By Tim Trent (Bracknell, UK) Sept 24 |There is something good happening in the USA. It's by no means universal there yet, and the tide may turn several times before it becomes universal, but, for gay youth, something good is happening, and a New York Times Magazine preview article handles it in detail. ( Full Article Here)
It's a long article, there are nine pages. Almost all of them are worth reading in full.
Published yesterday, on 23rd September, it starts:
Now think for a moment. Not only is Austin now absolutely out of the closet at 13, there is a photograph of him in the New York Times. And that photo shows an ordinary kid in ordinary clothes. He is the epitome of normality. The only difference is that in his core he knows he needs his current and future partner to be another boy.
The thing that marks Austin out as different from my generation is his attitude:
I read that and wanted to cry. No, I wanted not to cry. To make this personal for a moment, I found out I was gay when I was 13, and I hid it until I was 48. I damaged myself so badly that I am still coming to terms with it at 57. Austin is not only brave, but he is wise.
And yet the USA is the land where Matthew Shepard was pistol whipped and left dying on a fence in Wyoming just because he was gay. Austin is brave as a lion, too.
It's not just Austin, of course it's not. And, increasingly, itls not just in large urban environments. Even in the Bible belt the leaves are starting to fall form the fundamentalist trees as we reach what we all hope is the Autumn of anti gay prejudice. Though we recognise that Autumn and Winter are followed by Spring and Summer, we hope that the new Spring will be truly new and without that evil fundamentalist bigotry.
The article also makes a point about the inherently patronising adult attitudes to teenage sexuality:
We know, because we were teenagers, that we had sexual feelings at 12, 13, 14, 15. We are able in our own experiences to differentiate between a mechanical pleasurable physical response and a romantic response linked (or not) to thoughts or acts of sex. Yet we still patronise kids by treating them like infants, not like the embryo adults that they are. And we discriminate between the heterosexual and the rest. Or we demean their feelings by talking about an 'adolescent crush' as if it was some sort of ailment that time cured.
There's so much in this article that gives me hope for the USA. I'd love to quote more from it, but the laws of copyright prevent more than a few snippets. But I commend it to you. Go and read it now. Read it however biased you may feel at this moment against homosexuality. Most importantly, read it if you are a parent, and then go and hug your child.
It's a long article, there are nine pages. Almost all of them are worth reading in full.
Published yesterday, on 23rd September, it starts:
Austin didn’t know what to wear to his first gay dance last spring. It was bad enough that the gangly 13-year-old from Sand Springs, Okla., had to go without his boyfriend at the time, a 14-year-old star athlete at another middle school, but there were also laundry issues. “I don’t have any clean clothes!” he complained to me by text message, his favored method of communication.
Now think for a moment. Not only is Austin now absolutely out of the closet at 13, there is a photograph of him in the New York Times. And that photo shows an ordinary kid in ordinary clothes. He is the epitome of normality. The only difference is that in his core he knows he needs his current and future partner to be another boy.
The thing that marks Austin out as different from my generation is his attitude:
“When I first realized I was gay,” Austin interjected [to the author], “I just assumed I would hide it and be miserable for the rest of my life. But then I said, ‘O.K., wait, I don’t want to hide this and be miserable my whole life.’ ”
I read that and wanted to cry. No, I wanted not to cry. To make this personal for a moment, I found out I was gay when I was 13, and I hid it until I was 48. I damaged myself so badly that I am still coming to terms with it at 57. Austin is not only brave, but he is wise.
And yet the USA is the land where Matthew Shepard was pistol whipped and left dying on a fence in Wyoming just because he was gay. Austin is brave as a lion, too.
It's not just Austin, of course it's not. And, increasingly, itls not just in large urban environments. Even in the Bible belt the leaves are starting to fall form the fundamentalist trees as we reach what we all hope is the Autumn of anti gay prejudice. Though we recognise that Autumn and Winter are followed by Spring and Summer, we hope that the new Spring will be truly new and without that evil fundamentalist bigotry.
The article also makes a point about the inherently patronising adult attitudes to teenage sexuality:
"... the younger they are when they come out, the more that youth with same-sex attractions face an obstacle that would be unimaginable to their straight peers. When a 12-year-old boy matter-of-factly tells his parents — or a school counselor — that he likes girls, their reaction tends not to be one of disbelief, dismissal or rejection. “No one says to them: ‘Are you sure? You’re too young to know if you like girls. It’s probably just a phase,’ ” says Eileen Ross, the director of the Outlet Program, a support service for gay youth in Mountain View, Calif. “But that’s what we say too often to gay youth. We deny them their feelings and truth in a way we would never do with a heterosexual young person.”
We know, because we were teenagers, that we had sexual feelings at 12, 13, 14, 15. We are able in our own experiences to differentiate between a mechanical pleasurable physical response and a romantic response linked (or not) to thoughts or acts of sex. Yet we still patronise kids by treating them like infants, not like the embryo adults that they are. And we discriminate between the heterosexual and the rest. Or we demean their feelings by talking about an 'adolescent crush' as if it was some sort of ailment that time cured.
There's so much in this article that gives me hope for the USA. I'd love to quote more from it, but the laws of copyright prevent more than a few snippets. But I commend it to you. Go and read it now. Read it however biased you may feel at this moment against homosexuality. Most importantly, read it if you are a parent, and then go and hug your child.
Tim Trent is an IT Marketing & Security expert privacy specialist and a frequent contributor on LGBT issues for Brody's Notes & Scribbles from the UK. (Photo of Tim Trent: Marketing by Permission, Berkshire, UK.)
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