Laura’s Team Pick
We’re not the only ones who are excited about Pariah. In anticipation for its release, Salon and New America Media are running a series of coming stories from minority and immigrant queer teens and young adults. I’m going to be honest and admit that I was expecting the ratio of gay boy to lesbian to trans* stories to hover somewhere around 83:6:1, but so far I’ve got nothing but good things to say. Of the stories we’ve published so far, we’ve seen impeccably well-written stories from an Raul Rodriguez, Raul Rodriguez, undocumented Peruvian man, Jamilah King, the African American daughter of a single woman, Andres Garcia, a Catholic Latino teenage boy, and Jean Melesaine, a Mormon-raised Samoan American woman. It’s the revolution in almost-nearly-mainstream media!
“If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of them, ‘No, you stay home tonight, you won’t be welcome,’ because I’m going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black. Or I’m going to a Black poetry reading, and half the poets are anti-homosexual, or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.”
