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JOURNAL ENTRIES

KYMBERLE SAMIS AND DAWN THOMPSON,

GUEST EDITORS

Child and youth care is first and foremost concerned with the development of self and/in relationship. After almost 20 years in a personal relationship, we, the co-editors of this issue, have recognized the powerful effect of relationship on the development of self. It would seem to be impossible to live with a student, and then instructor, of literature without some love of reading rubbing off, without gaining some more awareness of words and the power of language. And it is impossible to live with someone who has been a child and youth care practitioner, a child and family therapist, and now a child and youth care instructor without developing a shift in perspective that demands and values personal awareness and growth, and forces one to spend more time in the "real world," caring about real people, rather than the sometimes escapist world of books. These two areas of expertise came together here, as we read and chose articles and used our knowledge to help writers to flesh out content, to gain more self-awareness through writing, and to write more effectively.

Because it has been in relationship, both personal and professional, that we have come to the place of co-editing this issue, and because after the next issue the Journal of Child and Youth Care will be known as the Journal of Relational Child and Youth Care Practice, we have decided to write this editorial together. Both voices, first separately and then merged when our experiences have been sufficiently similar, will be presented. It is interesting to note that in the process of writing this, we each separately began by discussing two threads of our own identities.

Since I came to Nanaimo and Malaspina eight years ago, two of the threads that constitute the fabric of my self, one personal and one professional, have slowly and surely begun to braid together so that today they are inextricably woven. Although I was out during my doctoral studies, and the feminist slant to my studies included lesbian authors, gay and lesbian studies was never my main focus. And where I did touch on them, it was on a level so literary and theoretical that my view of myself as a political activist sometimes seemed just a little fraudulent.

Before the move, Kym and I had spent the last six years in Vancouver, B.C., where the gay and lesbian community is huge, diverse, and visible. In many ways, the slower pace of life in Nanaimo was a welcome change.

However we did miss the community (and the diversity of restaurants!). In an effort to find one, we got involved in the organization of lesbian dances. At the first dance, I got in trouble for letting in underage women. Frankly, I hadn’t even thought about asking for ID. But after the fact, I fumed for months. "Where else could these young women go?" I asked. "What choices do they have?" There were no youth groups in Nanaimo, there was no gay bar that might look the other way, as they often had when I was young, just because the folks who worked there knew that there were no other options for gay and lesbian youth.

It was important to me at the time to listen, empathize with, and validate the experiences of these youth. And I also tried to support them in terms of making choices that would facilitate their growth and well-being. What I observed was, of course, what happens when any of us feel heard, validated, and accepted: these youth began to accept themselves, including their sexual identity. They began to talk about and write about their experiences and to ask for and demand respect from their peers, teachers, parents, social workers, and in one case, even the mayor of our city. Basically, they rejected the ever-present expectation to be invisible and silent. They epitomized the popular phrase in gay and lesbian culture, "We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going shopping."

Four years of volunteering at Youthquest! was a profound learning experience for me, and transformational as well, because for the first time I felt like I was doing something practical, rather than just theoretical, to change our society. Witnessing the positive effects the drop-in had on the youth came to be precisely what gay pride means to me.

In my own academic area, I was leaning more and more towards gay and lesbian issues, teaching queer theory in my Critical Theory course, and eventually teaching a course on Gay and Lesbian Literature, with a focus on youth issues and queer young adult literature. This has now become my main research interest. Allowing these two fields to intersect, allowing my volunteer work and my academic work to overlap, has made both more meaningful.

KYM:

It is my experience that all of us, regardless of our sexual identity, take part, at least to some degree, in the silencing of LGBTQ realities and experiences. There is a continuum of how this might look. On one extreme are those who very loudly and sometimes violently try to silence and extinguish those who are LGBTQ. Somewhere in the middle of the continuum are those who "tolerate" LGBTQ people but would prefer that they were not visible or spoken about. At the other end are those, who like myself, seem to be quite comfortable with being "out" in all contexts of their lives but who still feel uncomfortable and even fearful to some degree about the daily encounters in which we must continually decide whether to be who we are or "edit" our experience to some degree.

There is no question that age, employment status, and the self-confidence that comes with time and self-work protects us from some of that discrimination. However, increasingly over the years, and even more so now that we have a child, it has become more important to both of us to speak about and make visible the experiences of those who are marginalized so that others will come to understand, accept, and be responsive. This issue of the Journal of Child and Youth Care is one of the ways in which we hope to have some influence in terms of making the experiences of LGBTQ children and youth more visible and audible. This journal strives to include the experiences of all children and youth. And thus it must invite practitioners to assess their own beliefs and values with regard to LGBTQ issues and concerns. In this way we might come a little closer to core belief #5 of Malaspina University-College’s Child and Youth Care Programs:

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