Gay teen
revolution

Being a teenager in 1982 really, really sucked. Until I reached college, I didn't hear a single positive word about gay people (and believe me, I was listening!). But I sure heard a lot of the negative stuff--about how we gays were weak and pathetic and miserable and immoral and promiscuous and couldn't be trusted around little boys. When I was 13 my father gave me a book, A Boy's Sex Life, by William J. Bausch, which spelled it all out in black and white: Gays are "disturbed," "fearful," "lonesome," "sick," and many other terrible things. By the end of my teen years I had the self-esteem of a sea anemone. So in 1989, when I was 25, I decided I wanted to try to make things better for the GLBT teenagers who came after me. I volunteered to help with a support group for gay youths in my hometown of Tacoma, Wash. We named ourselves Oasis, met at a local church, and went from zero to 150 members in a matter of months. We formed a speakers' bureau and offered our services to the local high schools. A few private schools bit, but most public schools responded with variations on, "We don't have any gay students here." That came as news to me, because the 150 members of our support group had to be attending school somewhere. We soon discovered that folks all across the country were forming similar support groups. To my surprise, I suddenly found myself in the middle of an actual movement. An aspiring novelist, I decided to write about it. But New York editors' reaction to my 1991 novel was eerily reminiscent of the response I'd received from schools: "There is no market for a book about gay teens." Meanwhile, out in the real world, many of those nonexistent gay teens decided they were tired of being treated as if they were invisible. They were coming out in their high schools, starting gay-straight alliances--and often directly challenging hostile parents and terrified administrators. The gay teen movement had begun. In early 2003, HarperCollins finally published my novel, Geography Club, and was surprised by the wide and enthusiastic response to the book from gay teens. I wasn't. What did surprise me was the reaction to the book among straight teenagers--yes, even straight boys. The world had changed a lot since 1989, even more than I'd thought. When I do author visits to high schools these days, I never intend to discuss gay issues. But the kids invariably bring it up during the Q&A. They want to know about my relationship with my partner of 13 years (happy) and how my parents reacted to my own coming-out (not so happy). After one of my first school events, a teenage boy told me that even though he was straight, he really related to my book's main character, a gay teen. "But you can't relate to him!" I said, somewhat facetiously. "You're straight!" "I still know what it's like to feel like an outsider," he said with a smile, "to feel that if your friends knew the real you, they might not be your friends. Everyone feels like that sometimes." Many of today's teenagers "get" the gay issue in a way that I wouldn't have thought possible even five years ago. Maybe we should all send thank-you notes to MTV. Not every U.S. high school is equally tolerant, of course. At one recent visit to a rural school, the principal almost went into cardiac arrest when he discovered just who his librarian had invited to speak at his school. But even there, the school had a GSA, and when a member asked me about my coming-out, there was no tittering or discomfort from the other students. In other words, the gay teen revolution is now well under way. At a surprising number of schools, a majority of students now seem to take gay equality for granted. The burden of proof has shifted to our opponents: Why shouldn't gays have equality? And without preexisting prejudice, that's a very difficult question to answer. In the short term, the far right may be exercising its political muscle, but I remain extremely optimistic. That's because I've seen the future, and, on many high school campuses at least, it is now. Hartinger's Geography Club is being adapted into a feature film, and the novel's sequel, The Order of the Poison Oak, is in stores now.