The Stemmler/Dennis LGBT& Award, established by Sigma Tau Delta members Dr. Kevin Stemmler and Dr. Larry Dennis, honors exceptional creative and critical works that represent or celebrate the LGBTQ+ community. This annual award addresses the historical marginalization of LGBTQ+ voices in academia, providing recognition for both creative and scholarly contributions. The award’s name incorporates an ampersand, inspired by GLAAD’s “&Together” campaign and the work of G&LR, symbolizing inclusivity and unity among diverse identities. This year’s winners were selected from over 120 eligible submissions for presentation at the annual Sigma Tau Delta/English Honor Society Convention. Submissions were evaluated by LGBTQ+ faculty judges in the Society. For more information, see English.org, “Awards”
As part of Lambda Literary’s partnership with Sigma Tau Delta, we are proud to celebrate the achievements of Stemmler/Dennis Award winners like Ollie Myers.
Raphael
Tomboy was the first version of it you had ever been called. You were eight in third grade wearing black jeans and a shirt that always felt too tight no matter how many times it was washed. Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the show you would always watch before and after school. Raphael was your favorite of the four because he was the strongest, he had the coolest weapons, and of course he wore the coolest color – red.
Although, for some reason, it was weird you liked the show so much. You couldn’t help but talk about it with a boy in your class, and he called you a tomboy for liking it. Only boys like shows like that. Only boys were allowed to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ninjago, and Teen Titans. Only boys were allowed to like red. Girls had to like pink.
That boy hated that you knew more about his favorite show than he did. There was just something telling him that he had to be better than you, that he had to know more than you. But if you were a tomboy instead, then it would be fair for you to like the same things that he did. Tomboys are allowed to like those things because it’s in the name. They’re allowed to like boy cartoons, and they’re allowed to like red instead of pink.
Please Not That
Tomboys are always gay. At least, that’s what a girl told you in sixth grade. You were paired together on the first day of class and were told to say a few things about yourselves. You had the perfect word, a word that you had embodied for three years since that boy told you what you are. You told her about yourself, and when she looked at you like you were some freak, you proudly boiled it all down to you being a tomboy.
“But tomboys are gay.”
No, they aren’t. Tomboys are just girls who like boy things, like video games, spiders, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They aren’t gay, they can’t be if they like boy things because boys aren’t gay. If a boy was gay, then he would like girl things, and if a girl was gay, she would like boy things. But you weren’t a girl, you were a tomboy, and it’s okay for tomboys to like boy things.
“No. Tomboys are always gay.”
But you were not gay. You couldn’t be gay. Sure, you liked girls. They were nice, pretty, and smart, but you were not gay. It’s okay for tomboys to like girls. Tomboys aren’t gay; boy is in the name, so they can’t be gay. Tomboys can’t be gay, or else they’d go to Hell, and that wasn’t fair because what was the point of even being one? If you couldn’t like boy things, then what was the point of any of it?
So, you weren’t a tomboy. If tomboys are gay, then you had to be better than that so you wouldn’t go to Hell. You had to find some other way to be better than what tomboys are.
On Your Knees
You were raised Baptist. Your mother dragged you to church every Sunday morning where you and the other kids were taken down to the basement for the children’s service. You sang songs about the flood, little lights, and love from Jesus before getting a snack and being sent back upstairs where you would tell your mother about what you learned before going home.
The adult service was different, and your first time experiencing one scared you more than anything ever had before. It wasn’t songs and laughing like it had always been. It was loud, the people in the pews were quiet, and nobody was smiling as the pastor screamed about the Old Testament. You were terrified, and when you tried to talk, your mother hushed you. So, you stayed quiet to make sure you wouldn’t make her angry in front of God. But that first service imprinted one thing into your head. God would do anything if you prayed to him hard enough.
Years after that service – but not long after you had been told that tomboys are always gay – you got down on your knees during the night, cupped your hands together, and bowed your head. As a last-ditch effort, you begged God to make you normal. You didn’t want to be a tomboy, you didn’t want to like boy things, and you especially didn’t want to be gay. You begged with hushed whispers in your room for hours, reciting as many scriptures as you could pull out of your head and panicking when you couldn’t remember how to finish the ones that you had been told were most important. You begged to be made normal, to love dresses, skirts, makeup, and jewelry. You begged to be able to love pink.
No matter how hard you begged, you couldn’t feel anything changing. You still hated those dresses and skirts, you loathed makeup and jewelry, and you abhorred pink more than any color that ever existed. There had to be something else you could do to be normal.
Instead of praying to be normal, you begged to be made a boy. You begged, and you cried out your prayers as if they were the only thing that could save you because boys were allowed to like the same things you did. If you were a boy, then you wouldn’t be gay because you didn’t like girl things. If you were a boy, then you wouldn’t have to hate yourself for not being the same as the other girls. If you were a boy, you would not have to like pink.
Hate It All
Senior year of high school is when it settled. Six years after God abandoned you is when you decided to look for answers to the problem that had been plaguing you. You went on every site that looked like it might help, you read countless threads about experiences so similar to your own, and you found an answer that was common between them all. It was one word, so simple in its meaning yet so threatening to everything you had ever been.
But that answer couldn’t be right, it couldn’t be the truth. You looked for other lies to tell yourself in reassurance that it wasn’t real, that you really were just screwed-up in the head like you had always been told. You couldn’t possibly be one of those things, the ones that are hated by everyone everywhere, the creatures that shapeshift and transform into nightmares, or the ones who belong to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Being one of those things meant being an abomination. It meant that women would always fear you and real men would always try to kill you. It meant that you would never be safe again, even in your own home. It meant that your eyes would constantly be over your shoulder with every step you took, being the most cautious around your closest friends. It meant that never again would you be seen as anything else other than a monster.
Against your strongest wishes and ironic prayers, you are what you never wanted to be. You’re no longer the same as pink because you’re worse than it. You’re some screwed-up shade of purple that shouldn’t even exist. You are what you never should have been.
Home’s Not There
You lie awake in bed one night your freshman year of college with the standing fan creaking as it turns back and forth on full blast. The dorms were old, the AC didn’t work, one of your windows didn’t have a screen, and the walls were made of cement bricks that were painted a shade of beige that sucked the life out of everything
You were miserable. In that moment, you knew that it would be better to simply not exist anymore. It wasn’t death that was the comfort, it was the possibility of not having to be alive that was. The thought of not having to go through another class that you hated, having to sleep another night in that terrible bed, or having to come back to a dorm room that felt nothing like home.
But you didn’t know what home was anymore, either. You were only “home” barely two days out of the week, so was it really your home anymore? That house that your parents moved you to after a little girl your age had been raped in your old neighborhood park. That house that you got down on your knees in and prayed and begged to be made a boy. That house that you survived high school in, where half the teachers were pedophiles and you had a holiday called “bomb-threat-Fridays.” Where the students hooped and hollered about the KKK and nazis, but they would get angry if they couldn’t drive in their favorite John Deere on “drive your tractor to school day.”
No. That wasn’t your home. You were better than that, even if you were a screwed-up shade of purple that those same kids from high school said they wanted to cull like the cattle on their farms. You hate that place just as much as you hate pink.
Never Blue
Almost ten years after God abandoned you, you realize how strange all of it is. You’re purple, you’ll never be anything except purple, and you used to hate it because of that pink part of yourself that you could never get rid of. You want to be blue entirely, but you never can be. Not when you started as pink. No matter how much you mix them together, no matter how much blue you add to the palette, the pink will always be there underneath it all.
You are pink, and sometimes you still don’t like that color, but you can’t abhor it like you once did. If you do, then you hate that part of yourself. And maybe you do. Maybe you hate that pink part of yourself, maybe you wish you could just take a knife and cut it out, and maybe you wish you could leave it all behind to be entirely blue. But you can’t.
You are this new purple, and even with the pink, you don’t hate it anymore. You’re a new person, and you were given a new start to life. So, you keep the pink, and you stop trying to hide it because you realize that you’ll never be able to escape it.
A Pink Shadow
Twelve years after that first word in third grade, you sit in a coffee shop scrolling on your phone as you eat your lunch between classes. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pop up on your screen, and you can’t help but smile as you remember how much you used to love Raphael. He still has the coolest weapons, and he still wears the coolest color.
You stopped watching the show in middle school partly because the cartoon ended, and partly because you hadn’t been made a boy like you so desperately wanted. You still want it, too, even if some fictional man in the sky isn’t listening to you. You want it more than anything in life, to be a boy, to be a man. You want more than anything to be blue.
Maybe one day you will be. Maybe one day the purple will fade, and you’ll be made more of blue than any other color. Maybe you won’t remember the days that you hated yourself and thought you were an abomination.
At least now you’re allowed to like red instead of pink. And that’s ironic, in a way. You like red, and you want nothing more than to be blue. But no matter how blue you might be in the years to come, you’ll still have your pink shadow following you around until the end.
OLLIE MYERS is an English-Creative Writing student from West Virginia who focuses on topics of the LGBTQ+ community and Appalachia, two areas and identities that play a big role in who he is. His goal with writing is to have his pieces stick in the heads of readers even after they’ve been long finished with them. More of his works can be seen in the Marc Harshman Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and The Hedge Apple Literary Magazine.
