Celeste Lecesne: I co-founded the Trevor Project, finally I’m telling you, “I am Trevor”
Personal Photograph: Celeste and Friends, Lobby of San Diego Old Globe Theater, The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, October 2017
Posted by permission granted by Celeste, a dear friend of ours. Diane has known Celeste since she was Assistant to the Producer for Trevor - the movie, and I joined the special group of friends when I became “Mx. Diane”. I present to you the essay because the words of this playwright and human rights activist embodies my idea “Five Ways of Lifetime Healing: Self-Love, Helping Friendships, Villages, Social Justice Work, Tell The Story”. Celeste is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of the Future Perfect and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Celeste’s story:
It was a Sunday like any other in the 1960s New Jersey bedroom community where I lived.
That morning, as I dressed for church, I realized the world would never accept me if people learned the truth. It had been a rough week. The kids at school had found out that I had a crush on a boy, and the bullying that followed convinced me that I would have to change. I’d have to be less myself. Less sensitive. Less girly. More of a man. But deep down, I knew that wasn’t possible. I sat down on my bed and decided I had only one option: to kill myself.
I was 13 years old.
Somehow, I managed to survive and move to New York to become a playwright and performer. And 20 years later, on another Sunday, I happened to hear a story on the radio about suicide being the second-leading cause of death among young Americans. Even more disturbing, the report said that gay and lesbian teenagers were four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Those statistics have remained basically unchanged for 30 years.
That news report prompted me to write and perform a solo theater show about a 13-year-old boy named Trevor, a Diana Ross fanatic who develops a crush on Pinky Faraday, one of the most popular boys in his school. When Trevor’s classmates find out, he tries to kill himself by taking an overdose of aspirin but survives and discovers newfound hope. The stage show became the short film “Trevor,” which won an Academy Award in 1995 and led me to co-found the Trevor Project.
I’ve been telling stories as an artist for decades, but for the first time I am revealing a crucial part of my own story: I am Trevor.
It never seemed necessary to say that publicly before, but I also never thought that in 2023 there would be more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced across the country targeting young people, particularly those who are transgender and nonbinary. Many of these bills are trying to erase the existence of LGBTQ+ youth and prevent their stories from being told. So far, 75 have been signed into law, banning books that tell LGBTQ stories, preventing educators and students from discussing sexuality in schools, outlawing performances by drag queens, and criminalizing lifesaving health care for transgender people.
I think the reason anti-LGBTQ activists are so obsessed with preventing queer storytelling is that they know how powerful it is in winning acceptance. History has proved that the most effective strategy in the fight for gay rights has always been telling our personal stories. It was our love stories that changed the minds and opened the hearts of millions of Americans to marriage equality. It was the coming-out stories of so many sons and daughters, cousins, uncles, aunts, teachers, and artists over the previous decades that convinced society that we are fully human and that love is love. By courageously coming forward to speak our truth and live out loud, we have shown our friends and families what it looks like to be authentically oneself.
The wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation is paradoxically a response to how much more comfortable young people are today in expressing themselves than I ever could have dreamed 60 years ago. I know as well as anyone the sobering statistics about LGBTQ youth in crisis, but on the ground in places such as Alabama, Indiana and Texas, the kids are telling a different story. They are meeting in church basements, classrooms and youth centers, building networks of connections, finding each other online and in person, insisting on equity and inclusion, and redefining what it means to be queer.
Though it is still undeniably difficult for LGBTQ+ youth, many have grown up exercising the right to be themselves, and they are not about to forfeit that freedom. Despite the obstacles — depression, self-harm, bullying — many young queer people are busy living lives of quiet determination. Politicians and preachers may regard them as aberrant, misguided or just plain evil; they might even call for their total eradication from public life — as happened at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference — but this generation of queer youth know who they are, and they will not be swayed from the business of becoming.
Visiting a middle school in Kentucky shortly before the pandemic, I was astounded to find a group of students so out and proud in a state so publicly non-affirming. When asked how they came to be so sure about who they are, one sixth-grader replied without skipping a beat: “Your heart just tells you, and you obey.”
LGBTQ+ young people are writing a new story, one in which everyone is free to be themselves. Create your own ending.
