A chorus of growth.

In the audience I saw only silhouettes as my friends and I took the stage at Carnegie Hall last June. There was a queasiness in my stomach as the French lyrics that once seemed so difficult humbled from my mouth. When I left the stage I was filled with wonder. I am a member of the Youth Pride Chorus in New York City. I am a young lesbian, and thanks to the chorus, I am no longer a silhouette.

In the years before I came out, my life was filled with loneliness and depression. Though my family was supportive and loving, I lived with great confusion. I had queer adults in my life but I didn't know it. I thought the photographs and magazines at my godfather's home were classical art, and I watched perplexed as my aunt grew a beard. But when I came out at 15, I was lucky. My sister already knew, and my father half-jokingly said that we should "check out chicks together."

I went to New York's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center, where I at last found peace. I joined a number of programs, became a peer educator, and met an amazing girl who was as quirky as I am. By the time I jobbed the chorus a year later, the young woman from Queens who knew nothing about lesbian sex was well-versed in a world of divas, tranny boys, gender fucks, and "high-femme lesbo girl-fags." II was the chorus that changed me. One of our songs, "Dirait-on" by Rainer Maria Rilke, touts a message of self-love. Through its rehearsal, I realized I could come to mean the words that I sang: Perhaps I could love myself for who I was.