Queer Teen Night at CAMH: A Safe Space for LGBTQ Teens

Queer safe spaces for teens are not an abundant resource in the Greater Houston area or even across the nation. However, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s (CAMH) Teen Council Coordinator Jack Morillo and its Teen Council are proud to invite local LGBTQ teens, aged 14 and above, to seek haven within their walls on August 1, 2024. This year’s annual Queer Teen Night event will provide local LGBTQ youth space and opportunity to divine and imagine, in community, all the ways their futures can be bold, bright, and affirming.

“Queer Teen Night is an extension of our teen-based programming, because we noticed the kinds of teens that we attract already have kind of a Queer sensibility,” states Morillo. “The Queer teens who are already attending our museum and new Queer teens can be brought in and feel at home in this extended community of local Queer young people.”

This year’s Queer Teen Night is inspired by the Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow exhibit at CAMH. “The ideas that she’s proposing through her visual strategies, her interests, were super stimulating and felt in line with what it is to engage a queer politic, which uses tools like fantasy and creating,” explains Morillo. “I think that specific strategy of futurity is something that I want to invite young Queer people into as a strategy that has a long Queer lineage.”

The CAMH exhibit and the Queer Teen Night event both invite attendees to fantasize as a mode of creation, allowing us to explore the futures we want to find ourselves within. With that in mind, Malaysian-born and Houston-raised performance artist Kumquat will be on hand to provide tarot readings. 

“I’m hoping the teens will engage this Queer process of meaning making through the pretty Queer symbology of tarot and participate in a co-authoring process between themselves, the reader, and the divine to conjure the future that they want,” Morillo says. “I want them to gain the insight that the future is still very alive for them here in Texas, especially as politics try to erase Queer futures in Texas. I want them to know that it’s alive, that they’re authors of it, and that there’s evidence of it, because it’s happening in that very moment through the performance of tarot reading.”

Like all things tied to divining the future, one must accept and lean into the power of suggestion for it to provide any meaning or relevance. And that’s exactly where the act of authoring our own futures blends with these tools. “Tarot can be instructive, and I’m interested in the suggestive and emergent qualities that tarot imagery and discourse can offer,” Morillo explains. “As much as it is secluded from politics, it can really make one’s interiority come to the fore, and I think that alignment and conversation between your inner self and the world that you’re facing creates a level of clarity that can really ferment the truer decisions that one can make, which are those self-authoring decisions that influence one’s future.”

Helping Queer teens imagine and envision futures where they can and do achieve their goals is an absolute hallmark of LGBTQ safe spaces, so this year’s event provides both literal and figurative safe spaces for those who attend. “Queer Teen Night is a responsibility that I’ve inherited as someone who just entered this role of Teen Council Coordinator,” says Morillo, “but I was also in Teen Council myself when I was in high school. This was and is a space that is safe for me, being Queer. So, I’m gestating this sense of safety and expression that I can call upon freely in a way that is not immediately accessible at churches, schools, or within families.”

“I really see the museum as something that can offer an alternative to the normative institutions that teens engage with,” adds Morillo, “[which] now, more than ever, is politically fraught. And teens are not only exposed to that but are highly sensitive to that. The bluntness of these political instruments affects them on a deep level, and I want to provide a truly safe space that is an alternative to the political responses to Queer identities. I don’t want to coddle them, but I do want to provide them a safety and immunity to just meet each other without being subjected to a political climate.”

Spaces that create, celebrate, and exhibit art have often been among the safest places for Queer-identifying people to exist, dream, commune, plan, and achieve. CAMH’s bold implementation of programming for Queer teens is as heartwarming as it is essential. May the teens who attend plant the seeds for future gardens where Queer people thrive without societal or political scrutiny.

WHAT: Queer Teen Night
WHEN: August 1 | 6:00PM – 8:00PM
WHERE: Contemporary Arts Museum , 5216 Montrose Boulevard
INFO: https://camh.org/event/queer-teen-night-august-2024/