Thoughts on "Models of Pride"

Today I (somehow) dragged myself out of bed at 7:30am to go to “Models of Pride,” which is an annual LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) youth conference held at Occidental College. A lot of the workshops were media-related, so I thought I’d just blog about my experience at the conference and some of the things I noticed.

Part One, or omg I’m old:
First of all, the description of the event says it’s a youth conference geared towards queer youth between the ages of 14 and 23. However, when I got there, I definitely felt that it was geared more towards high school students. When we were in small groups for an “icebreaker,” my group of 12 had about 3 people over 18. But everyone was really nice. But I still felt really old basically the whole time I was there.

Part 2, or workshops:
So I went to three workshops, all of which dealt with the media in some way. I think that nearly half of all of the workshops engaged with media. Anyway, first I went to a workshop that was (supposed to be) about gender stereotypes in advertising, how they uphold social norms, and what this means for transgender youth. Unfortunately, there was a girl in the group who wasn’t on the same page as the rest of us, in that she didn’t believe that these norms existed or that people really pay attention to the media. So basically, the workshop was spent trying to reason with her, which was pretty lame. I also went to a workshop on the importance of representing black queer people in history, and one about being out in the film/television industry. Of the three, I enjoyed the second one the best. It was the best put together, and it was also the most tech-savvy (fancy PowerPoint with music, oooh). That made me think about how the use of technology affects my assessment of someone’s presentation. During the first workshop, the presenters just cut out some magazine ads in front of us and clipped them to the chalkboard. The whole time they were doing this, all I could think was “Why didn’t they just scan them and make a PowerPoint?”, and I felt like a total techno-snob. It’s not that their information would be any less valid than the tech-savvy presentation, but it’s interesting to think about the connotations that different presentation methods carry (at least for me anyway).

Part 3, or the Myspace phenomenon:
Myspace was a big deal at the conference. My friend met a guy in our icebreaker group who she had some stuff in common with, and he immediately asked her for her Myspace name so he could add her as a friend. The conference itself also seemed to very aware of the fact that Myspace is very popular among queer teens. Aside from jokes by volunteers/group leaders about meeting people at the conference and adding them as Myspace friends, there was an entire workshop dedicated to Myspace, analyzing its impact. Also, there was a mini-address book in the back of the program to write down contact info for new friends, with spaces for name, number, email, and (you guessed it) Myspace address.