Lets get right to it,  Wednesday brought a lot of emotions for me as it did for many. I still can’t really articulate how I’m feeling. I’m surrounded by a thick fog of electric-shock clouds, floating through waves of fear, anger, frustration, despair. Amongst the national feelings of despair and hopelessness, I’ve seen so much light.  I’ve been thinking about the power of allies in the wake of all this. At my high school, I’ve never seen any sort of movement for people to stand with their queer peers, and even most queer people at my school don’t show solidarity within the community.On Wednesday in CVU, pride flag stickers were dispensed in mass. That day everyone became an ally, standing in solidarity with their LGBTQ peers. So, why now?  Now more than ever the nation is crying shouting out allyship in every sense. Not just support of the LGBTQ community, of people of color, of women, of Muslims – but the solidarity of a democratic nation against bigotry.  Now we’re angry, and we’re ready to fight for what’s right.

But what does this mean for us?   We’re going to have allies. We’ve got a lot of queer youth that are really really scared for their future. We’re going to have stories. We’re going to have an extra push this year from the community to make change, a community that wants to ensure a safe future for their children.

I’ve been researching the narrative arc of documentary storytelling this week and I’ve come up with a general storyline that I think will work for us (see picture attached). I think our first step is to get stories emailed to us in written form. This way, the story teller has time to organize and craft their story and we can choose our best story without interviewing a dozen people and having to watch 12+ hours of footage. We have so much to do in so little time, this will get us to where we want to be much quicker.  After we listen to the grievances of our queer student population, we can then craft our questions for the larger school community.This way we can understand the gaps between queer student’s understanding of allyship in schools and the perspective of those not dealing with these issues on a day to day basis.  From there, we’ll figure out what schools are already doing to help bridge these gaps and what other schools can do to take steps forward.

We’ve got a long year ahead of us with a lot of really hard work. But I’m fired up, I’m angry and I’m ready to make change.