Queer safe spaces for teens are not an abundant resource in the Greater Houston area or even across the country. But Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s (CAMH) Teen Council Coordinator Jack Morillo and its Teen Council are proud to invite local LGBTQ teens, ages 14 and up, to seek sanctuary within its walls on August 1, 2024. This year’s annual Queer Teen Night event will give local LGBTQ youth the space and opportunity to envision and envision, 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 that the types of teens that we attract already have a type of Queer sensibility,” says Morillo. “The Queer teens who already attend our museum and new Queer teens can be brought in and feel at home in this extended community of local Queer youth.”

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

The CAMH exhibition and Queer Teen Night event both invite participants to fantasize as a means of creation, allowing us to explore the future we want to be in. With that in mind, Malaysian born and raised performance artist Kumquat will be on hand to give tarot readings.

“I hope the teens will engage in this Queer process to create meaning through the beautiful Queer symbology of the tarot and engage in a co-authoring process between themselves, the reader and the divine to conjure up the future they want,” says Morillo. “I want them to realize that the future is still very much alive for them here in Texas, especially when politics is trying to erase queer semesters in Texas. I want them to know that it’s alive, that they are the authors of it, and that there is proof of that, because it happens at that very moment through tarot reading being done.”

Like anything connected to divination, one must accept and lean into the power of suggestion for it to have any meaning or relevance. And that’s exactly where the act of creating our own future mixes with these tools. “Tarot can be educational, and I’m interested in the evocative and emergent qualities that tarot imagery and discourse can offer,” explains Morillo. “As much as it’s detached from politics, it can really bring your inner self to the fore, and I think that alignment and conversation between your inner self and the world you’re facing creates a level of clarity that can really ferment truer decisions that you can make, which are the self-authoring decisions that affect one’s future.”

Helping Queer teens envision and envision futures where they can and 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 stepped into the role of Teen Council Coordinator,” says Morillo, “but I was also on the Teen Council myself when I was in high school. This was and is a space that is safe for me, as a Queer. So I provide a sense of safety and expression that I can freely invoke in a way that is not immediately available in churches, schools, or within families.”

“I really see the museum as something that can offer an alternative to the normative institutions that teenagers engage with,” adds Morillo, “(which) now, more than ever, is politically charged. And teens are not only exposed to that but are very sensitive to that. The obtuseness of these political instruments affects them on a deep level, and I want to provide a real safe space that is an alternative to the political responses to queer identities. I don’t want to pat them, but I want to give them a safety and immunity to just meet each other without being exposed to a political climate.”

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

WHAT: Queer Teen Night
WHEN: August 1 | 18:00-20:00
WHERE: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 5216 Montrose Boulevard
INFO: https://camh.org/event/queer-teen-night-august-2024/