When the participants lists came out for the World Conference on Youth, ahead of my trip to Sri Lanka last month, there was some detective work done to identify the other Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. Safe to say there's always plenty in common and lots to talk about simply by being involved in an international youth movement, let alone the same one, but it is always particularly exciting/reassuring when you reaslise your not the only participant from the LGBTI/Queer community. One of the other Girl Scout facilitators runs a blog entitled ScOUT of the Closet giving the stories of Girl Scouts with diverse sexual orientations and gender expressions, you can read about it here (http://scoutofthecloset.blogspot.co.uk) and asked me to contribute an entry after the conference. Here are my answers to her questions.
• How do you self-identify?
Queer. I find it difficult to separate out my gender identity and my sexual orientation as I believe they are interlinked and relational. Queer is the word I feel like I can claim to mean what I want it to. I don't believe in any binary system and other labels would just be too restrictive in their accepted definitions.
• Your involvement and role in Girl Guiding?
I have been a member since I was 5 years old, making that nearly 19 years in total now. In the UK you move through the sections of Rainbow, Brownie, Guide and Senior Section, the last of which I will remain a member of until my 26th birthday. I have been volunteering to help run sessions for younger members since I was 12 and I organised games and activities for the Rainbows and Brownies who met in the same Church hall. Since I was 14 I've enjoyed the international scope of guiding and scouting and I'm proud to say it has taken me on travels across four continents and enabled me to see the diversity of the world around me. I've taken on roles at a regional (the UK equivalent of state) and national levels as well as with the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. A lot of my roles and activities have focused on getting young peoples views heard in decision making.
• Describe your first and/or pivotal romantic or intimate experiences, your crushes, your moments of longing or confusion.
The most pivotal relationship would have to be the one with my wife - and ironically Guiding was more of a hindrance than a help in this case! Come the end of my Bachelors degree I was volunteering the majority of weekends and took on a full time internship for three months in our Regional Girlguiding Office. It was for the duration of the summer just outside the city where I would start my Masters the following September. It's safe to say that summer I lived and breathed girlguiding, I guess it's perhaps the closest thing I could have done in the UK to the US Girl Scout summer camps where it fills almost every moment of every day. Come September I literally went straight from the office to my university and my weekends were a return to the guiding world that I couldn't just put down.
Little did I know it at the time but my future partner, an American, and I were paired up in one of our first sessions to interview each other and subsequently do introductions to the rest of the class. Mango will forever have to be my favourite food as the first thing that came to my mind during that session. Apparently after the session she tried to catch up with me, but I was oblivious as I hurried off to the sports fair to sign up for the ladies rugby team (a decision I did regret later I the year). We were then partnered for a group project, I pulled my weight in getting the work done but was unavailable for the Sunday Lunch work session where friendships were forged as I was off on another guiding weekend.
Between Guiding and the fellowship that was paying for my studies, I had very little time to socialise with my course mates really until May of the following year - the end of the rugby season. I had joined the rugby team thinking that was where I would make good friends - that is what had happened during my undergraduate years. But I should have realised that they were not friends that would last earlier on.
In the November of my MA year a friend I had known for just a couple of months (not from uni) killed himself. He was trans and bisexual and we had met at a leadership course for LGBT young people. He was fiercely intelligent, studying for a doctorate in chemistry at Cambridge, and should have had a bright future ahead. It hit me hard. I should have known then that I was not relying on the right people for friendship and support. In fact it wasn't until I mentioned the loss of my friend in a seminar, where I was speaking about personal baggage being brought to an exhibition, that anybody asked if I was ok. Only one particular person did. After this I began talking to her more, but it was a few more months until she grew so impatient with me she asked me out for a drink and I finally took a hint.
We had dinner as a group of course mates, drank a lot of wine and I walked her home. We talked until sunrise and I think it's safe to say that we've been almost inseparable ever since. In the little over two years of our relationship so far we've negotiated a transatlantic relationship, tried to understand the US and UK visa systems, lived in the US, brought our dog to live with us in the UK, held a civil partnership ceremony and are currently planning a wedding in the US next year.
I think the lesson from this for me has to be one that is a quote from Baden Powell - "Look wide. And when you are looking wide, look wider still!" Restricting our view to just one thing, to one area, even when that thing is guiding or scouting itself, will mean we miss things, that we don't embrace the full diversity of the world around us. In my case it was nearly missing out on meeting the singly most positive influence in my life. I thought my past experience taught me the right course to follow to build friendships and find support, but situations change and the only way we continue to learn and develop ourselves as a person is by trying new things, going to new places and meeting new people.
• Describe any transformations that occurred in a Girl Scout/Girl Guide context.
I have always been told I was a quiet, shy child, and guiding was the key influence that turned me from that to the leader I am today. It was a background activity that introduced me to new things during my childhood until, at the age of 13, I dropped out of school to be home educated after becoming suicidal due to bullying. I swapped the formal curricula of school for the non-formal frameworks of guiding as I structured my learning through earning badges and getting more involved. This wasn't an overnight transformation, but being a young leader with younger girls helped to build up my confidence. I started going to a senior section group too and discovered international opportunities.
In 2004 I went to Switzerland, the youngest amongst a county group and just a matter of months after I had left school behind me. In late 2005 I was selected to go to the Netherlands with a region (state) group the following summer. Then in late 2006 I set up a conservation project at a local heritage site for my fellow guides and senior section members - having been inspired by an activity at a county camp. In early 2007 I trained to be a peer educator, learning how to deal with my emotions around bullying at the same time as learning how to run activities to help others. I completed awards, went to local, county, regional and national camps and residential events, and in 2008, at the age of 17, volunteered myself to chair the region's youth forum.
That was a role that I held for 4 and a half years. Being presented with an award for commitment to youth participation at one of the large scale events I organised was one of the proudest moments of my guiding career. (My other proudest moments include speaking at the United Nations).
Without guiding I do not know where I would be or what may have happened in my life. But I know I wouldn't be here: planning my future with my incredible wife, preparing to embark on a PhD studying museums, hoping to bring education outside of schools (guiding, scouting, museums, arts and heritage) to more people.
• Any musings on how Girl Scouting/Girl Guiding has impacted your personal identity and the importance of Girl Scouting/Girl Guiding for LGBTQA youth.
I have spent many an hour contemplating how I can rectify my gender identity with my membership of a movement which (at least at the UK level) seemingly reinforces a binary of gender identities, trying to see how I can honestly in the depths of my heart be part of something which at its core says we are only for girls. It's a largely linguistic internal argument - only sometimes do I come across the situation where I feel like I don't fit in the same gender category as those around me in a guiding situation. And that's because there's still a fair amount of homophobia about - I feel like an outsider as people freely speak about boyfriends and husbands helping with events or preparations for activities because I have the experience that talking about my girlfriend/partner/wife makes some (usually older) fellow volunteers back away from me slowly - as though my queerness is somehow contagious. I've seen horrified looks, I've had people refuse to sit near me for meals, it's the small acts of unkindness that are almost unconscious to those who perform them.
I am particularly excited this summer as for the first time we're taking promotional activities to pride events. For years there's been this collective fear hanging over the organisation that somehow, by admitting that some members are LGBTQI etc, that we all are. It's the Victorian notion that single sex institutions somehow create homosexuality. Several of my friends will by donning their uniforms and walking in parades this summer, and it's about time too!
My dream is that one day we will have a society with true gender equality, where the binary is no longer hegemonic, and the notion of GIRL guides and GIRL Scouts will no longer seem necessary. I know, particularly as a teenager, I needed a space where I wasn't required to behave 'like a girl should' and so I value what the movement creates for girls, young women and especially queer young people who are still exploring where they belong. I just hope that one day soon we can make ourselves redundant.
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