Coming Out in Middle School. Openarms is practically overrun with supportive moms. While Austin and Ben were on the patio, a 1. Nick arrived with his mom. Nick came out to her when he was 1.
Some danced to the Lady Gaga song “Poker Face,” others battled one another in pool or foosball and a handful of young couples held hands on the outdoor patio. In one corner, a short, perky eighth- grade girl kissed her ninth- grade girlfriend of one year. I asked them where they met.
Not far from them, a 1. Misti — who came out to classmates at her middle school when she was 1. Austin had practically forgotten about his boyfriend. Instead, he was confessing to me — mostly by text message, though we were standing next to each other — his crush on Laddie, a 1. Tulsa from a small town in Texas.
Like Austin, Laddie was attending the dance for the first time, but he came off as much more comfortable in his skin and had a handful of admirers on the patio. Laddie told them that he came out in eighth grade and that the announcement sent shock waves through his Texas school.“I definitely lost some friends,” he said, “but no one really made fun of me or called me names, probably because I was one of the most popular kids when I came out. I don’t think I would have come out if I wasn’t popular.”“When I first realized I was gay,” Austin interjected, “I just assumed I would hide it and be miserable for the rest of my life.
But then I said, . In addition to the weekly dances, the couple lead discussion groups every Thursday — about self- esteem, healthy relationships and H. I. V./AIDS. When I asked Gillean if he ever expected kids as young as Nick and Austin to show up at Openarms, he chuckled and shook his head. Like many adult gay men who came out in college or later, Gillean couldn’t imagine openly gay middle- school students. Though most adolescents who come out do so in high school, sex researchers and counselors say that middle- school students are increasingly coming out to friends or family or to an adult in school. Just how they’re faring in a world that wasn’t expecting them — and that isn’t so sure a 1.
Though gay kids in the South and in rural areas tend to have a harder time than those on the coasts, I met gay youth who were doing well in socially conservative areas like Tulsa and others in progressive cities who were afraid to come out. What is clear is that for many gay youth, middle school is more survival than learning — one parent of a gay teenager I spent time with likened her child’s middle school to a “war zone.” In a 2. Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (Glsen), 8. Another 3. 9 percent reported physical assaults.
Of the students who told teachers or administrators about the bullying, only 2. A middle- school counselor in Maine summed up the view of many educators I spoke to when she conceded that her school was “totally unprepared” for openly gay students.
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Now we do, so we’re playing catch up to try to keep them safe.”As a response to anti- gay bullying and harassment, at least 1. G. S. A.) groups, where gay and lesbian students — and their straight peers — meet to brainstorm strategies for making their campus safer. Other schools are letting students be part of the national Day of Silence each April (participants take a vow of silence for a day to symbolize the silencing effect of anti- gay harassment), which last year was held in memory of Lawrence King, a 1. Oxnard, Calif., who was shot and killed at school by a 1.
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Both G. S. A.’s and the Day of Silence have been controversial in places, as some parents and faculty members object to what they see as the promotion of homosexuality in public schools and the “premature sexualization of the students,” as a lawyer for a school in central Florida that was fighting the creation of a G. S. A. But there is a growing consensus among parents and middle- school educators that something needs to be done to curb anti- gay bullying, which a 2. University of Nebraska and Harvard Medical School found to be the most psychologically harmful type of bullying.“I certainly don’t believe school districts should force a sexual agenda on the community,” says Finn Laursen, the executive director of the Christian Educators Association International, “but we can’t just put our heads in the sand and ignore the kind of harassment that’s going on.”The challenging school experience of so many gay and lesbian students — and the suicides last spring of a sixth grader in Massachusetts and a fifth grader in Georgia, both of whom were relentlessly bullied at school for appearing gay — reinforces the longtime narrative of gay youth in crisis. Studies in the ’8. When I went to work in 1. XY, a national magazine for young gay men, we received dozens of letters each week from teenagers in the depths of despair. Some had been thrown out by their families; others lived at home but were reminded often that they were intrinsically flawed.
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My arrival at XY (at 2. I was only three years out of the closet myself) coincided with the founding of the Trevor Project, which runs a national 2.
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G. S. A.’s in high schools. A new kind of gay adolescent was appearing on the page — proud, resilient, sometimes even happy. We profiled many of them in the magazine, including a seventh grader in suburban Philadelphia who was out to his classmates and a high- school varsity- football player from Massachusetts who came out to his teammates and was shocked to find unconditional support.
That’s not to say that gay teenagers didn’t still suffer harassment at school or rejection at home, but many seemed less burdened with shame and self- loathing than their older gay peers. What had changed? Not only were there increasingly accurate and positive portrayals of gays and lesbians in popular culture, but most teenagers were by then regular Internet users. Going online broke through the isolation that had been a hallmark of being young and gay, and it allowed gay teenagers to find information to refute what their families or churches sometimes still told them — namely, that they would never find happiness and love. Today, nearly a decade after my time at XY, young people with same- sex attractions are increasingly coming out and living lives that would be “nearly incomprehensible to earlier generations of gay youth,” Ritch Savin- Williams writes in his book “The New Gay Teenager.” A professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University, Savin- Williams told me recently that being young and gay is no longer an automatic prescription for a traumatic childhood. Photo. Austin, a gay 1.
Oklahoma. Credit. Brent Humphreys for The New York Times In particular, openly gay youth who are perceived as conforming to adolescent gender norms are often fully integrated into their peer and school social circles. Girls who come out as bisexual but are still considered “feminine” are often immune from harassment, as are some gay boys, like Laddie, who come out but are still considered “masculine.” “Bisexual girls have it the easiest,” Austin told me in Oklahoma. When a 1. 2- 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.
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. We deny them their feelings and truth in a way we would never do with a heterosexual young person.”I was guilty of my share of that, too, the first time I met Kera — then a 1. Justin, last spring in a city in New England. Kera had small, delicate features. Justin had freckles and braces. They seemed like kids.
Yet there they were at a bookstore coffee shop after school, talking nonchalantly — when they weren’t giggling uncontrollably about one of their many inside jokes, that is — about their sexual identities. Kera said she was bisexual. Justin said he was gay. The effect was initially surreal to me, and before long I heard myself blurt out, “But you’re so young!”My reaction surprised me. After all, I’d known on some level that I was gay when I was their age. If I were growing up today, it’s possible that I would feel emboldened enough to confide in my parents, or at least a close friend, that I was gay. I’d also spent the morning of my visit reading a handful of studies about when gay and lesbian youth first report an awareness of same- sex attraction.
Though most didn’t self- identify as gay or lesbian until they were 1. Boys tended to be aware about a year earlier than girls. Kera and Justin knew that, too, but they’re among the first generation of young gay adolescents to take on an identity that many parents and educators associate with adult lifestyle choices. Kera says she was 1. The Safest Online Dating Sites. I realized that was me.”She told her mom soon after (more on that later) and then came out to her close friends at school, including Justin, who she had suspected was gay. Last year, the entire school found out when she briefly dated a female classmate. Some guys made fun of us, others hit on us.
Most middle- school guys are total, complete morons.”Though he wishes he could be as “brave” as Kera, Justin is out to only a few friends at school. A tall, heavyset 1. Austin said his eighth- grade classmates regularly called him the “gay freak.” They groped themselves in front of him. Not a day went by when someone didn’t call him a “fag,” sometimes with teachers present. And at a football game last fall, several classmates forced him off the bleachers because it wasn’t “the queer section.”“I would have preferred that he not come out in school, but he wanted to be honest — he wanted to be true to himself,” Austin’s mother, Nadia, told me. It seems like I spent the entire year in the principal’s office trying to get them to protect my son. But they would say things like, .