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(Music playing by Laila Nur- lyrics: "It took me a moment to figure out, but I never second-guessed
and I never had doubts that I was born to be a man...will you love me now that I am
a boy?)
I grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina and I lived there for 18 years and now I live
in Greensboro, NC
I grew up in Atlanta, Atlanta Georgia, but I've spent about the last three and a half
years living in Greensboro, NC.
I've lived in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, Kings Mountain, North Carolina, Statesville,
North Carolina, Camden, South Carolina, Columbia South Carolina, and now Durham, North Carolina.
My Dad was a Southern Baptist pastor so we moved around a lot.
I've always lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, except for a few years I lived in Wilmington
and also I tried a brief New York stint but that didn't work for me...at all.
I'm from Austin, Texas. I was born in Midland, Texas which... but I grew up in Austin and
went to college in Austin at University of Texas and just moved to Durham, North Carolina
about three years ago.
I'm from Durham. I've lived there basically my whole life with one small exception...I
lived in the rural mountains of North Carolina for about a year.
I'm a therapist and I work with a lot of teenagers and a lot of the them come to me from really
small towns because they have no resources. There aren't any ***-friendly therapists
there for them to see, and their families feel really isolated, and their schools don't
allow GSAs or QSAs. They don't know any other gay people. They've been harassed in their
schools, even physically assaulted, and so I think the South really needs a safe place
for youth to come together and meet each other and for families to be able to connect and
meet each other."
Spaces like QORDS that lift up *** youth resilience and *** youth power and also
a space where *** youth can have fun. I think that a lot of negative and harmful things
happen to us as *** and trans folks in the South, that, like...let's have some fun and
play music! I think that's going to be exciting and really great."
(Music playing by the Tomboys)
And so I think QORDS is going to be very helpful in creating *** spaces and safe spaces and
also in educating people on how to build community with one another and take that information,
go back to their hometowns, and hopefully work on creating those spaces there".
Just to reiterate, I think it's going to provide a strong sense of community that's just not
present anywhere else in the rural South or that's harder to find cause it is the South.
Being *** here is not as accepted as it is in other places, but we're striving to
get it there and hoping QORDS will be a step in that direction."
As a young person who didn't come out as trans until later in their life, a space where there's
a bunch of *** folks, um, is rare. um, and so to be like "oh, we're all *** and we're
all celebrating that and we're all holding it down and we're all building community"
i think is really exciting.
I think my years would have been more awesome. I would have had friends that would have had
access to a lot more resources like I did. I got to have privilege everywhere I went
and I would have loved for that opportunity to have also been available to all my friends.
So I think as a kid having gay friends, we all
would have been a lot happier and healthier and have had a lot less trouble when we were
growing up.
I think I would have had more *** friends. um, I would have known that *** people grow
up and have whole, fulfiling lives. I would have had *** adult role models which is
something that didn't exist to me until I moved away, um and now is really only something
that is just now becoming a reality to me. I think I would have felt like I had a say
and that my experience as a *** person mattered, and that it would have kind of been a place
to find solace from all the negativity and hatred that I was dealing with as a ***
person in the South.
(Music playing-Laila Nur, lyrics: we are only as tall as we think we are and equally small.
you can fall if you want to, but i cannot catch you. i'm unprepared.)
I'm really excited for their final showcase performance. We're gonna get to hear all the
hip hop and rock songs that they've written and they're going to perform it at a club
and it's going to be really rad.
and so I'm excited for like a crop of *** and trans youth from the South, making music,
learning more about themselves, building community, and becoming a little more armed to take on
the world and build the South that we need.
(Aleks B. spoken word: "We're ***, we're bois with an i, yes we're hella ***, yes
we live in the South, yes we come from small towns, yes we're here, yes we're now, I see
you strutting down the street, yes you homotastic ***".)