Browsing: Youth

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June 28,1969. In the early morning hours, police raid a mafia-run Greenwich Village bar named the Stonewall Inn that catered to an assortment of patrons including drag queens, transgendered people, homeless youth, middle class gays, and hustlers. …

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On April 25th at 7:00 p.m., I arrived at the Hasted-Hunt Gallery in New York City’s gay ghetto, Chelsea, where a robust reception for the youthful participants of Soulforce’s Equality Ride was being held. The Equality Riders, some of whom have been the victims of hate crimes and expelled from Christian colleges because of their sexual orientation, are a bold band of young activists who have traveled across the country …

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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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… 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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MANY YOUNG GAY MEN are perceived by themselves and others as “whores,” but it’s a label that other gay youth are consciously rejecting. An earlier generation of gay men embraced sexual liberation as the driving goal of gay liberation itself, and found it empowering to be a “whore” or a “slut.” “Sexual objectification is a focus of our quest for freedom,” declared “A Gay Manifesto” of the 1970’s (by Carl Wittman). But gay youth culture has changed dramatically since then. Gay young people in general have veered toward a more heterosexual definition of their sexual relations. Few would agree with the sentiment expressed in another manifesto of early Gay Liberation, that of Martha Shelley in her classic essay “Gay is Good”: “straight roles stink.”

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