Anthony Steel, Membership Support Coordinator
This year’s National Festival of Youth Theatre (NFYT) was an explosion of colour. Flags, make-up, glitter, and a joyous, camp closing ceilidh to wrap up the weekend. Pronoun badges were on the welcome table, gender neutral signs were put up outside toilets, and we also had our inclusivity posters up, ensuring that all spaces covered by YTAS were intolerant of any kind of bullying. Visibility is one of the key components required for completing the LGBT Charter Silver Award with LGBT Youth Scotland. I don’t want to tempt fate, but I like to think we smashed this with a lovely hammer.
Seeing this abundance of positivity and visibility at NFYT was quite moving. It is a way of communicating to our young people that regardless of who they are and where they are from, they are in a safe space where they can fully express their identity as much as they would like. And I know myself and others in the community would’ve fully appreciated efforts like this back in the day when we went to youth theatre ourselves.
The group leaders also took note of this at the event. Findings from our evaluation forms found that the festival’s Pride theme was noticed by all those who completed the survey, with 93% of the same group believing it provided a positive difference. Meanwhile, pronoun badges were noticed by 93% but 100% agreed the inclusion of these made a positive difference.
And it’s important to commit to this level of visibility and support. LGBT Youth Scotland’s recent report found that there’s been a decline in young people feeling happy living as an LGBTQIA+ person in Scotland (67% in 2012, 55% in 2017 and 37% in 2022). Of that, for trans and non-binary folx specifically, the number is lower with 59% in 2012 down to 28% in 2022. Reading figures like this only highlights further that we should never be complacent and continue to support queer youth where we can. With figures like this in mind, it’s still essential to remind our young people that their identity is valid, wonderful and (if they like) celebratory.
The great thing about youth theatre is that it can be a very effective place of escape for all young people. Youth theatres are places for creativity, confidence building, and developing new skills. Through performance and self-expression, they can be a space where young people can begin to explore who they are. We want to champion and highlight this aspect of youth theatre as much as possible to theatre-makers everywhere. While this may already be widely recognised by the majority of youth theatre leaders, in practice challenges can arise. For example, a young person might be ‘out’ to fellow participants and the facilitator, but not at home. This might run into further areas to consider such as casting or programmes for audiences and how the individual is represented.
With points like this in mind, we have developed a new Toolkit to help address such challenges and help your work to be more inclusive for young LGBTQIA+ and their facilitators in youth performance settings. We recognised that we would not be able to complete the Toolkit without the contribution of practitioners on the ground working with young people, who themselves identify as LGBTQIA+. So, we established a Working Group who would meet on a semi-regular basis to discuss and exchange ideas on issues that might be a challenge for practitioners or the young people they are working with. It’s been brilliant getting these opinions, amounting to a rich amount of information which we have been able to apply to the Toolkit and YTAS’s own journey.
As well as guidance on a number of topics – such as casting, programming and wellbeing – the Toolkit also provides resources from other sector support organisations. Make sure to also check out Drew Taylor-Wilson’s Queering the Narrative, a selection of short videos that explore creative practice inspired by LGBTQIA+ artists. The Toolkit will be an ever-evolving document, acknowledging that we should be constantly adapting to new ideas and approaches to inclusivity.
This might be something you want to develop further at your own organisation, and we’re more than happy to discuss this further with you and explore other cross-cutting areas that might fall into your strategy of making your organisation a more diverse and inclusive place to create work. Just get in touch and we can go from there! And remember, we have lots of other resources available on our website as well as our Membership Support Portal, a vast collection of information to help you better run your youth theatre and projects for young people.
