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… IT USED TO BE that going to a gay bar meant being in the thick of gay community, gay culture, and gay activism. There would be fliers up on a bulletin board somewhere near the pay phone. There might be a fundraiser for the local LGBT community center or there might be some political conversation. … While the Internet is a powerful tool for organizing and for getting the word out about GLBT issues-from news on legislation to advice on how to bypass heterosexist adoption laws- I worry that it’s lulling us into a false sense of security. …

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The following is excerpted and adapted from an article that first appeared in the Journal of Homosexuality, Volume 49, Number 1, 2005.

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FAN FICTION, in its simplest definition, is fiction written by the fans of any popular narrative, be it a novel, a TV series, or a film. While private fan fiction may be as old as fiction itself, its origins as a genre for public (albeit esoteric) circulation can be traced back to the start of fan magazines or “fanzines” in the 1970’s. With the advent of the Internet, the genre has suddenly become available to a mass readership, and this has alerted more people to the phenomenon and to its possibilities than a fanzine could ever hope to do. .

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BY ALL ACCOUNTS gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youths comprise a disproportionate number of at-risk youths across the U.S. They are substantially more likely than are straight youths to experience homelessness, whether because they run away or because they’re forced to leave home by their families. They’re more likely to attempt suicide and more likely to commit truancy or to drop out of high school altogether to avoid an intolerable situation. …

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TO GROW UP gay or lesbian any time before the Internet came into wide use, in most of America, was to experience a profound isolation. There were few places where one could go to see the possibility of a normal life. Many of us wondered whether we were alone in feeling the anomaly of same-sex attraction. Only slowly, as gays and lesbians began appearing in the mainstream media, could youths come to know that homosexuality is out there. Everything changed with the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990’s. …

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… Derrick is not self-hating, homophobic, or confused about who he is. He just doesn’t think he’s gay.

Derrick is not a lone exception. This I discovered through interviewing young women with physical or romantic attractions to women, talking to youths in gay/straight alliances, reading youth stories gathered by others, listening to young people at the annual True Colors conference over the past decade, and reading the scientific literature. …

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WHERE ARE WE in the struggle for gay rights in the United States? Are we in the early stages of what will become a successful mass movement for equal civil rights and respect? Or have we reached the highest point of advance for the time being-where we have persuaded many fair-minded people to disdain homophobia, but have lost the momentum to the well-organized and more powerful forces of conservative backlash? …

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This article first appeared in Salon.com, at www.Salon.com. An on-line version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.

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… The most recent studies show that approximately ten million children in the U.S. have one or more lesbian, gay, or bisexual parent. The media present us alternately as either blissfully well-adjusted or angrily screwed up-or ignore us altogether. …

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… That was the beginning of our friendship. Our conversations were few and never about poetry, but I was also reading his work and became intrigued by his use of meter and rhyme. In an era of beat poetry and language poetry and abstract poetry that I couldn’t grasp, Gunn both challenged and comforted me with his formalism. He also excited me with his imagination …

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