From: heath@athena.cs.uga.edu (Terrance Heath)
Newsgroups: soc.bi
Subject: YOUNG AND QUEER REPOSTED
Date: 25 Jul 92 15:31:07 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

I just happened to have this in my News directory, so I thought I go
ahead and repost it, seeing as how there was some demand.





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Young and Gay

by Linnea Due (managing editor)

Express, Volume 14, No. 37 (June 26, 1992)
[The Express is a free weekly paper in the
East San Francisco Bay Area]


It's a sultry Saturday afternoon in Berkeley. The young 
men drifting into the big Victorian community center on
Telegraph Avenue fan themselves with magazines and newspapers.
They chat downstairs for a few minutes until the group's
facilitator, Vashti Holt, arrives, and then they shamble up
the stairs after her like so many clumsy bears. "Where's the 
women?" one of them asks dolefully. One finally arrives, in
the person of a Berkeley High student who creeps in without
saying a word. Holt stops kidding with a few of the guys and
clears her throat. "This is the lesbian, gay, and bi youth
group at the Pacific Center," she announces. "Let's go around
and see how we're doing." Everyone complains for another half-
minute - about the heat, the chairs, life - and then settles down
to listen.

One sixteen-year-old boy, who's been leafing through an issue
of People magazine, mentions that he's plastered his bedroom 
with posters of Julia Roberts. He laughs uncertainly. "That
was when I was trying... I mean,, when I thought I was 
straight..." His voice trails off. (A while later, out of
sight of the group, he's sobbing to a friend, crying that
he doesn't want to be gay. He wants it to stop.)

A Cal student says he's anxious about making a presentation
on a gay theme to his class. To do it right, he has to come
out, and he hadn't counted on being so nervous. THe whole 
time she's listening to him, the Berkeley High student is
shaking her head, quivering with outrage. Flinging her hands
up in frustration, she explodes: "Why're you letting them in
on your business? Man, I go to school and I got to work! I
don't let anybody in my business." He tries to explain that
he chose his topic *because* he was gay, and that he'd be 
letting himself down if he let fear override what he wanted to
do. She'll have none of it. "*Nobody* knows *nothin'* about me,"
she says, jabbing her thumb at her chest. "I don't let
*anybody* in."

A seventeen-year-old barely speaks above a whisper. When he talks,
the raucous group quiets down and leans forward to hear. 
Everyone holds their breath as he says he had dinner with his
father. He looks at the floor, his hands scrabbling over each
other like panicked animals. He can't go on.

			---------------------

The two meanings of gay are never further apart than when the
word is qualified by "young." In spite of gains by the lesbian
and gay community since June 1969, when a group of queens and
bar dykes fought back as cops raided the Stonewall Inn in 
Greenwich Village, the situation for young gays has not improved
significantly - in fact, there's a growingsuspicion that it's
become worse.

Some facts: 30 percent of teeneage suicides are estimated to be 
by gays and lesbians; 50 percent of gay youth experience 
serious depression and suicidal feelings as compared to 19
percent of heterosexual youth; 45 percent of gay males and
20 percent of lesbians encounter verbal or physical abuse in
high school, with 28 percent dropping out over sexual-orientation
issues; 25 percent of runaway teens are gay or lesbian - though
many of these must be more accurately be called "throwaways."
Twenty-six percent of gay male teens living on the street had
been forced by their parents to leave home because they were gay.

This information is gleaned from a 1989 study on youth suicide
commissioned by the US Department of Healthe and Human Services.
"If open about who they are, [gay youth] may feel some sense of
security within themselves, but face tremendous external conflicts
with family and peers," the study reported. "If closed about who
they are, they may be able to 'pass' as 'straight' in their
communities while facing a tremendous internal struggle to 
understand and accept themselves.... Gay youth are the only 
group of adolescents with no peer group to identify with or
receive support from. Many report extreme isolation and loss
of close friends."

What must be accomplished in adolescence - separating from the 
family, forming a positive personal identity, and learning about
relationships - is made more difficult when you're gay. To find
out who you are on the often violent proving grounds of an American
high school is tough for anyone, but to discover you're among
the most despised is devastating. A panic-filled retrenchment can
result, a pulling back from contact with anyone who might discover
the secret. Just when you need reassurance the most, those whom
you've always counted on, your parents and friends, become 
antagonists to be hoodwinked. Growing up gay in this society is
really about different degrees of growing up undercover, and the
sooner you know, the harder it is.

			-------------------

I don't remember not knowing. For awhile, I talked about it, saying
I wanted to be strong ("Girls don't need to be strong"), that when
I got married, my wife and i would have a wonderful house ("You
won't have a wife, you'll have a husband"). By age five I was sick
of the flak, so I kept my mouth shut. I figured they just didn't
get it. It wasn't that I wanted to be a boy, those strange mixes
of overly rough and teacup-fragile, with exotic problems like athlete's
foot and undescended testicles, but I *did* want to be the kind of 
girl I was, and I thought those people who were telling me I couldn't
have a wife just hadn't met girls like me before.

In the closing days of summer camp, when I was seven, we were supposed
to announce with whom we were going steady. Of course, no one really
was - we were all too young - but nevertheless I was thrown into a 
quandary. If I were going to pledge my troth, it certainly would be
to Stacy, with whom I'd been sneaking off all summer to plan our 
wonderful life together. Ken snagged me after dinner one night, just
before campfire. "Look," he said bluntly," you want to go with Stacy
and I want to go with Roger. So what we'll do is just tell everybody
you're going with me and she's going with Rog."

God, what a mind! Such duplicity would never have occurred to me.
It made me feel a little funny - wasn't it like lying?- but still....
I edited myself more and more as I became older and realized it
wasn't that people hadn't known about girls like me, but that those
girls were so horrible no one wanted to ever talk about them. I
believed I was hiding so successfully until my Girl Scout leader
threw me out for being "too masculine." My world fell apart.
Everyone knew. I was completely obvious. Something drastic had
to be done.

Something was. I dropped out of the athletics I loved, I started
setting my  hair, I changed my style of dress, I developed an
imperious persona to go along with my attire, and i began 
pretending an interest in boys. From seventh through twelfth
grades, I was another person, somewone I became in the morning
and shed in the afternoon when I got home from school and put on
my normal clothes. After awhile, I wasn't sure who I was or what
I felt. My romantic experiences were limited to trying mot to
be alone with the boys I dated. By the time I got out of high
school, I knew less about myself than when I'd left sixth grade,
and I was alcoholic and suicidal to boot. The only thing I did
right was to get straight As. I was one of three people voted
"Most Likely to Succeed" from our class of six hundred. What that
signified to me was how successfully I had already hidden.

			-------------------

There are those who cannot hide. Says "Charley," a high school junior
in El Sobrante: "Some people say they've known their sexuality since
they were three, whether they were straight or gay, byt I think for
most people it's later. For me it went both ways, so I didn't think
anything was weird at all until the fifth grade, when I started real-
izing that maybe something was different. When I was thirteen I figured
out the label. And that's around when I started being hassled in
school, people calling me pussy and fag.... By the ninth grade, I
would be happy if I came home from a day in school and I hadn't been
called faggot or cocksucker once. That's really a sad standard
for what makes you happy.

"One time I was in the locker room and this guy who didn't like
me starts going over and over, 'Charley sucks dick, Charley sucks
dick,' and soon the whole locker room full of guys was yelling this
for like maybe three minutes. ANd i had to pretend I didn't give
a shit about it, but really I wanted to kill myself. That's when
I started  cutting school. It's sad because I had a 4.0 grade
average, I'd won all these awards, and within a few months I went
to Ds and Fs. Now that I'm at a different school, I'm still
cutting. It's like I got in a rut."

Charley, to me, is not obvious, but he says he saw a videotape of
himself in the seventh grade and he was "kinda effeminate." Since
then he's worked hard to hide any clues that he's gay - "Sometimes
I don't know what's me anymore"- but it hasn't  helped much, 
especially not at his old school in Oakland. Finally he was expelled
for cutting classes and sent to live in El Sobrante with his father,
a remote man who beat Charley when he was younger.

"I just withdrew from everyone," Charley says, as we sit in Willard
Park on a sunny holiday afternoon. "The whole point of talking to
guys after the eighth grade became to prove my heterosexuality. I
was never outgoing, but after people  started picking on me I got
even worse. I've always had a  hard time relating to men anyway
because of my father beating me. It was like a one-two punch: first
I was beaten and then I found out I was gay."

Charley is tall- over six feet- a big, good-looking kid with soft eyes
and a tentative smile. He used to run cross-country, but he dropped out
of that, too. He says it's better at his new school, and that this
year he's finally made some friends. Then he shakes his head. "But
how can I consider them friends when, if they knew, they'd hate me?"

"If I dropped out, I guess I'd go live with my mom again," he says,
his voice tinged with hopelessness. "Last week I just wanted to lash
out at the straight world for doing this to me. I realize I've made
choices, but when I first started cutting school I felt like I was
making the only choice. I was for simple survival. I wasn't just
choosing to fuck up, I was choosing to not kill myself. Cutting
was my drug of choice, my way of avoiding those situations. If I had
to do it again I don't know if I'd be able to do it differently.

"This year I auditioned for a play, and I got a big part. I was so
excited. Then people started calling me faggot. Some of the 
people doing it were gay; these guys who were heavily closeted.
I didn't want to say 'I'm not a fucking faggot. Get off my case,'
because then I'd be the homophobic homos they are. So I dropped
out. I'm tired of trying to be someone else.

"I see these kids at school who are gay. This one girl who's really
popular is a total dyke. That makes me jealous 'cause they have 
their lives totally together, like they're going on to college and 
they're prom queens or whatever. But they're in the closet. They're
being whatever everyone else wants them to be." He stares off across
the park. "Sometimes I just feel so desperate. I can see wanting to
settle down and have a longtime companion and children and all that,
but right now I just want action." He laughs. "And that's not 
happening either. I don't want to be promiscuous or anything, and I 
want to find someone my own age, 'cause then - well, we'd be in
the same place. But after six years of knowing, it's just so
much pent-up frustration."

He fishes around in his backpack to find his journal so he can show
me the entries he'w written to himself. They start, "Dear Charley."
"I must feel better about myself to write that, don't you think?"
He replaces the journal and stretches his long legs. "There's no way
I could be out at school without being totally ostracized, without
violence. But I'm lying to myself and to the world every day I'm
in school."

			-------------------------

My father once told me he hoped I wouldn't get involved in the
gay subculture. Once you do that, he said, you're lost. You can
never come back. Apart from the fact that I couldn't go "back"
to some place I'd never been, what he was asking me to do was,
in essence, hold a loaded gun to my head and pull the trigger.

Gays without a community are defined by straight people's 
homophobia - you *are* the "other," the pervert, the freak.
Viewing yourself through the eyes of a society that loathes
you is a devastating experience. It's impossible not to
internalize that level of contempt. The armor that will 
eventually defend you comes from lovers and friends, and
being one among thousands like yourself who are living 
fruitful, happy lives. But there's no easy fit for teenagers
in the adult gay community - a world that to teens, if they
even know about it, seems far away and unattainable. Adults
steer clear of gay youth, fearful of charges of "recruiting"-
even though, as Charley says, if any sexuality could be 
induced, it would be heterosexuality, given how we're bom-
barded with it. And because almost every teen who can is
hiding, it's near impossible to develop your own community.

Julie Stevens, a 27-year-old Berkley hairstylist, grew up 
gay in what a lot of people might think was an ideal situation:
her mother is also a lesbian. Instead, her childhood was a
nightmare of conflicting perceptions. "I grew up in Southern
California, in the most oppressive place I could think of -
the San Fernando Valley, kind of like where they dropped 
the Rodney King verdict. When I was about five, my parents got
divorced. My mom came back when I was around seven and came
out to me, my brother, my father. She'd gone to Mexico and 
fallen in love with a woman. I didn't know what it meant.
I remember telling kids at school that gay meant happy, that
she was happy and gay.

"My dad wouldn't let me see my mom. I had a lot of shame about
her...I knew my dad didn't like what she'd done, that there was
something wrong with her. I thought maybe she was crazy. Now,
as an adult, I dream that my mom's crazy and my family's trying
to keep me away from her. But when I was a kid...you know, if 
they cut off your left arm, you don't question where is your
left arm. It's just that you don't have one."

Stevens sighs as she gazes across the long back room at the Tea
Spot Cafe on San Pablo Avenue, where we're having lunch. She
looks younger than her age, with an open face and a quick smile
that comes adn goes like the sun on a cloudy day. "They sent me
to a shrink when I was, like seven, you know, to deal with my
problem."

"What was your problem?" I ask.

She smiles on-off. "They never told me." She gnaws gently on her
lower lip, thinking. "That I loved my mother more than my
father, that I identified with her."

"They felt you weren't fitting in somehow?"

"Oh, I *definitely* wasn't fitting in. I could've saved them a 
lot of money by telling them that. Ther was a distinction 
between me and my family, me and the neighborhood. I wasn't
like the other girls who were all interested in boys. I was
definitely different. I grew up a tomboy. I didn't wear a shirt
until my father said I had to."

"And they associated this with your mother?"

"Yeah, like, 'Her mom's a lesbian and it's really fucking up our
daughter, so now we're going to have to send her to therapy.'

"Then my dad started letting me see my mom. I'd go to her house
on weekends. She lived in Echo Park, in a real dyke neighborhood.
She was active in the lesbian community, and at that time it was
really grass roots. I was hanging around all those women, and i 
was, like, in heaven. I never knew anything better than that.
People paid attention to me, they talked about feelings, they
took my feelings seriously."

"So I started living this double life," Stevens says. "I was in
heterosexual suburban land during the week and on the weekends
I was with my mom and her girlfriend. That went on until I was
about thirteen and a half. I was begging my father to let me
live with my mom. I wasn't being treated like a human being
at home. I wanted to get the hell out of there. And I'd been
having these feelings for women and girls, getting crushes....
So I moved in with my mom, and that summer we moved up here to
Berkeley." She pauses. "By that time, most of the kids in my
dad's neighborhood had found out about my mom. I had to walk
home all these weird routes so I wouldn't get confronted by
those kids. They'd throw things at me and beat me up, say my
mom was queer or that I was, chase me down the street."

"Did you feel like they were harassing you more because of your
mom or just because of the way you were?"

"Both." Silence. "Then we moved up here, and I went to Willard
Junior High. I was fourteen. Not only did I discover women, I 
discovered all these things, like freedom, being a young woman,
being a lesbian. I knew I was a lesbian at that point, no doubt
about it.... But you know, that time is a big blur to me." She
pushes the food around on her plate for a moment. She hasn't 
eaten much. "I had such shame about sexuality. From fourteen to
twenty-0ne seemed almost like the same year to me. I did a lot
of drugs, I slept with a lot of women. I had a fake ID, I got
into bars." She pauses. "It's painful to talk about. It's like
that was the package of my life. 'You're a lesbian, your 
parents got divorced, this is your package.' The alcohol and
drugs were part of that. And i was so confused for such a long
time. My dad was making it seem like me being a lesbian was my
mom's fault. I didn't know that it was *me*. Like without my
mother and without my father, I'd *still* be a lesbian.

"I hated Berkeley High. It was so big, I was lost, and I was
still living a double life. I had this school and home life,
and then I had this great nightlife. I didn't understand why 
people were trying to make me be a kid. It was so much easier
for me to be an adult.

"I started getting into all kinds of trouble, with my mom, y'know,
about the drugs. And then I was high in classes, cutting all
the time. Finally they kicked me out. I made it a quarter of
the way through the tenth grade, and that was it for my high
school education.

"I was really glad. I hated it there. It was uncomfortable.
There were these two young women who went to my school who
were gorgeous. I had huge crushes on them. And they didn't
take me seriously. They were straight. Everybody else was
having sexual feelings, and here I was a freak. How could I
be attracted to these two gorgeous women, I mean, what was 
I thinking?"

"Did you feel it was bad?"

"Yeah."

"Did you talk to your mother?"

"No."

"Why?"

"You just didn't talk about that kind of stuff. You kept that
iron door *locked*, and don't you dare try to get the key out
and open it up." She takes a deep breath. "Besides, I was hassled
a lot in school, called dyke all the time. If you have a choice
of being hassled or not, you're going to choose not to be hassled.
I got screamed at, had  shit thrown at me in the hallways. I was
afraid to walk down the hallway if it was just me. I'd look
both ways and then I'd run.

"Anyway, high school ended, and there I was, out in the real
working world. My mom said I had to get a job. I was grateful
she didn't make me go to some other school. The part I wish
was different was the stuff around the drugs. It's like society
just blocks gays and lesbians into this 'Shame on you' kind of
thing. There was nothing else for me to do, nowhere else for
me to go."

She pushes her plate aside. "My father told me I was self-
destructive. I was bound and determined to show him just how
self-destructive I was. Drugs, yeah! Get hurt, yeah! The older
I become, the more I'm just...." She shakes her head. "I mean,
God, how did I make it our of that stuff?"

			-------------------

The Pacific Center, a gay and lesbian service organization, sits
kitty-corner to the Andronico's on Telegraph. The center runs
a speakers' outreach to schools and the community, operates an
area-wide telephone hotline, offers an extensive counseling
program, and hosts twenty-some peer support groups.

One afternoon, about twenty young people sit in the upstairs
room at the Pacific Center, sprawled across a collection of
old couches and beat-up chairs. Several are talking about
last night at the Mix, a dance club down at Aquatic Park. The
ethnic makeup of this drop-in group reflects that of the 
East Bay: acouple more whites than blacks, three Latinos,
three Asians. What isn't reflected is gender parity: in spite
of having a woman facilitator, the most women I've seen here
is three.

"Boys tend to be louder and interrupt each other," Vashti Holt
says. She's been leading the group since 1989. "I think some
women are put off by that. And it's self-perpetuating. Women see
all the guys and don't come back. We should probably advertise
again. But if you put up flyers at high schools they're ripped
down in minuted. It happens in the dorms at Cal too. They're
torn down right away."

One day even Vashti isn't there - she's out playing softball.
I settle into a corner and disappear, made invisible by the 
generation gap. The group is talking about fathering children.
The Asians and Latinos are very concerned about not carrying
on the family name, particularly those who are only sons. The
whites and blacks shrug and say, sure, they'd like to know
someone would live on after them, but they wouldn't want to 
have to take care of a kid or support it or anything. I must
have made a strangled noise because one guy says (though not
to me), "Hey, half the men in the world feel that way. 
It's cool."

They reassure each other that they can still have children.
All they need to do is find a lesbian couple who wants kids.
Or they could pay a lesbian to have a child for them. A 
figure of $2,000 is bandied about. Several think this is
outrageously high, but others point out that having a kid
must be a lot of work.

Not all the meetings are so hilarious, intentionally or otherwise.
But humor does help to make bearable situations that are
otherwise grim.

"Because of Rodney King," says one CCAC student, a black man with
a ready grin, "we were all talking about how we were 
prejudiced, and I said I didn't like heterosexuals coming to 
this gay club I got to."

"Yeah, keep 'em out," several people shout.

"Then the teacher said afterwards she didn't want me to bring
my private life into class," he continues. "I mean, that's
what we were *all* doing."

"I sure wouldn't come out at school," comments seventeen-year-
old Frank. "Otherwise, the shit'd hit the fan."

The college student shakes his head. "Just get the fuck out
of high school."

"I want to know how to meet people," one teen says.

"Go to your school library and get a list of who's checked
out the gay books," Frank advises. Then he sighs. "I wish
there were places for us."

Vashti wonders whether anyone would go straight if they could.
Everyone wants to know if she means like for an hour or two.
"Forever," she says with finality.

No one does. "I couldn't get away with as much," says a young man
who just moved here from Minnesota. "As a gay man I can be strong,
weak, open, closed, everything. I couldn't do that if I were 
straight."

"What I hate is how we're not expected to be human," Frank says.
"They think we have only one thing on our minds."

"Three," the CCAC student counters. "Sex, art, and retail."

But at another meeting, an eighteen-year-old says he
would go straight in an instant. "I can't live gay," he says.
He tells the group that he plans to marry this woman he
knows. That way he can have a family and be accepted. Everyone
looks worried. "Do you love her?" someone asks.

"Well, yeah. I mean, I could never love her the way I can a man.
But what I hope is that I could learn to love her, over time."

Some shake ther heads, but a couple of people are more
philosophical. "To close off that part of yourself - it's a
choice some people make," one young man says.

"I guess if both of you agree to try it," another says.
"She does know?"

It turns out she doesn't know. Now everyone looks really
worried. "It's not fair to her," the eighteen-year-old
admits. "But it's not fair to me to have to live like this.
I can't stand not being accepted." He looks up at the 
ceiling and asks, "Is there any way to change?"

No one offers any hope in that direction. "For weeks I prayed,
'Jesus, change me,'" a twenty-year-old says. "'If I'm not
doing your work, change me.' And I put all gay thoughts out
of my head. You know what? All those thoughts came back. I
figured if God made me this way, that's the way He wants me to be."

"Unless it's the devil," someone quips.

"But that's what I think," breaks in the eighteen-year-old
excitedly. "I think Satan must be inside me."

Charley tells me later in a shakey voice, "We don't need to
worry about straight people hating us when we already hate
ourselves so much."

			--------------------

No one would argue that it hasn't become better for gay adults
in the last 25 years. Yes, of course, it's still awful, and the
ships of state are veering into increasingly stormy waters, but 
still it's better now for adults than it was in the '40s or '50s.
So why hasn't the situation imporved for teenagers? How could 
anything be as bad as growing up thinking that there's no
one else like you in the entire world?

Today's youth are much more conscious of being gay. The hetero-
sexual presumption which we older types grew up with (and
shouted against in the early gay pride parades) is no longer
quite so monolithic. But a sense of place for older people can
create a dangerous no-man's-land for youth. Before Stonewall,
a lot of people didn't figure out their sexuality before their
late teens. Today's teenagers are cottoning to the fact sooner
that either they're gay or someone near and dear is struggling
with his/her sexual orientation. And as the government study
on youth suicide says, " The earlier youth are aware of their
orientation and identify themselves as gay, the greater the
conflicts they have."

Doesn't this fly in the face of all the cries to "Come out,
come out" we've heard for years? Yes and no. Clearly there 
is no more important force for change than for gays to 
identify themselves as such and to live openly, taking
whatever consequences may come our way. But we tend to
be protective of our kids, and it's hard to tell someone
like Charley that he should be beating the drum. Charley
wanted me to use his real name. 

"But you just told me that if you came out in school you's
be beaten up," I said.

"Yeah...but don't you think I *should* come out?"

Again, yes and no. Bereft of a caring community, of adults who
could help, Charley is beset by a battle of perceptions: am I
a pervert or am I gay and proud? And if I *am* gay and proud
and don't come out, doesn't that make me a coward?

Charley's right when he ways junior high and high school are
unreal worlds. They're the last bastions of strict sex-role
stereotyping before we enter the grays of  adult life, where
women of all sexual orientations don't perform as expected
and, surprise, neither do men. Whenever you're enforcing 
something that doesn't really exist, like rigid sex roles, you 
need a scapegoat to ensure that people stay in line - enter
queer, lezzie, cocksucker, fairy, dyke. You hear it in any
schoolyard, luckily most of the time not directed at some-
one, most of the time simply a mantra of affiliation, like
a pack of religious zealots clutching each others' hands as
they whisper about heathens.

			-------------------

"What I didn't like about _Gay Youth_ is that it gives the 
impression that kids should come out," says P.E. teacher "Joan,"
who nevertheless plans to use the new documentary in the 
consciousness-raising classes she runs at her high school.
Released this month, the forty-minute film by lesbian
filmmaker Pam Walton focuses on Bobby Griffith, a deeply
religious young man from Concord who could not accept
being gay and finally committed suicide, and Gina Gutierrez, a 
high-spirited Bay Area native who came out while she was
at Los Gatos High School, survived the taunts, and went
on to college. Walton, now 47, says she made the film
because her own adolescence was so difficult. "A lot of
young people don't believe they'll ever *not* be despised,"
Walton says. "They don't understand there's another
world out there."

"Adolescence is a psychosis," says Walton. "Most kids are
rebelling against anything that looks like an authority
figure, but there's also a pathological need to be like
your peers. I never did rebel. I felt so crooked on the 
inside that I was completely straight on the outside."
She shakes her head. "If you never have an adolescence,
you don't enter adulthood as a whole person. I went nuts
when I was 25. I had to be a teenager then.

"I remember so clearly when I was nineteen. The first time
I told someone I was a ho-mo-sex-u-al." She grins. "She
was a very caring, loving person. Her first reaction was,
'Oh, you don't want to live the life of a lesbian.' And
I thought, 'Oh, my God, I guess I don't.' What does that
mean, I wondered, sleeping on the streets in a dark alley?
This was, like, 1965. I got into therapy right away. The 
therapist I had was horrible, just horrible. She'd sit and
look at me and never say a thing. Well, all my friends were
starting to sleep with boys, so I made a conscious decision
that I would, too. I singled out this guy who was in my 
art class, and I slept with him. It was one of the most
ghastly things I have ever done. I told the therapist, and
she said I was cured. When I came back the next week, she'd
given my appointment to someone else."

Walton says she read about Bobby Griffith in the _[San
Francisco] Examiner_ series on gay life in 1989. Gina
Gutierrez came to her, called her up after she heard that
Walton was making a film on gay youth. "She was so much
the opposit of the Bobby story. I thought I'd do a full
treatment of the two and then touch on other themes - 
substance abuse, homelessness - with short interviews, 
talking heads."

Gutierrez had chosen to perform a gay-themed monologue
for a school assembly. "Gina read Thoreau's _Civil
Disobedience_ and she decided she was going to be
honest about who she was," Walton explains. Being 
honest included attending the prom with her girlfriend,
coming out to her parents, and, not least, being in
Walton's film. Gina's stepfather, in one wonderful
segment, says Gina should be able to kiss her girlfriend
out on the porch - doesn't Gina's younger sister kiss her
boyfriend? Gina's mother isn't entirely happy with this
idea, but can't think of a logical comeback. Gina herself
is evervescent, perched on the kitchen counter, as 
delighted as if she were watching a captivating tennis
match.

"The thing is," Joan, the P.E. teacher, says to me over
the phone, "Gina is completely self-assured. And her parents
are amazing. It doesn't usually work that way, with either
kids or parents."

Many kids know they might get tossed out of the house if
they're honest about who they are. "I'm only sixteen,"
Charley says. "I don't think I can realistically support
myself yet, so I can't tell my father." This sentiment
was echoed many times at the Pacific Center groups. And as 
awful as being drummed out of the household would be for
anyone, for gays of color it feels like a death warrant.
The family is the bulwark against the crushing malevolence
of the majority culture; to be banished from or even at
odds with your family is like coming to bat with three
strikes against you - race, age, sexual orientation - and
perhaps gender as well.

Several studies have indicated that the later a son or 
daughter comes out, the easier it is for parents to accept.
Once a child is earning a living, making his or her own way
in the adult world, parents' fears may be somewhat mollified.
When a teenager comes out, almost any parent is thrown into
a panic. "I've never dealt with a moment's oppression," admits
a father at a meeting of parents of gays. "I was raised upper
middle class. I'm a professional. When my daughter told me
she was a lesbian, I realized her whole life people would
hate her blindly, without reason. First it made me frightened
to death for her, and then it made me furious. Now I've been
thinking about all prejudice, about how badly so many people
are treated." He laughs. "She's made me a radical."

Unfortunately, this man is unusual. Parents moving past the
fear stage most frequently go into denial. "My mother said
she wished I was dead," one young woman told me. "What
she really meant is that it would have been easier for me
not to have been born than for her to endure how frightened
she is for me. I couldn't take it if she really wanted me to 
die. But we don't talk about it at all now. It's the big
unspoken subject."

Denial can go both ways. If no one talks about it, it's
hard to know how anyone feels. And as Charley says,
"Adolescence is hard enough as it is without society
telling you you should be dead."

		-------------------------

Waht could help? "Consciousness raising would be a start,"
says Joan. "Every kid knows what it means to be trashed.
We start with that. We get them in touch with how painful
it is. And then we turn it around and say, 'Look at all these
other people who are being hurt.' It's really effective, but
all I hear is that there isn't enough time for it." She
pauses. "We counsel people not to come out. It's not safe,
physically or emotionally. Until we get some assistance from
social programs and the government, we shouldn't leave
these kids to hang out to dry."

But what about the kids who are already hanging? What about
those who can't act straight or who don't want to hide? 
Some of them are on the streets, some in shelters, some 
miserable at home. Some are in mental institutions or
religious aversion-therapy centers, committed by their
parents. And some, of course, really are dead.

The figures collected by the government are staggering:
25% of lesbians and 20% of gay men reported in one study
that they'd attempted suicide - lesbians are twice as likely
as straight women to try suicide, gay men six times as likely
as straight men. A majority of these attempts took place
before age twenty, with a third occuring before age
seventeen. But the numbers are somewhat misleading; attempts
by teenagers have a much lower success rate than adult
attempts, so many of these gestures must be  interpreted
as a plea for help. Still, out of all suicides committed by
teenagers, 30% are committed by gays and lesbians, who make
up only 10% of the polulation.

Where help might come from is problematic. The findings
of the government report on teen suicide have not been
publicized and there are those who would like to keep it
that way. Soon after the report came out, state repre-
sentative and spurned senatorial hopeful William 
Dannemeyer wrote to George Bush and to Secretary of Health
and Human Services Louis Sullivan, asking them to denounce
the portions dealing with suicide among gay teens. Why?
Because the report dared to suggest a remedy: "The root of
the problem...is a society that discriminates against and
stigmatizes homosexuals. We need to make a conscious
effort to promote a positive image of homosexuals at all
levels of society that provides gay youth with a diversity of
lesbian and gay male adult role models." The study goes on
to suggest that families must bve educated to accept their gay
children, that schools need to include information about
sexual orientation and make a commitment to protecting
gay youth from abuse.

Sullivan responded to critcs of the report by saying that
he had neither endorsed nor approved it, noting that it 
was written during the Reagan administration. He is said
to be studying its recommendations, but since he's been
doing that since 1990, don't expect a speedy reply. Besides,
any politician with his finger in the wind registered on
point man Dan Quayle's speech a couple weeks ago, in
which he accused the "cultural elites" of believing "all
'lifestyles' are equal."

What are we to think when the vice president says people
are not equal because of who they are? When we equate
lifestyle with real lives and are willing to let kids
die to prove a point, then things aren't exactly
cooking in our kitchen.

		--------------------------


Most of the people I've interviewed here would rank pretty high
on the Kinsey scale (1 = exclusive heterosexual relations; 
6 = exclusive homosexual relations). For the most part, people
are somewhere in between, with many who identify as gay falling
as a 3 or a 4. This can be confusing for teens, who don't
understand why they're attracted to both sexes, or why
intercourse feels great with the opposite sex yet things aren't
meshing emotionally. But because our society is so rigid
about gender issues, we all tend to spring to either end of
the Kinsey scale like metal filings glomming onto magnets.
The gay community can sometimes seem almost as stringent
in its mores as its majority counterpart, creating an even
greater sense of alienation among despairing teenagers.
Almost nowhere - and certainly not in high school - is a range
of gender and sexuality ever presented as a possibility, as
simply what people are or can be. In fact, probably more
people than not feel "wrong" in some area of gender identity,
no matter what their sexual orientation.

A wider spectrum can be found any Friday night at the Mix,
a dance club for young people at the north end of Berkeley's
Aquatic Park. Pay your cover, get your hand stamped (a small
stamp if under 21, large if over), and enter a dark cave
vibrating with music. Large sculptures of dragons and harpies
boudn off the wall, surrounded by gaudy paintings of 
lipsticked women and clowns. Strobes flicker, freezing 
gestures into still-lifes: teeth gleam in ecstatic grins;
hands reach towards the ceiling; sweat sluices down a bare
chest. Dykes with tattoos are dancing with flaming queens.
Longhaired girls shimmy against longhaired girls. Hunky
guys slam hunky guys. Women have spent hard-earned cash
at Victoria's Secret and are flaunting it. Men wear base-
ball caps with the bill in back. T-shirts are almost a 
uniform, over breasts or over pecs, the looser the better,
so you can pull the cloth free and flap it occasionally
for ventilation.

But anything goes, and so does anyone. You can be whatever
you like, and that's a big improvement over the not-so-
old days. No one's telling you to be butch or femme -
or not to be. No one's demanding mustaches or sculpted
bods. People are splattered like a Rorschachs across a
Kinsey scale of gender identity that has lots of grays
and room to play, whether you're bi, gay or straight. I
loved it, but I bet Dan Quayle wouldn't. And that's a 
problem. When presidential campaigns depend on branding
the existence of certain citizens an obscenity, we're
skating close to fascism.

But Pam Walton sees hope in poetential horror. "The process
of getting well is messy," she says. "This culture is so
homophobic and so sick that it has to go through con-
vulsions to get well. Coming out into the open about
who you are is going to stir up all this sickness. It's
like the bottom of a pond. It's got to come up before it
can be cleaned."

____________________________________________________________


[End quoted material]


a 
-- 
       ____         Scott Keeney, DNA repair-queer         ____
       \  /           scottk@mendel.berkeley.edu           \  /
        \/        Biochemistry and Molecular Biology        \/ 
                            U.C. Berkeley



-- 
"Black men loving black men is THE revolutionary act!"
			-Joseph Beam_
Terrance Heath 
heath@athena.cs.uga.edu