The New Sexualities: Giving the Teens their Voice

My eldest has a subscription to One Teen Story, a lit magazine out of Brooklyn, from the publishers of One Story.  The titles describe the magazines: every couple of weeks, a single piece of short fiction.   She wanted us to read Claire Spaulding’s “Helen,” which she liked.  One of the story’s themes is sexual identity, and how teens cope with their feelings.  The narrator is a male homosexual, his friend is male but seeks to identify as female. There are numerous temporal shifts that address the issues of bullying that is associated with coming out as any sort of deviant from the traditional male/female/straight checkboxes; the struggle to accept the title character is not just those of her classmates, but from the narrator, who desires Helen in her “original,” or shall I say, “birth” state, a male, but cannot desire that same person as Helen. Spaulding, a high school student, tells a tale that is probably very familiar for those in her generation, though I must admit that her style does show her limited experience as a writer (quite a few clichés, for example). 

I’m writing about this story not simply for whatever worth it might have to its young audience.  I’m thinking about my daughter and her generation and how they seem to be responding to the cultural shift concerning what I will call sexuality politics.  (My daughter is just a few years younger than Spaulding.)

What I admire about my daughter is that she seems to get it.  She understands that human sexuality is fluid, that bullying people because of their “deviance” is wrong, that love is love.  There’s not even any confusion for her, though I suspect that once she begins to have strong feelings for another person, there will be much of that, because love is confusing, and teens are crazy to begin with.  I hope that mine is among the last generation to find sport in “fag-hating,” to oversimplify things a bit.  Despite being born just a couple of years before Stonewall, I grew up in a society that was, to use the great phrase from Harvey Milk, “fiercely heterosexual.”  That revolution was also taking part among my peers, as I would later know, but as kids we were perfectly comfortable making gay jokes and laughing at gay stereotypes in films and tv shows.  I was exposed (so to speak) to the usual products of “GUY” culture: football, Playboy, heavy metal.  But though I can see, thinking back, that my late high school and my college years saw in my own views a wider perspective; I suppose the term would be “tolerance,” but as my former boss – a Catholic nun,  I  should note! – said at a meeting a few years ago, that word implies that a person is doing or being something that “we” dislike but “put up with” – and that’s condescending and doesn’t get us any closer to where we need to be for a more just social order.  I certainly think I carry fewer prejudices than my parents do, and as is often the case, my children will carry fewer ones than I do. 

The story told in Helen is not so straightforward; I wish I could blame its temporal shifts, but I know that it’s because I’m half a step behind the youth culture that will shatter all these boundaries for good.  (It’s not going to be so easy; ask any Black male whether or not we are really a post-racial society. ) When I was in graduate school, the term “queer” became the catch-all term for homosexuals and bisexuals, but now it is one letter in the alphabet soup we call “LGBTQ.”  I don’t mean to complain here – except to note that “queer” is easier to speak than “LGBTQ” – because language is always a matter of power and control.  (This is why the society moves from “Negro” to “Afro-American” to “African American,” etc.)  As a person of a culturally privileged class, I can take my own identity somewhat for granted, though of course my male-ness, my white-ness and my straight-ness is defined as against my not being female, not being brown, not being queer.  (Go back and look at the use of the word “deviant” in this post.)  To those who speak about LGBTQ as a “lifestyle choice,” I ask: when did you choose to be straight?    

I'm glad I've lived in a time where so many doors have been been torn down.  At the institution where I work, in the middle of suburbia, the campus's class valedictorian was president of the LGBTQ club and was active in more campus communities than should be allowed by the sheer time commitments she had to have.  She helped make the campus a better place for those who will follow, and I wish we could have found an excuse to flunk her, just to keep her there! 

As much as cyberspace may be creating more opportunities for bullies to do horrible things, I see the youth of my daughter’s age as becoming increasingly more expansive in their cultural mindset.  While there still can be a massive blowback at any time, I hope these kids are strong and will not tolerate any more closets and other straightjackets.