Chapter 22

I thought there were some very interesting points in the article.  I think that a lot of people assume that a lot of queer kids don't know they are gay until they come out.  The assumption is that middle school kids don't know that they are gay.  The article discounted this.  When I was in high school, there were about five of us that were extremely close.  One of whom is gay.  He knew he was gay since he was in middle school, but he never came out to anyone (besides his therapist) until college.  Why not?  Not even to his extremely close friends.?  Because we live in a heterosexist and homophobic world.  My friend was terrified of how he would be treated, the potential violence he could encounter.  And that fear is real.  

 Some of the other posts have critiqued this article for not providing any specific recommendations for what we can actually do to help LGBT youth in our classes.  Here's one simple thing that we can do.  I believe we talked in class about the controversy in West Bend about some parents trying to remove some books from the library, or reclassify them for older readers.  Apparently, the reason the books raise some objections is that they contain characters who are openly queer and may even have queer relationships.  For this, one of the parents said (I will paraphrase here): "I think that the book should be removed.  If it is left in the library, I think there should be an equal number of books in the library that teach children who might consider being gay how to turn away from such a path."  There are a lot of things wrong with this statement.  For one, usually kids don't consider (i.e. choose) being gay.  They are gay. period.  Second, the straight equivalent of the book in  question would not be one that teaches kids how not to be gay, but rather a book with straight character engaging in straight relationships.  That would be 99.5 % of the books already in the library.   Although we do have some out role models in the media that weren't around 20 years ago, that doesn't mean that heterosexism or homophobia have disappeared.  The fact that we can name all of the openly gay role models that come to mind show how rare they actually are.  Can you name all of the straight role models for kids these days?

So maybe something we can actually *do* is to make sure the libraries at the schools we work in have books that are queer-positive.  

(Amy - I know this post is late, and I don't expect credit for it, but I really wanted to write it anyway.)