Greg Lockwood Scholarship

Stumbling across this scholarship, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief, visibility, of clarity. So often in my life does my identity as a queer youth feel like a taboo, an uncomfortable shift in posture, a subject that older generations in positions of power would love to overlook because it's easier to see me for all my other qualities. It's easy for my grandmother to point out a lesbian couple in disgust to me despite her knowing I'm one of them. It's easier for my dad to chuckle awkwardly when I tell his creepy friends that I'm not into boys when they ask unsolicited questions. It comes naturally for my family and workplace to graze over the fact that I'm queer and don't align with typical gender roles to feed their own concept of who it is acceptable to be. It's easier to erase queer youth because our existence is undesirable, it's not something these generations anticipate and therefore they respond with discomfort, with disapproval, with distaste. These reactions enfeeble me. They cause me to shrink and hide my personality among the flavors they can stomach, among the flavors that resonate with their limited palette. Thus, if I could see a change in this world, among so many, it would include eradicating this negative reaction to a person's visibility. It would mean existing as you are, as your regular, un-caricatured version of yourself without being given a second glance. You see, when I'm presenting a pitch to my internship director after having cut my hair short, I don't want him to deem me as overbearing and pushy. I don't want to have to shrink back into my femininity just to gain his approval. I want him to hear me out purely to hear me out, without a second thought to my presentation or affiliation with queerness. I don't want to have to be obsequious or have to suppress my flamboyance to align with his perception of an acceptable employee. I want to see a world where our colors, our backgrounds, our accents, our presentations are appreciated, but not sensationalized, not made out to be intimidating or disqualifying. A world where I don't have to leave out the fact that my rugby coach is married to another woman just to sustain my family's approval of my sisters and I playing on her team. I want the future of the world to stop getting hung up on and appalled by our identities and the way we inhabit our bodies, but to let every person exist in the form, expression, and presentation that brings them the most peace. For if we are capable of existing in peace and in relative control of our own self-concept, then we could concentrate our efforts into progressing to a place of sustainability and progress. In a world that doesn't try to put a ceiling on what you're allowed to accomplish as a member of x, y, or z, we wouldn't have to attend countless protests or spend hours of our remaining energy responding to ignorant people that wish to belittle us into submission to their world order. A change such as this is would set us free from the shadows we are encouraged to recede into between our moments of "normativity". This kind of change would allow us to confidently express our abilities as problem solvers, comforters, creatives, personalities, and hard workers which are currently devalued because of our identities and how we express our sexualities, cultures, disabilities, preferences, and lifestyles. As unfettered youth, we trudge on to see a change like this to its fruition.