STEPHANIE QUINTERO
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: Academy of American Studies
BORN: Queens, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: During the Poetry workshop, one of the guest speakers was a former mentee, and she recited one of her poems to us. One of the things that struck me was that she wasn’t reading directly off of a page; it was all memorized. The way she recited her poem was so unique and powerful because the story itself was about when she was in her mother’s womb. As she couldn’t possibly remember that, it was all based on what her mother had told her. She was an activist, too. She was so inspiring.
JULIA LYNN RUBIN
YEARS AS MENTOR: 3
OCCUPATION: Freelance Writer and Author
BORN: Baltimore, MD
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Burro Hills (Diversion Books, March 2018), published in Sierra Nevada Review, RipRap Literary Journal
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Each week, my mentee and I usually meet at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in SoHo. One day we were both stuck, not sure what we wanted to write about, until I picked up a photography book and opened to a random page. It was a photo of a flower on a windowsill. From there, we free-wrote for twenty minutes, and I ended up with a flash-fiction piece that I submitted to literary magazines. It was so liberating, and an amazing reminder that I have so much inside my head waiting to be written about.
During my childhood, I was very uncomfortable with my own sexuality until I actually spoke up about it, and at age seventeen, I decided to write this piece.
Tears on my mother’s freckled cheeks trickled down quickly, one after the other. Her face flushed pink as I tapped my finger against the window switch on the passenger side of our car. Seeing Mami in a state of confusion felt like staring into a mirror. My fingertips tingled and as I looked down at my hands, my vision blurred. I closed my eyes and continued to replay my confession to her.
After a string of painfully quiet days, I’d received a longdistance phone call from my family’s priest back in Colombia. “You must know that the decisions you make now are essential to your future. They have consequences and you wouldn’t want them to hurt you, would you?” I remember the way the priest’s soft voice had echoed through the receiver. As we spoke, my mother stood in front of me with her hands folded together tightly, as if she was praying that I had not just told her that I was bisexual.
“Yeah,” I reluctantly mumbled, eager to get off the phone. After that conversation with the priest, loud dinner table talks turned into silent ones. At thirteen, I felt entirely alone.
Growing up in the Catholic faith, religion class taught me that men and women are created to only be attracted to each other. According to the Catholic interpretation of the Bible, the pure thought of falling in love with someone of the same gender is sinful. Members of the church community bad-mouthed the LBGTQ+ community. Openly gay women and men would not dare to walk into Our Lady of Fatima Church. I doubted my own presence as I sang “Hallelujah” on Sundays, relentlessly questioning if my feelings were just a phase. I questioned the unconditional love that God supposedly promised while feeling great judgment by my mother. Her plan did not consist of processing my sexual orientation.
Mami grew up in the small town of Tuluá, Colombia, where everyone knows everyone, and being different makes you the subject of the juicy gossip swapped between women who stay home to cook and clean for their families. Growing up in a traditional Colombian Catholic household, Mami was never exposed to an openly gay community. On her eighth day after arriving to the United States as a twenty-year-old, she stood in shock when she saw two men kiss in public. My upbringing was different; being raised in New York City, where queer couples openly expressed their affection for each other in the streets, encouraged me to love without shame. I remember feeling similar butterflies from excitement as she did when she had her first kiss with a boy. Mine was with a girl.
After four years of living in silence about my sexuality, I finally spoke up.