KBIA News

Alphabet Soup

What radical courage does it take to love in the face of hate? Through portraiture and personal narratives highlighting joy, belonging, found family and meaningful romantic and platonic relationships, KBIA’s Alphabet Soup challenges the notion that Missouri’s LGBTQ+ community is a monolith.Tucked away within the amalgamation of letters that makes up the LGBTQ+ community and the complex identities each represents is joy: rebellious, resistant, radiant. If you have a story you would like to share, visit https://tinyurl.com/LGBTQJoy or contact news@kbia.org.Created by Bailey Stover.

16-year-old Eli: “You may not have a label, but that doesn't invalidate your experiences.”

KBIA | By Bailey Stover, Photo Editor: Nick Sheaffer

Published April 4, 2025 at 2:00 PM CDT

Eli, a 16-year-old who uses any pronouns, stands near the water on Friday, May 17, 2024, at Stephens Lake Park in Columbia. Eli said heteronormativity frustrates them because people assume they are straight. “My family defines it as a ‘pass the peas’ household to where if you say you’re queer over dinner they’re just like, ‘OK, cool. Pass the peas,’ is their analogy where it doesn’t impact anyone’s daily lives, so they don’t care,” Eli said. “I don’t want to label myself because I don’t want to inadvertently pressure my own self to not want to explore. And, I also don’t want any external pressures telling me what I should be attracted to. I’m kind of just figuring it out and honestly don’t care to find a label. I’m just going to do what I want.”

Eli is a 16-year-old teenage member of the LGBTQ+ community who uses any pronouns. They spoke about not needing to confine their queerness to a specific label, and the importance of allowing young people to fluidly explore their identity.

Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.

Eli: I’m still figuring this out. I'm a child, and so, it's very difficult to, like, tell someone what I'm experiencing, but I also don't feel like there's a specific need to do so because I feel like the people that are the most accepting, for me, are the people who don't really care.

They don't need to know about what I'm experiencing in order to , like, care about it, in order to validate me. They will just accept me regardless, and those are the type of people that I end up befriending, partly because I don't label myself.

My parents never particularly cared. It was just kind of this idea of they didn't want me to jump to a conclusion and stick by it way too early.

They wanted me to go experience things and so, especially when I labeled myself early on, they were just like, “Okay, cool, but take a chill pill and like, go with that label, but be comfortable changing it.”

And so, I find myself in a lot of situations as someone who doesn't label themselves at all – a lot of people assume I'm straight.

I don't really talk about my sexuality or my dating experiences a lot with the people around me, and so, people automatically assume that that must be, I'm straight, because in order to be queer, you have to be super open about it, or in the closet.

Which I think is very harmful. It comes to this idea that you need to justify your queerness by explaining your experiences, etc.

That label doesn't really matter to me, and so, people are just like, “Oh, you're
a girl,” or “you're nonbinary,” or like, “Oh, you're straight.”

I'm just like, “Okay, I'm gonna sit here and I'm gonna be okay and I'm gonna ignore you.”

Everyone doesn't have enough time for everything they want to do, and it's kind of determining what's more important.

Frankly put, I read so many books about trains – I have the time to think about my identity, I just don't care enough.

Eli holds their train-themed music box on Friday, May 17, 2024, at Stephens Lake Park in Columbia. “It was pretty confusing, especially because previously I didn't really want to define myself as queer. Especially in middle school, you don't know what's going on the majority of the time. Some people do; I did not. By that point it hit that there are certain spaces where just not ‘normal,’ where it's like an irregular thing or that you're going to get made fun of if you were openly queer or something. And so although it didn't impact me personally too much because I was able to have my parents at home, and I was figuring it out on my own and kind of this idea there, it did hurt sometimes,” Eli said. “In certain environments, I would lower my voice when talking about it, or when my friends would want to talk to me about it, but not feel comfortable saying it in the hallway or something. And so, it really hurt, especially because I saw a lot of my friends who needed a safe space, and the only safe space accessible was school. And to not be able to have those conversations openly in the hallway was very difficult for them, and my heart just kind of broke for them.”

It's kind of like, here's a list of everything I have to do, and then I look at it and I'm just like, maybe I don't care enough about this identity thing to be looking at it right now.

And I think it's important to show that kids are comfortable just being kids, and that being queer doesn't automatically mean that every teenager is just sitting in the basement looking at a screen, trying to figure out their identity and like ignoring everything else.

And I feel like a lot of times, that's the perception that people have sometimes – that if you're a queer teenager, that automatically means that you're hyper worrying about your label.

And even people who label themselves are just doing it to find a community, but they recognize that it can change, and I feel like not enough people recognize that.

[I] think it's important to acknowledge that you may not feel completely comfortable, like, this label isn't going to change – you may not have a label, but that doesn't invalidate your experiences, and it doesn't mean that you have to sit down and justify why you're queer. You can just like be that without having to worry about labels, etc.