Skitt: writing

I started writing for theater. I was in About Face Youth Theater, AFYT, which is a queer political activist group that speaks, educates, and explores issues through performance art. Mostly plays and shorts skits. I never acted or preformed. I was lighting, set, sound costumes, stage manager, ect. Anything that didn't require me to actually be on stage. I have a terrible case of stage fright. I was also assistant play write. Our director also wrote the plays. We would brainstorm topics for our next play during the spring. We would go to workshop every Saturday for 5 hours and talk about issues we saw effecting us. We would work on acting techniques, dance, and writing too. One spring our director asked us to keep a journal. That's how I started writing. She said write about everything because as much as our work is about making changes in our queer community it is also therapy to help us work through all the damage injustice has wrought upon us. We would read our journals if we wanted to aloud in workshop and that's where we got the idea to write What's the T. As spring went on she asked us to make videos about what the T means to us. She took everything we said everything we did and put it in to a play. On Sunday's or Friday's after school, if I didn't have sports practice, I would meet with her one on one and read what she had wrote and help edit and write. During the summer we would study our lines and work on scenes, set, costumes, the entire production. I remember because a lot of the time we didn't have air conditioning and it would get so hot we would all walk around topless. During the summer we would meet 4 days a week for 8 hours at a time. We spent a lot of time together and we all were very close. During the fall we would preform our play all across the country at different venues. The first couple off weeks we would stay in the city and do our play all over, even in schools. The rest of fall we would preform on Saturdays only. Each Saturday was a different place. We could only preform on Saturdays when we were on the road because we were all in school, different schools, but we had to be in school Monday through Friday. We were all between the ages of 12 and 18 so you know our parents wouldn't take kindly to us missing school for a play. A lot of our parents didn't know we were in a theater troop that wasn't part of our school. They defiantly didn't know it was an all gay group. We kept writing in our journals all through out what's the T, from beginning to end. At the end we took some of the money we made from the play and made a book, What's the T: The Real T. It was for us and our finical supporters. I think we only made like 50 copies. Any way we auctioned off one copy that was signed by all of us at About Face's annual Gala, Wonka Ball! The person who got it was the chief editor for a queer news paper here in the city. She loved the book so much she came to one of our workshops and offered us jobs as writers for the newspaper. Everyone else was an actor and declined but my director being the person that she is spoke up and said that I helped actually write the play and should write for her. I said I would if she would let me pick four other people. She asked me why four. I said the reason why the play was amazing and why you love the book is because its all these different points of view. It is a well rounded read about people who manage to find common ground despite our differences. I am only one perspective, you need a gay, lesbian, a trans* person, a queer, a white person, a lanti@, a Asian, and different classes. I know four people who can give you these different perspectives.  So me and my 4 friends kept writing for this newspaper. When I went to college I kept writing for the newspaper but not as often. I found that I would write what I saw and what it was like to be at a school that talks about diversity but really doesn't understand what it means. I wrote for my community there to the adminstration to give us a voice. Now that I am back in the city working with the same organization I use to when I was in highschool, and  running 3 of my own organizations I still write. I still write for the newspaper, me and the 4 others still do. I am still involved with About Face Theater, though no longer part of the youth program.  I wonder why I still write because I never did it for the money I get from the Newspaper. I write for you guys. I write so that you guys know there is someone out there who has gone through the same thing you are going through, or something kinda similar. That there is community out there you just have to find it, or create it. And I write for myself, because I started writing for art therapy and never really stopped.