In 2022 The Trevor Project released their National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health and found 73% of LGBTQ youth reported that they have experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity at least once in their lifetime. To accompany this general survey on quality of life it can also be noted that the Washington Post reported that around 390 anti-LGBTQ forms of legislation were introduced in 2022 and in the 2021-2022 broadcast year GLAAD found only 11% of all characters in television and digital media identify as LGBTQ. For generations, the LGBTQ+ community has faced an overwhelming amount of adversity and lack of representation.

In modern society the teenage bedroom is one of the most ubiquitous curiosities. A sacred haven filled with an array of identity-forming paraphernalia, visual manifestations of adolescence and sprinklings of aspirational dreams. Its rich landscape of idiosyncratic emotion, desire and capriciousness has fed the themes found in Hollywood movies, chart-topping records and center-fold spreads— an endless cycle of inspiration, creation, performance and consumption of American youth culture. However, the resulting manifestation, or high-gloss pages and newsprint clippings taped to bedroom walls and school-hall lockers have historically existed as homogenous and heteronormative representations or distortions of reality.

Teen Spirit, re-envisions LGBTQ representation in print media by offering a rich visual landscape of queer fever dreams, invented nightmares and still fantasies. Self-produced and self-displayed as an undistinguished movie-poster, a television promotion, or an editorial cover the body, in defiance inches toward revolution by deconstructing the expectations of what it can or cannot be. Its performance of queerness imagines a future or revises a past in a self-fulfilling act of reclamation. Out of necessity LGBTQ individuals continue to establish and support their own communities creating a world in which they can exist freely.