Snapshots of queer youth: a photography exhibit of candid portraits of gay and lesbian young people lives up to its name: "Exuberance!" - art

Benjie Nycum and Mike Glatze will never forget the words their young gay friend Graham said as he lay in bed slowly dying of diabetes: "I think I personify the word exuberance." And they hope America won't be able to forget those words either.

Activist-photographers Glatze and Nycum, along with photographer Rachelle Lee Smith (whose work debuted in The Advocate in 2002 and is not included here), have created a showcase of American youth that they say embodies the same zeal for life their young friend once had. Called "Exuberance!" it features more than 300 5-by-5 framed photographs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered U.S. and Canadian youth. Having premiered in July 2002 in Halifax, Canada, the exhibit is set to make its official U.S. debut April 25 at the Sol Mednick Gallery and Gallery 1401 at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, sponsored in part by the annual global GLBT-rights symposium Equality Forum, which convenes April 28.

"We realized the whole group of gay and lesbian youth personify exuberance in so many ways," Glatze says. "For example, [gays and lesbians] all have had to deal with struggles of coming out and have risen above them--it's an exuberant state of being."

Since 2001 Nycum and Glatze have been regularly traversing North America by car, stopping at cities and small towns along the way to interview and photograph queer youth for their activist Web site, Young Gay America. It took them four trips to collect the more than 1,000 stories and 6,000 photographs from which the show has been culled. Nycum says he has "a mission to put queer youth out in the media" and adds that the current youth movement wouldn't have been possible just a decade ago.

It's a point vividly illustrated by 15-year-old David from Lebanon, Pa., whose portrait with his mother appears in the exhibition. "To me, the words faggot, homosexual, and queer aren't negative at all," he says. "Some people may look down on gay people for whatever reason ... but that's them."

Glatze says the media often downplay the strengths of gay youth in favor of reporting on their troubles, an emphasis he hopes the exhibit will counterbalance. "How often does the mainstream media talk about how resilient these kids are to overcome their problems and difficulties and [how they] might be well-equipped to be future leaders?"

Some of the young people featured in the exhibition are already leaders in their communities. Liz from Pueblo, Colo., helped to create her hometown's annual pride event when she was just 16. "I just don't think anyone had got around to doing it," she says. "But then we realized, `Why not? Why couldn't we do it?' No one else was. So we did it."

That's exuberance.

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