourite memories at Sentinel. We have also included her winning essay below.
1. What made you choose the subject you are writing about?
I kind of knew right away that I wanted to write about the influence of pop culture on me as a gay teenager, just because film, art and music are where I find the most comfort and joy. Then, it ended up morphing into another beast entirely, so I just let my brain take me where it wanted, which ended up being gay culture more than anything else. I’m really happy with where it ended up, though.
2. Why do you like Creative Writing/why do you think it is important?
I’ve always felt more able to express myself through written language than speaking, since I tend to ramble lots when I speak out loud, but I think that’s just because I’m so excitable. I think it’s important for everyone to have an outlet wherein they feel they can actually communicate what’s on their mind, and for a lot of more introverted people, I’ve noticed that’s writing more than anything else.
3. What is/was your favourite class at Sentinel? (This year or from high school overall)
I’ve really loved taking Human Geography over the past two years, it’s by far the most fun I’ve had in class. Anything to do with Humanities is definitely up there for me.
4. What is your favourite memory at Sentinel? (This year or from high school overall)
Everything is a total blur at this point, but all 5 years of theatre bring back fond memories.
5. What are your future goals? (personal or career wise)
I’d love to be a librarian or work in a museum! I want to stay in school for as long as I can, too. I don’t know, I’m not too picky, I’m good with going with the flow. I’d be into having a cabin, a garden and some cats with my future wife, though.
Growing up, I was consistently made aware of my parents’ support of me. When I
discovered my queerness at the age of twelve, there was no doubt in my mind that they would understand and accept me. However, as I would come to learn in the subsequent years, my real battle was with accepting myself. Normalizing my own sexuality after being subject to viewing systematic oppression and aggression over my entire lifetime has been a daunting task. Although reflecting inwards is important, I prefer to reflect backwards and outwards, into the rich cultural history of people like me, to find a home in my community’s culture, and more importantly,
myself.
For me, it started back in fan communities on places like Tumblr. Things like film,
television, and comic books were a place for me to focus my energy, as I was having a hard time truly connecting with my friends in the physical world. Instead, I made friends with whom I could choose what we had in common, some of whom I still keep in touch with to this day, and I found myself becoming more and more surrounded by LGBT+ people populating the crevices of the internet where I spent most of my time. One of the reasons I am still active in a lot of these communities today is the irreplaceable sense of home; I have yet to find any place that has that sheer amount of queer youth conglomerated in one place. Now that I’m growing up, however, I find that I spend less time in LGBT-dominant spaces, but more in examination of our culture in general, and in consumption of media that allows me to feel at home in my identity. Instead of projecting queerness onto media created by cisgendered heterosexual people for those same people, I find solace in reflecting upon a peculiar & particular niche of sapphic Renaissance artwork. I spend my weekends watching documentaries on queer-coded cinema of the 1940’s and 50’s as well as the impacts of Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson and STAR. I feel my bones shake with anger as I hear of the AIDS crisis from the mouths of those who survived through it, and I shed tears of laughter going through the most precise of lesbian humour accounts on Instagram (for real, there are grid charts depicting personality types based on the type of work boots we wear).
In particular, I enjoy focusing on today’s humour and the reclamation of queer narratives
that I can access through social media. I think that as there was a collective shift in consciousness from the late 80’s and early 90’s era of political activism into the 2000’s, LGBT+ youth quickly felt displaced from our elders, and the sense of a particular culture that nestled us away from the rest of the world was lost as we were meshed in with the greater society. Don’t get me wrong, of course we love our rights being supported by legislature, but I have witnessed with my own two eyes, during the time I have been on the internet, that there has been a desire to reclaim our sense of self. For an onlooker, our use of slurs once used against us and of stereotypes that we are now claiming for our own may appear bizarre and even detrimental, but for us it is a way of coming
into our own. There is also a massive consumption of media that (most likely) was not originally intended to be examined through an LGBT+ lens, but gay youth are taking pieces of music, film, and literature and molding them into something we can relate to and find refuge in.
There is a new form of LGBT+ icon taking form; one that is deeply personal &
individual, and one that does not need to be accepted by all facets of the community. Did you know that Taylor Swift is a modern lesbian icon to a bunch of young women and girls? Neither did I, until I stumbled upon a paper — that counted hundreds of pages, I may add — going into full analysis of her discography from a sapphic perspective, and the sub-culture it came from. It is also tremendously refreshing to see actual LGBT+ artists become a new generation of “gay icon”: people like Hayley Kiyoko, Laverne Cox, Troye Sivan, Janelle Monáe, Sophie and Harry Styles. I could seriously go on, but it is important to note that the days when the only LGBT+ icons we had were straight, cisgender, white women, have now passed. We have finally claimed a spot for ourselves in media, in culture, and we are taking up our own space, very visibly, for the first time in history. This is what brings me pure elation, and this is what I care about most.
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