Story Behind the Story

When Shout Mouse began brainstorming the theme for our first Queer Youth Voices anthology, “love” rose to the top, as it always does.

 The editorial team thought of love as a generative concept, while also noting how queer love can be often misunderstood, silenced, feared, and oversimplified. And yes, “love is love,” but what might the full underbelly of that simple phrase look like, and how might it reveal the expansiveness of what queer love can be? More importantly, what can we learn from young people, specifically, as they practice, witness, fumble through, and imagine love for themselves? In June 2024, 26 queer youth submitted their poetry and prose, exploring just that.

Most of these young authors did not write in isolation. Community was a key ingredient for many as they wrote about the selected theme. Shout Mouse held 16 free writing workshops around the city and virtually, open to ALL queer-identifying youth between 13-24 years old. These workshops were held in partnership with not one, but four different DC-based community partners: The DC Center, Sasha Bruce Youthwork, SMYAL, and Split This Rock. Four partners whose work centers, or has vested care for, queer youth. Our partners supported recruitment and provided workshop space, where participants were able to drop in as they chose, weaving together a wide and vibrant tapestry of mission-aligned kin. 

During workshops, four queer story coaches guided the young people generously through aspects of the theme like self-love, friendship, romance, grief, and more. They provided youth with writings and other forms of art by queer artists that explored similar topics, inviting youth not to just listen to the work, but to engage with it. They would ask How might you implement similar tools in your own writing? or What did the pieces reveal to you about your own life? The discussion fed the young authors as they wrote forward. Then, at the end of the workshop, when participants shared what they had just written, they engaged with each other, using and building on the same questions the story coaches introduced before.

Each generative workshop laid a crucial golden brick, and led to four group revision workshops. Through trust and collaboration, these revision sessions allowed youth to sharpen each other’s work into its best shape for submission. Every moment of listening, engaging, teaching, sharing, and sharpening became a kind of love in themselves. And the result? A book the world needs: a collection of 41 poems, short stories, comics, and essays the authors titled The Light Looks Like Me: Words on Love from Queer Youth. 

Youth started writing this collection during an election year on purpose. At Shout Mouse, we strive to publish books that “meet the moment.” We look around, we read the headlines, we ask Whose stories are not being heard? 2024 marked another year of increasing anti-trans legislation. As I am writing this, 44 anti-trans bills have been signed into law since the beginning of 2024, impacting queer and trans representation in school curricula, dictating where trans people can go to the bathroom, and restricting access to gender-affirming care. Though over half of the young people who participated in the Queer Youth Voices programming were not even old enough to vote in an election where their livelihoods were at stake, they still had the ability to use their voices, to put pen to paper. 

This 2024 wave amplifies a post-2020 stark increase in the number of attempts to censor books. Between January 1 and August 31, 2024 alone, 1,128 unique book titles were challenged or at threat of being banned from schools and library services. The fact that the majority of the most targeted titles feature LGBTQIA+ characters and themes is no coincidence. 

Reading is an exercise in representation and imagination. When you see yourself in literature, you begin to imagine a world where you, as yourself, can not only exist, but thrive. You imagine a world where you are possible. You can imagine a whole universe that loves you.

That is exactly what the young authors of The Light Looks Like Me did. They carefully and deliberately built universes, on and off the page, where they and young people like them are loved. The universes that they deserve. And now, dear reader, you are in for a treat, because the words you are about to read, the heart beating inside of them, will make love rise in us all.