The first time I ever heard the word “gay”, it was met with laughter and ridicule by my classmates. We were in third grade, listening to our teacher read a book about a swan who couldn’t sing like the rest of his flock. I didn’t know what the word meant yet, but I was still old enough to know that staying silent when a “good” joke was told made you stand out. So I laughed with them. Of course, “gay” had been written with its older meaning in mind: happy, carefree, cheerful.
Three years later, when I realized I was that thing my classmates had laughed about, I was lucky to be met with open arms by a little pocket of fellow queers at my middle school. For some, grades 6-8 are the worst years of adolescence–rife with vicious social hierarchies and growing pains of the physical and psychological variety. But in that group, lovingly named the “Skittle Squad” for our colorful array of identities, I felt safe. Together we celebrated coming-outs and cartoon crushes, changes in pronouns and messy middle school dating drama.
This pocket of safety is exactly the feeling that the Queer Youth Task Force wants to invoke at this year’s Queer Youth Leadership Awards, and it’s all thanks to a small group of students at Pajaro Valley High School (PVHS). Every year, the Queer Youth Leadership Awards (QYLA) partners with a different high school in Santa Cruz County, and this year, as the QYLA Production Intern, I had the honor of working with students from PVHS, who came from the school’s Associated Student Body (ASB) club and Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA) club. I was so nervous before our first meeting together–what if they didn’t care about queer and trans celebration? What if they lost interest and said it was too much work? What if they simply didn’t have the energy?
My concerns were blown away by the end of the meeting. These students are passionate, creative, ambitious, driven–and also, very funny. Many of them are balancing the weight of multiple different interests and obligations, dipping into theater, sports, leadership, academics, and of course, the weight of growing up queer and trans at a time where being those things puts a target on your back. These students voluntarily show up to each meeting (which, for the record, happens during a school period that they could be using for anything else) prepared and invested to discuss whatever I bring to the agenda for the day. It’s at these meetings that the students developed the theme for this year’s Queer Youth Leadership Awards: “Found in the Forest”.
If you come to QYLA 2026, you’ll hear the explanation for the theme from the students themselves during the show–but I’ll give you the gist here. The theme comes from the saying, “are we out of the woods yet?” And while we aren’t out of the woods yet, not until classrooms or courtrooms stop lighting up at the word “gay” or “trans”, we can still find one another in this wild world. We can take hands, join together, and create our own space to find peace, even if only for a moment. Being queer gives us the opportunity to choose our family trees. In a sense, the bonds we make together as queer people strengthen our ability to withstand even the coldest nights in the forest; we make our own clearings. This theme, created by youth who are living the reality of queerness and otherness of all kinds, emphasizes why the Queer Youth Leadership Awards are still so important. It’s not just an award show, and not even just a celebration. It’s a pocket. It’s a clearing. It’s a time to be gay.
I hope you’ll join me at the 29th Annual Queer Youth Leadership Awards (QYLA) on Saturday, May 9 at Pajaro Valley High School in Watsonville at 5:30 pm where we will all be honoring and celebrating queer and trans youth leaders as QYLA nominees & awardees along with their allies.
Sophia Garcia, she/they, is a second year Intensive Psychology student at UC Santa Cruz. She got the opportunity to intern at QYLA through UCSC’s Psychology Field Study program.
Three awards are presented at the ceremony, the Queer Youth Leadership Award, the Ally to Queer Youth Award, and the Organizational Ally to Queer Youth Award. To read about all of the 2026 nominees and learn more about the awards ceremony, visit QYLA.org or call (831) 427-4004.
