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January 9, 2009 Author's |
Book Display[Becoming]
Young ideas on gender, identity, and sexuality
![[Becoming]](/books/www/books/24140-ANDE-thumbnail.gif) by Edited by Diane Anderson-Minshall and Gina de Vries Foreword by Zoe Trope | Availability |
Description | |
[Becoming] is a groundbreaking collection of creative work by people between the ages of 12 and 24 with a foreword written by Zoe Trope, the acclaimed teen author of Please Don´t Kill the Freshmen. Here´s what others are saying about [Becoming]. “This book is more than a collection of writings by queer youth—it´s a celebration of their lives, their challenges, and their triumphs, a document of their culture that´s long overdue.” Lori Selke, editor, Tough Girls “Aren’t all books with fierce, young voices supposed to evoke Holden Caulfield? Shouldn’t I say something like: “Becoming is The Catcher in the Rye on hormones and enrolled in Harvey Milk High”? But Becoming is so over Mr. Caulfield’s brand of coming-of-age. This collection does no less than remind us--no matter what age, orientation, or gender--that we are all constantly becoming.”—T Cooper, author of the novel Some of the Parts “Becoming is a powerful, necessary collection of queer youth writing that should give us all faith in the next generation as they dissect, interrogate and celebrate who they are. This collection of bold, provocative, often challenging essays, stories, poems and interviews presents views that are (sadly) rarely heard, but deserve to be. These writers demand that we embrace them as part of the GLBT community on their own terms, and their strength, passion, talent and courage let us know that our future is in good hands.”—Rachel Kramer Bussel, reviser, The Lesbian Sex Book; Co-Author, The Erotic Writer’s Market Guide, Co-Editor, Up All Night “Becoming, with its broad range of rarely heard voices, is sure to bring comfort to those who identify and insight to those who don´t. Diane Anderson-Minshall and Gina de Vries have done queer youth, their friends and family, and the world of readers a great service.”—Lisa Jervis, publisher & editor, Bitch magazine. [DIANE’S INTRO] It’s hard not to notice queer people nowadays. It sounds simple, I know, but there are queer folks everywhere—on television and magazine covers, in rock bands and at high schools. My friends have gay doctors and lesbian realtors and transgendered ministers and bisexual bosses. It’s no longer such a surprise to find out somebody is homo. Young people, it seems, are the least non-plussed by sexuality. Queer kids are suing their schools for not protecting them; they’re declaring their orientation in elementary school; they’re reinventing the dictionary to encompass the permeations of their life. I was not one of these kids. I was not very brave. It was still the 1980s when I came out. There was a Bush in the White House but otherwise little was as it is now. Back then, 18 or 19 were considered young. Heck, I knew Mormon housewives who were coming out at 45. They thought I was revolutionary. In all honesty, I had a cadre of queer friends in my rural Idaho high school. Each weekend we drove sixty miles to the cool, all-ages, new wave dance where boys wore lipstick and girls danced with each other and we snickered at the drag queens and bar dykes who peopled the shadowy dive next door. None of us were out. My first boyfriend—the boy who gave me my first “real” kiss at 14—knew that he was gay long before that kiss (I knew that day). But we never talked about sexuality until we were in college. By that point, he’d had several boyfriends and I’d had a girlfriend for a year. A full closeted year where she and I double dated cute but clueless college boys who wondered why we spent so much time in the bathroom. When I finally did come out, it shook my whole world. I moved dozens of times, transferred to six different colleges, and shifted all of my energies into queer activism. My parents were not pleased. I abandoned mainstream publishing for the burgeoning gay media. I found my home in feminist bookstores. Residing among other activists, I left work to attend ACT UP and Queer Nation protests and endlessly despaired about the plight of gay and lesbian youth locked away in mental hospitals by their parents. I wrote long diatribes about our lack of visibility at places like the 1987 March on Washington but I was too young, too disenfranchised myself to even make the trip. I was essentially still a teenager and—if you use the Stonewall Riots as the labor pains—so was the queer civil rights movement. There was no Ellen Degeneres or k.d. lang. Elton John and George Michael were still closeted. Queer as Folk and Boys Don’t Cry were years away. Though Tim Curran came out as a gay Boy Scout in 1981, generally Scouts had not yet begun to declare their right to be gay. There were no lesbian rock stars, no gay television networks (no, MTV doesn’t count). Plays about painfully shy gay teenagers—like Christopher Shinn’s recent FOUR—did not attract mainstream reviews, much less straight audiences. There were no queercore indie bands like Bitch and Animal, Le Tigre, and Ninja Death Squad (whose song “Homophobes Gaybash in Order to Suppress Their Powerful Homosexual Tendencies” makes me smile every time). The AIDS Memorial Quilt—now so big it overflows the Mall in Washington—was small enough to fit in a car trunk. There was no Matthew Shepard. Indeed, queer life in America has changed dramatically since I was young. Our civil rights movement—once focused on marriage and job security—now seems squarely in the hands of queer youth. A recent San Francisco State study shows that people are coming out at 14 and 15 instead of 19 and 20. Rather than dropping out of school and slinking away to some big city with this self-knowledge, this new generation is demanding to have a place in society, to be protected from harassment, and to have the same opportunities as its peers. When it doesn’t happen—after all, a lot of queer kids still face a daily barrage of insults, threats, and assaults—some take matters into their own hands. They’re not just forming gay-straight alliances and talking with reporters, they’re also suing their schools: Derek Henkle, now 21, filed suit against his Reno, Nevada high school (seven years after he was beaten by fellow students) while19 year old Timothy Dahle just settled a federal civil rights case against his school district. Rosemary Linares launched a veritable campaign to get her Saline, Michigan high school to allow her to write about gay rights. Chris McCarthy and Mike Dillon put a halt to anti-gay harassment at their New Jersey school—and then formed a statewide group, Gay Youth Against Discrimination—to urge other teens to do the same. In Masconomet, Massachusetts, football captain Corey Johnson came out to his team, landed in Sports Illustrated, and raised queer youth awareness to a whole new level. Nearly a quarter of a century after Randy Rohl and Aaron Fricke first did the same thing, a growing number of high school students are demanding to take their same sex dates to dances and proms. Just last year, couples in Toronto and Baton Rouge, Louisiana won the right to attend together. In Wyoming earlier this year, a straight senior (Amanda Blair) enlisted the help of the ACLU to challenge her high school’s ban on same-sex prom dates. Sometimes, as in the case of Krystal Bennett, queer teens are defying gender while still being honored as prom royalty. Of course, some of the change has happened at individual schools like Pennsylvania’s Friends Central School—a Quaker school where classes now include “Gay and Lesbian Representation in Literature.” Or like New York’s Harvey Milk High School—the first and largest U.S. high school specifically for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students—which is so popular that the dropout rate is minimal and there is a three-year waiting list. And in LA, Dr. Virginia Uribe’s attempt to help gay students—Project 10, which was started just as I was coming out—has been so successful that the National Education Association has called for it’s development nationwide. Colleges, too, have seen a swell in queer activism, though this sometimes makes strange bedfellows: the all-woman Smith College has more out female to male trannies than any college of comparable size but rumor has it the administration will try to expel anyone who changes their legal gender or initiates physical transition. This keeps many transgendered Smith students in another type of closet but students are still showing their support: students just voted to change their constitution to gender-neutral pronouns to accurately reflect their increasingly trans population. Meanwhile, at Boston’s Bridgewater State University, a new scholarship program became the first of it’s kind; the Frank-Tremblay Safe Colleges Scholarship is aimed at gay and lesbian students who have been financially cut off by their parents. This all underscores the real truth: that even though young queers have made remarkable advances, there is still peril in being yourself. A full 97 percent of students in public high schools hear homophobic remarks from peers. In fact, the typical high school student hears anti-gay slurs 25 times a day. At least 40 percent of homeless youth identify as lesbian or gay. Alcoholism, substance abuse, and depression are all significantly more common in LGBT youth. Queer teens account for 30 percent of all youth suicides (this includes, sadly, one of our contributors—Robbie Kirkland—whose mother submitted his poems). Though there are nearly one million gay teenagers in the U.S., parents and teachers are generally opposed to having any discussion of homosexuality in the classroom. Only 20 states require sex ed—most of it abstinence-based—and at least one in 12 health instructors teach their students that homosexuality is wrong. And, of course, queer kids are still having sex, sometimes with dire consequences. Lesbian girls have higher rates of teen pregnancy, and HIV infection among the young is still rising. For boys like Matthew Limon sex is fraught with perils. Matthew was sentenced to 17 years in a Kansas prison for having consensual oral sex with another teenage boy. Matthew had just turned 18 and his partner was a month shy of his 15th birthday but Kansas’ “Rome and Juliet Law” (a loophole for teen sex) doesn’t apply to homosexuals. Matthew will be 35 when he gets out of prison and he’ll have to register as a sex offender the rest of his life. So, even though I envy the kids of today—their resources, their enthusiasm, their youth—you’ll never catch me saying it’s easy to be young and queer. Hell, it’s downright perilous for transgendered kids. I can name off a handful of beautiful queer teens who were murdered in recent years: Gwen Araujo, Freddie Cortez, Alina Barragan, Ukea Davis, Stephanie Thomas. When 13-year-old Aaron Vays moved from Russia to New York so he could ice skate competitively, a group of gay-bashers put him in the hospital instead. After Andy Williams got tired of being taunted as a “wimp” and “bitch” at his high school, he went on a shooting spree that left two classmates dead. But I do think queer youth today have one remarkable advantage over their predecessors—they get to live their adolescence in real time—and sometimes, occasionally, people listen to them. Mostly I think it’s amazing to hear what young people today have to say. Hell, 16-year-old lesbian Emma Rood took on the government with a federal lawsuit against the Children’s Internet Protection Act—which forces federally funded libraries to install filtering software that blocks controversial Web pages—because it prevented people from researching gay issues. Another 16 year old, queer-identified Zoe Trope, became a cult hit with her novel Please Don’t Kill the Freshman. Exploring geek love, lesbian debauchery, gay best friends, and general high school frustration, Please became a bestseller in Trope’s native Northwest and garnered her a mainstream book deal from Harper Collins. The new memoir hits shelves before her 2004 graduation. I love Zoe—I’m part of that so-called cult of fans she has now—and I think our vast array of our contributors should be getting the same accolades. Between interviews, essays, poems, plays, fiction, news reports, and song lyrics, my remarkable co-editor Gina deVries and I have assembled over three dozen great young minds. I couldn’t be pressed to pick my favorite; they all lend themselves to the great diversity of ideas about gender, sexuality, and identity. (Heck, many of them couldn’t even agree on the definitions of those words.) Inside these pages you’ll find Iolanta Star, a 16-year-old Russian immigrant teen, and Alicia Champion, a musician who self-produced her first album at 17. There’s a lot of fierce poetry—on race and culture from the brilliant Sherisse Alvarez, on love and sex from Stanford’s Ellen Freytag, and on just about everything from Holden Jude Dean, a 19 year old genderqueer transboy. Montana-based Mikhail Abraham writes of a high school dance while James Patrick Gillece III talks, in even sparser prose, of finding love on the Internet. Matt Swanson, a 17 year old from Wisconsin, gives us his thoughts on “real life” versus Real World. R.L. Baldwin boldly looks at race and family. Nadine Gartner presents a hilarious look at coming out to her Jewish mother. Christa Kreimendahl subverts the playwright genre (and gives me chills) with her award-winning play. Wendy Thompson, a 20 year old bisexual, Chinese African American, and Shawnta Smith, a 19 year old Jamaican/Belizean-Black American, both look at culture and identity as well as sexuality in their amazing pieces, while Grover—a trans-identified butch dyke leather boy drag king performance artist activist kid—offers up an essay on the racial politics of leather. Like many anthologies—especially ones in which the contributors range between junior high school students and college graduates—the work is intentionally uneven. Much of it is experimental and some of it reads like a visual effect from a spoken word piece. And it’s challenging stuff to read—whether you’re gay or straight. There are more pieces in this anthology than I can mention here. I think they each contribute a unique—and pressing—voice to Becoming. I hope you agree. Diane Anderson-Minshall, March 2004♣ [GINA’S INTRO] I came out as a lesbian when I was eleven years old. I sit to write this, many years and sexual permutations later, a month after my twentieth birthday. I’m in a late-night campus café at my small liberal arts college. My foot is moving back and forth to the hip-hop that the kids at the counter are playing. I can’t hear much of what they’re saying now—the music is too loud—but I heard the word “lesbian” a moment ago. Nobody flinched or made disgusted noises; nobody followed the word with a hateful expletive. Most of the time, I can slip into that same mode of operation easily. I can say queer stuff and not worry that it will get a bad reaction; accept and understand the conversation that transpires as commonplace. In this world of mine, “I was talking with my genderqueer friend who wants to be a porn star” or “Have I told you about my intersex friend who was able to legally marry her partner?” sounds about as normal as “I had spaghetti for dinner.” Then I remember that in Catholic middle school eight years ago, even muttering the word “lesbian” in a vaguely positive way invited hurled epithets and basketballs that sent me running to the girls’ room crying and clutching my broken glasses. I remember how scared I was when I was eleven and first acknowledging my crushes on other girls. I hid during recess at school and called youth hotlines at home, stammering into the phone at the disbelieving counselors on the other end: “Yes, I am gay. I know I’m only eleven, but that doesn’t matter. I know who I am.” I began attending queer youth events and support groups at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center in San Francisco, an organization that I credit with saving my life and my sanity as a scared middle-schooler. LYRIC gave me a sense of community and family, a refuge from the taunts and violence I faced at school. But still, in my first few months going there, the most common reactions to my age were “You’re how old?” and “You’re too young to even have a sexual orientation!” It was only after I stopped wearing dresses to LYRIC meetings and buzzed off my shoulder-length hair that people began to take me seriously. Now that I really looked like a little dyke, I must be genuine. When I was fourteen, I began examining and reclaiming my femme identity, and since I was older and had already “proven myself” to the queer community around me through activism and involvement, I was finally free to explore without people doubting my queerness.
I now visit LYRIC on my breaks home from college, to see old friends and staff and see how the youth there are doing. Now, there are tons of people in middle and early high school in attendance. In fact, the last time I visited there were probably more people in the 12 to 14 age range than there were college kids. I noticed that many of the younger dykes there were comfortable being feminine and being queer, that the two weren’t mutually exclusive. I hope that if any of them have cut their hair since then, they’ve done it because they’ve wanted to, not just to fit in with the hip dyke crowd. The last time I visited LYRIC, I left feeling a mix of amazement and relief. I might have been the only 12-year-old there eight years ago, but that certainly wasn’t the case now. Sometimes, though, I forget how privileged I am to be in a place where I am safe; how privileged I am to talk about my queer, activist, pansexual, femme, sex-positive, pervert self and not really worry about the consequences. I remember what my life was like around this time eight years ago, and I am so thankful that I am no longer at my middle school, no longer having to explain and justify my right to be at queer groups just like the sixteen and seventeen-year-olds, no longer living the split reality of safety at LYRIC and terror at school. I am so thankful that younger people in the queer community are carving out a space for themselves that didn’t exist when I came out. How did I even get to a place where I have the luxury of forgetting? In leaving middle school, I was able to leave the harassment. The parochial school I attended through eighth grade was hardly accepting or supportive of my baby-dyke self, but when I got to high school, things were different. From ninth to twelfth grade, I went to a hippie school in the middle of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. It was the kind of place where we sat in circles, called our teachers by their first names, and got narrative evaluations instead of grades. The kind of place that hung articles about my involvement with LYRIC on the bulletin board at the entrance to the school, with a circle around my name, a smiley face, and the annotation, “Gina is a Freshman Here!” Though I was the “Lesbian Poster Child” until I graduated (a fact that was particularly ironic to me considering my identity shift from lesbian to pansexual/queer) my high school was the kind of place where, even if kids didn’t look past my sexuality they never viewed it as something bad or immoral. My teachers and friends in high school embraced and encouraged my queerness, gave me room to grow as an activist and writer, and, most importantly, treated me like a normal kid. I no longer felt that division between my school life and my outside life. Those spheres didn’t need to exist separately any more, because I was finally safe. Obviously, my high school experience was unusual. I went to a ridiculously expensive, small, private, alternative college-prep school, a school that I would not have been able to go to had I not been granted a partial scholarship (and had my parents not been able to foot the rest of the sizable bill). In large part, my parents’ college education, my race, and my middle-class background privileged me to be in both a safe and an academically challenging and enriching high school environment. I know few people who have been able to take classes on American labor organizing history, circus arts, and Russian literature by the time they graduate high school. I know even fewer queer people who have had the kind of high school experience that I have had, one where taunts and harassment were not part of their daily lives. However, almost all of the young queer people I know, even if they never found support at school, found support in other ways: queer social and support groups, supportive spiritual communities, understanding family members, web pages, online journals and message boards, self-published ‘zines, and both mainstream and underground-press books. As a writer (and ‘zinester and chapbook-maker), I have often wondered where support for queer youth—in all of our fabulous, diverse, and divergent identities—is available in the media. Where are the youth that came out young? Youth who realized they were queer but had more pressing issues at hand? Youth who have had multiple coming-outs and identity shifts? Where are trans and genderqueer and intersex youth, queer youth of color, queer working-class youth? With some notable exceptions (like Amy Sonnie’s anthology Revolutionary Voices) the body of writing that is available to queer youth today is still painfully small, and it is lacking in both quality and diversity. Too often, the voices that are heard within the queer community are still those who already hold privilege: white people, middle and upper class people, men, non-trans folks, people who identify as strictly “gay” or “lesbian” or “man” or “woman.” Assimilation is a solution that many oppressed communities attempting to gain mainstream acceptance turn to—but at what cost? People of color, disabled people, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, intersex people, BDSM-practicing folk, women, youth, and the elderly are most often ignored and silenced within the queer community. A large part of my personal writing and activism is figuring out ways to bring out the voices of these people and communities who are so often ignored and marginalized, and to acknowledge my own privilege as a white, middle-class, non-trans, “straight-looking,” femme girl, and work to dismantle it. In the meantime, I try to use the privileges I have to open up avenues of communication, dialogue, and action for the communities and people I care about. The voices represented in Becoming are an attempt to reflect the diversity and range of experience in the queer youth community. However, as much as Diane and I tried to find pieces that spoke to a wide range of experiences, there are still shortcomings. The number of MTF-identified trans contributors in this anthology is, to my mind, painfully small. There are, to my knowledge, no openly intersex contributors, nor are intersex issues discussed outright in any contribution. Representation of sex workers, deaf and disabled people, and working-class and poor people is scant. And while race, culture, and ethnicity are addressed in many of the pieces, I feel that the ratio of contributors of color to white contributors is still too low. That is why, in part, I consider this a work-in-progress—not this anthology, per se, but the entire project of creating smart, diverse, and culturally-aware media for the queer youth community. My hope is that the places where this anthology is lacking will inspire our readers to carry on the work that Diane and I have begun. We hope others will want to further the body of diverse and radical media that is available to queer youth, and to make it with confidence and pride. I look forward to seeing how this anthology inspires and incites other queer youth to create their own media and give voice to their communities. I look forward to hearing from you, and, most importantly, seeing what you can do. Gina de Vries, March 2004 ♣ | |
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