I was eleven. It scared me though I realized I could not stop it.

 
Things were happening in my head when I was about five. I prayed to God that I did not have this problem as I was already a woman, black and disabled, so I had enough to deal with.

 

            I was a college basketball player at the time and the only non-straight athlete. Coming out is the hardest thing anyone can do.

 
            Cheskiewicz, Lomani and Kearns are three of the self-identifying queer kids pictured by Brooklyn-based photographer Michael Sharkey in his appropriately titled Queer Kids collection, eleven years in the making. Like many other wide-eyed, eager youths who reached out to Sharkey, they were taking a leap of faith, in the hope that the products of these photoshoots - hundreds of sincere, vividly-colored snapshots of the kids in their most comfortable gender performance - would help parents, friends, and society at large accept them for who they are.
            Sharkey started the project in March 2006 while working in the world of editorial photography, anxious to have a long-term project that was “not for a magazine or advertising project.” He mused, “Having grown up as a queer kid myself, it was a natural choice of topic, one that I wanted to dig into and explore.” For Sharkey, the project has alway been about grasping a better understanding of gender and gendered expression. “I felt a need to come to terms with the way that genders function in society and how it defines us,” he said. The project now features more than one hundred kids aged twelve to twenty-one from different states as well as other countries, each with unique stories, united by their queer identity.
            Sharkey found the first queer students in public high schools around the area with the help of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and social media. Many had something to say and wanted to be heard; after Queer Kids was published online, some took the lead and contacted Sharkey themselves.
            Kami Cheskiewicz learned about Queer Kids through her mother, who reached out after seeing the post on facebook. “I took a look at the website and decided yes, I wanted to participate,” she said. “At that time there were not a lot of photoshoots for LGBTQ kids, especially in a small city like Hartford where I grew up. I wanted to have a chance to be myself in a photoshoot.” As he did with other kids, Sharkey communicated with Cheskiewicz through email and got to know her as much as possible before heading to Connecticut; before taking the pictures, they also sat down for a short interview.
            Sharkey had tailored the questions beforehand from a general list created with the help of college friend Rosie Schaap, a writer and columnist for New York Times. Some examples include - “When did you realize you were queer?,” “Do you feel different from your straight friends?” and “Try to image your life ten years from now…what do you envision?”
            In writing the questions, Schaap was specifically interested in “getting a picture of a complete person.” She said, “I would want to know not what they do but how they experienced life, what they hoped to get out of it.” The kids’ answers were subsequently transcribed and printed next to their photos in all displays; Sharkey hopes that this would help viewers understand how “these kids have very human hopes, desires and fears that don’t pertain to their queer identity,” making them relatable to any young adult.  
            Now a fully-transitioned twenty-one-year-old female performance artist, Cheskiewicz fondly reminisces about her experience with Sharkey. “Before the photoshoot I was worried about the little details, the many things that could go wrong, and also what people would say about me. When I met him I was shell-shocked because I was fourteen and here was this celebrity photographer from New York.” In no time though, he helped her feel comfortable by cracking jokes and listening attentively as she talked about music (pop, happy hard-core) and her clothing style. To make sure the photographs were as authentic as possible, Sharkey let Cheskiewicz choose the clothes, make-up and background for her own photoshoot.
            Cheskiewicz, who settled with a white t-shirt with color-pencil prints, jeans and hot-pink rubber bracelets, commented, “I just wanted something colorful.” After the four-hour session, she got to flip through the five-hundred photographs before having a conversation with Sharkey about choosing ten that would work best. “When I saw the photos, I thought they looked great,” she said, recalling how she had fun sharing them with the LGBT support group at school. Cheskiewicz would continue keeping in contact with Sharkey, whom she considered a friend and confidante, and the two did another photoshoot three years after the first one, when she had fully transitioned. “Going on the journey alone would have been so much harder,” she said.
            Meanwhile, for Patrick Kearns, it was a memorable experience exploring his identity as both a queer youth and an avid athlete. He joined the photoshoot as part of a “politically active queers group in a straight-laced liberal arts school in central Pennsylvania.” After realizing his passion for basketball, Sharkey photographed Kearns in front of a hoop and in the locker-room.
           “He set up the largest lighting system I had ever seen smack in the middle of my college gymnasium,” said Kearns. “I was trying very hard to portray myself as a living, breathing human being instead of a tense skeleton of nerves.” In his most famous picture, featured on Queer Kids’ official website, the twenty-two-year-old gazes defiantly at the camera in his jerseys and shorts, one hand holding a basketball against the bright red locker.  Looking at this picture alongside others in the collection, he expresses deep appreciation for Sharkey, a photographer who tried to “not only show just who we are, but also how we want to be seen.”
            In 2013, Queer Kids went international when Rainbow House, an umbrella organization for LGBTQ associations in Brussels, invited Sharkey to come display his works and take pictures of its members.
            Pauline Lomani, then-president of the French-speaking LGBTQ students’ organization, was involved in reaching out to potential models and setting up the photoshoots at La Colline and Namur University. “My family does not know,” said Lomani, who, despite being quite open about her sexuality with peers, feared misunderstanding and intolerance from her own parents. “I thought we would not see each other for a long time after the photos were published. I think I will not be in touch with my parents and my family anymore,” she said. “My parents will ask me to not make a lot of noise about it. In the Congolese community, a lot of people talk.”
            Lomani still decided to go ahead with the photoshoot however, because she wanted the opportunity to stretch her comfort zone and explore with different modes of expression not observed elsewhere. “I rarely see black people being portrayed in any queer project, I wanted to do it because there’s no space for us anywhere,” she said. “That added gravity to the experience, I was always conscious of the issue of representation.”
            “It takes time to change a culture,” Sharkey said, and went on to recount the story of a kid whose participation in the project was stalled because of parental permission issues. He thinks that it is powerful, however, how many kids see this as an opportunity to make a statement about themselves. “Occasionally I would shoot a subject whose parents don’t know why they’re being photographed,” he said. “In a sense, they’re using it as a way to come out with their parents.”
             For Sharkey himself, it has also been a life-changing experience; as a cisgender gay male, he professed that before moving to New York in 1995, his understanding of the transgender community was rather limited. “It was very new and shocking. The particular transgender individuals I had the opportunity to meet were [...] larger than life characters, so I was enamoured by them but also very confused,” he said, admitting to a bias that stemmed from misunderstanding.
            Sharkey went on, “All of a sudden you realize how insane that is, that moment of consciousness when you ask how can I be so ignorant. That’s the most important thing I’ve taken from this project.” He described this as “enlightenment,” an experience which more people should have the opportunity of undergoing. “It can’t happen unless you go out there and talk with people,” Sharkey added. “It can’t happen on your own.”  
            Queer Kids was first published digitally in 2010 by aCurator, an online art magazine edited and published by British photography consultant Julie Grahame. Sharkey submitted his project to the magazine and received a nod for “the good, strong story, the keen sense of artistry and the high potential of making an impact on a wide community.” Grahame commented on the photographic quality of the works, “The main thing is the dynamic between the photographer and the subject, [...] it really shows. I appreciate how Sharkey actually invested time in talking to the subjects and getting to know them on an intimate level.” Till this day, Queer Kids is one of aCurator’s most viewed features, “constantly shared on social media and picking up a lot of traffic,” as Grahame said.
            The project has also been exhibited in physical form at the Galerie de la Main de Fer, Perpignan, Les Rencontres d’Arles 2014, the Stonewall National Museum, Florida and the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, amongst other places. One of the most prominent and comprehensive projects of its kind, Queer Kids is viewed by people from more than eighty different countries, also thanks to a feature in Times magazine.
            Reminiscing on the drastic social changes that have happened during the past eleven years, Sharkey, in his characteristic black t-shirt and faded baggy jeans, remarked, “LGBTQ youths have gone to being completely unheard and unrecognized to being one of the most powerful political and cultural identities in America. It’s been mind-blowing to watch that.”  He contrasted the relative ubiquity of queer expression on mainstream media nowadays to 2006, a time when the subject was almost taboo, carrying quite a pejorative connotation. “I think the thing that gave this movement its power, the same thing which gives any civil rights movement its power, is that once people realize what’s happening, their consciousness is raised,” he said. “There’s a lot of joy and empowerment in the raising of consciousness.”
            Queer Kids, alongside countless films, documentaries, songs and other projects that utilized the media, have certainly contributed to this shift in attitude. “Photographers are very important people especially in this age, 2017, they can capture everything about life in their pictures and spread a message that would resonate with a wide audience,” Cheskiewicz remarked. “Every picture tells a story.” Lomani, meanwhile, stressed the importance of fighting against the reduction of various queer experiences to one “type,” saying “Let’s show there are no norms. Let’s show we all have different faces.” For her, Queer Kids truly represented the power of “a movement of young people from different backgrounds.”
            Lauren O’Neal, curator of Phillips Exeter’s Lamont Gallery, commented about the impact the display had made on her campus, “The photographs certainly expanded [students’] understanding of the many faces of LGBTQ youth---they are your teammates, your classmates, and your confidantes.” Echoing these sentiments, senior Maya Kim remarked, “When you read the story of these people whom you maybe wouldn’t approach in real life, you realize who they are.”
This exhibition is the first one that specifically targets viewers at a high school who are also “kids.” Many teachers at Exeter joined in the movement by letting students go see the exhibition during class time. English instructor Christine Knapp took all her freshman classes to the exhibition; afterwards, she assigned them the task of choosing three pictures they were most drawn to and write about them. “This got them thinking about the assumptions they made, so they would understand that the LGBTQ community is as diverse as any other communities,” said Knapp. She also thought this was a good exhibition because it helped students not familiar with the vocabulary to understand and be comfortable using the word “queer.”
            While it is hard to exactly quantify Queer Kids’ influence on viewers in the US as well as abroad, one thing is certain - the project meant much to LBTQ youths, especially the ones directly involved with it since day one. For Kearns, having the freedom to express his true self helped him come to terms with his identity as not only a gay kid but a queer kid. “Being queer is different because it doesn’t have anything to do with asking to be accepted. It’s bold, it’s in-your-face,” he commented. “We’re not just looking for any kind of acceptance but total acceptance. And that means all of us.”
            Lomani saw the project as an opportunity for her organization to reach out to other queer youths, who might be feeling that they had no one to relate with. “Namur is a very conservative place. We need to be seen so people struggling with their LGBTQ identity know that they have a social network and a support system.” On a more personal level, Queer Kids also helped her develop a more positive image of herself. “After he showed me a few shots I started laughing,” she said. “I had never seen myself like that before.”
            While walking through the display of Queer Kids at the Lamont Gallery, Jessica Alvarez, a queer intern at Phillips Exeter, mused on how projects like this were non-existent when she was figuring out her identity. She said, with a note of ruefulness, “If this had been around when I was younger, I would have had a stronger sense of affirmation. Like my identity is important enough to be shown.”