AGGLY Vol. 1 # 2
Becky Whittenburg editor/publisher, P. O. Box 549, Pinecliffe, CO 80471 becky.whittenburg@bvsd.k12.co.us
Volume 1, Issue 2
AGGLY: Advocating for Gifted Gay & Lesbian Youth
AGGLY: Advocating for Gifted Gay & Lesbian Youth
Volume
1, Issue 2
September, 1998
In This Issue
On Being Different
The Long Journey
Title IX Protection
Shared Characteristics
On Being Different
by Elizabeth Lovance
"I knew that I was different, throughout my childhood." is a very standard line in many coming-out narratives. I can not say that I knew that I was a lesbian throughout childhood, but as soon as I started school I was painfully aware of the fact that I was different. I fully expected to marry my best friend and played house with him in anticipation of the fact. I was never without a doll and pitched fits whenever anyone tried to put a pair of pants on me. My difference was that I loved learning. I had been reading voraciously since age three and actually remembered what I read and expected that school would be a place where I could learn even more.
Despite many accommodations and a few grade skips, much of my time at school was spent figuring out ways to stimulate my mind while pretending to be attentive to the class. I was a "good girl" and was never caught off task. My social life was rough because of my giftedness. I had a few friends whom I could talk to and be myself with, but learned painfully that hiding my true passions was the easiest path to take at school. I watched the other kids in my class and acted as much like them as I could without lying about anything I truly cared about. The people who teased me when I was younger left me alone. I risked approaching a few kids at school who seemed to share the spark and made a few acquaintances, but only one close friend.
Things only got worse when I entered middle school and my classmates started being interested in dating. Dances with loud music and the prospect of trying to fake interest in the dating scene was just too much for me to try to float through. I used my age to explain away my lack of attraction to the popular boys and then, when that no longer worked, fell back on statistics drawn from my IQ. I retreated into the identity of a stereotypical gifted child and spent less time trying to fit in and more time learning about subjects that I enjoyed. As a coping and passing strategy, it served me well. My academic performance remained the same and I learned about a wide variety of topics not covered in the school curriculum. I could avoid the intricacies and heterosexual norms of high school life by retreating into the world of the nerd.
It did not really help me, personally, at all. My justifications to myself started falling apart my junior year in high school. I was afraid that the subject of dating would come up in any group of friends that I found and so I had even more reason to avoid becoming more than an acquaintance to any of my classmates. The feelings I had towards a girl in my class were suspiciously similar to the descriptions of crushes I overheard in the halls. Although we could have become good friends, risking revealing greater feelings towards her made spending time with her too nerve-wracking. Spending time with my male classmates became similarly perilous as I would always test myself to determine whether I could be attracted to them. Whatever barriers my being gifted had put up, my suspicions of being gay completed by the time I got to high school.
I am not completely sure why this is the case. My school, although small, was not as homophobic as some. There was even a teacher who made an effort to be positive about gay issues when they came up. My parents and some of my extended family would come to the defense of gay issues when a particularly homophobic feature showed on the news and I knew my two lesbian cousins were accepted by the family. One of my church's ministers was always careful to include gay people in his list of downtrodden groups that needed to be shown more acceptance by society. The women's college that I attended was so welcoming that it had gained a reputation for being a lesbian school. Half my college friends were gay by the time I came out, and more came out afterwards. My apprehension came down to not wanting to take on a difference that would mark me for the rest of my life. I knew and had been promised that the sharp edges of being gifted would wear off as I grew older, but I was aware that being lesbian would open me up to criticism for the rest of my life, no matter how affirming my current situation. The similarities in the two situations were clear to me and I was able to make the decision about my sexuality that I wish I had made about my giftedness. I knew that I had the skills to hide my sexuality for a while, but that a life of trying to conform would be too painful. I had already learned that no matter how hard and painfully I tried to fit into the system, I still would not fit in. It took me until my sophomore year of college to come out, a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday. I waited, somewhat consciously, until the time when my being gifted would not matter so much.
My sexuality was easier to come to terms with than my giftedness. Attacks on giftedness still touch rawer personal nerves than those on gay issues. I have very little difficulty telling anyone I meet that I am gay, when the situation arises, but I continue to dance very delicately around the issue of my age and other issues that would reveal my giftedness. I think this is because society deals with the two in very different ways. Sexuality is viewed as either conforming or non-conforming. It has always been fairly easy for me to figure out where people stood on the issue and what I would face as an out lesbian. The way society deals with giftedness is more complicated: learning is good, but don't learn too fast; school is a place of learning, but if children learn too far above the curve, they have to be put in their place. The shades of gray are difficult for anyone to sort out and are filled with contradictions for a child who just wants to learn and find friends in school. Trying to conform to those expectations while keeping hold of my own love of learning was stressful and maddening enough. Just as that difficulty was beginning to be assuaged by the new expectations of college and the real world, a new, undeniable nonconformity, forced its way into my consciousness.
I had resources to draw on that most gifted and lesbian/gay youth do not have. I knew that my family would always support me and have never dealt with truly unbudging systems. Even so, I became severely depressed in high school when only my intellectual needs were being addressed. I can not imagine where I might have ended up if I had been in a place where neither difference was dealt with or if I had not been able to find a college where both were accepted.
Title IX Protects GLB Students
For the first time, the U.S. Department of Education has explicitly extended to lesbians and gays Title IX protections against sexual harassment. Prompting the move: Openly gay student Willi Wagner and his parents, who charged that the Fayetteville, Ark. , school system did nothing after other students had beaten him. The district agreed to overhaul its policies, train staff and inform them that lesbian and gay students are covered under Title IX, which bars sexual harassment. Schools must comply with Title IX to obtain federal funding.
At issue, said Kate Frankfurt of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), are student safety and, potentially, a lot of local school district tax money. Courts have awarded significant damages to students targeted for being gay, she said, including Jamie Nabozny's ground-breaking case, which won the Wisconsin high school alum almost $900,000. Frankfurt said, "The majority of school districts do not have policies in place that specifically mention sexual orientation, like race and gender." Many districts are now revisiting their policies in light of Title IX protections.
Shared Characteristics
Gifted/talented individuals and gay/lesbian individuals often share
several characteristics, among them:
o Less rigidly defined gender specific
interests and characteristics
o Sense of being different
o Heightened
sensitivity
o Invisibility, assumptions by others and disclosure
issues/difficulties
o Isolation and difficulty finding like peers
o
Effects of discrimination
o Difficulty in seeing the future and themselves
in it
The Long Journey: Coming Out
by Jerry Flack
Books for Teens about "Coming Out"
In his discussion of the subjects of the Bible and homosexuality, the Rev. Peter Gomes, Preacher to Harvard University, and an African-American gay man, says that while homosexuality "was once the 'love that dare not speak its name,' it is now the topic that will not be quiet." (Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book, p. 145) Gomes refers to the political-religious debate that rages on in America , but his words could equally, and positively, refer to the plethora of books that have appeared in the past decade about homosexuals, their lives, and their coming out stories. Despite many strong attempts to censor them, it is indeed fortunate that such fine works as The Shared Heart, OUTspoken, and Hearing Us Out are available to provide G/L/B youth, their friends, and families with true stories that may often be harrowing, but are more often affirming.
In the first issue of AGGLY, I briefly described Adam Mastoon's The Shared Heart: Portraits and Stories Celebrating Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Young People (William Morrow, 1997). Now available in paperback as well as hard cover, The Shared Heart is the winner of the 1998 American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award for nonfiction. Adam Mastoon's introduction eloquently argues for the critical importance of the availability of books such as his own.
"Looking back, I cannot recall a single image or role model that mirrored my experience as a gay young man. Without external reflections to validate my internal experience I felt alienated and alone, I imagined that there was something terribly wrong with me." (p. vii)
The Shared Heart is one of the most moving books you will ever read. Mastoon crossed the nation photographing forty homosexual young adults. He asked each to tell his or her coming out story. The brief autobiographical essays range from heartbreaking to triumphant; all are courageous.
The resilience of the young people is truly remarkable. That many survived frightening experiences and hostile environments and have triumphed is a testament to their extraordinary courage. Some of the stories are heartbreaking. Edual and Rafael are Hispanic males driven from their homes when they came out or were cruelly "outed" by their parents or others. Dominique is an African-American lesbian who has only found safety and acceptance in a foster home. Her mother disowned her and her father "tried to beat the homosexuality out of me." Chris, witnessed his Irish immigrant parents disown two of his siblings when they came out. Yet, despite verbal and physical abuse in his community school, he became an activist for the rights of gay students in Boston and elsewhere. Nathan is a gifted dancer who quit dancing and allowed his supple dancer's body to become a cage at fifteen when he could no longer take the abuse of those who could not appreciate his great talent.
Yet, Nathan and the other heroes of this extraordinary book have found peace with themselves and are young people who are clearly going to make a difference in the world. Meet Jayson, for example. He is a recent high school graduate who ran for and was elected junior and senior class president as a gay-bisexual male in his small Vermont community. Or, spend some time with Leah, a Korean-American lesbian who wants to become a U. S. Senator, or William, who turned to the writings of such gay men as James Baldwin and Edmund White to find in literature a feeling of community and belonging.
The racial, ethnic, and geographical diversity of the 40 young adults is wonderful. That many of these gay youth are gifted artists, leaders, writers, actors, and musicians is undeniable. The Shared Heart deserves a large audience. It may speak most pointedly to G/L/B youth but its power to move, to inform, and to challenge all readers is extraordinary.
Roger Sutton begins Hearing Us Out: Voices from the Gay and Lesbian Community (Little, Brown 1994) in much the same way as Adam Mastoon opens The Shared Heart. He speaks to the fact that when he was a teen there were no books available to him about homosexuality and certainly no books about the gay community. He succeeds in remedying that situation with Hearing Us Out, a collection of first-person accounts from contemporary gays and lesbians who represent a broad cross-section of the extant gay community. Jeff Rivera shares his difficult experience of coming out as a teen. His mother took him to a psychiatrist to get him to change. Although his family was able to move past this stage of nonacceptance, his school experiences as a gay teen were horrendous and produced severe emotional trauma. Vicious notes such as "We're going to kill you, fag," appeared in his locker constantly, food was thrown at him in the cafeteria, and the school guidance counselor did nothing to help him. The harassment was so great that his grades dropped from A's to F's and he quit school.
Sadly, Jerry Lynn Fields and Michael Cornicelli from the Horizons, a Chicago center for gay and lesbian, and bisexual teens, confirm climates teens face when they come out to their parents or at school. "Many young people who come here don't even think they're going to survive adolescence," says Fields, an adult director of the center. Some teens are thrown out their homes and even beaten when they come out to their parents. So, why read about such harrowing stories? For the same reason that teens come to Horizons. No one is alone. When scarred gay teens come to Horizons they meet other kids who are also gay and who have walked the same path. Moreover, they meet happy and successful adults from the gay community who live exemplary lives and they learn that they, too, can have a good future.
Readers of Hearing Us Out also meet Rev. John Scott, a Presbyterian minister who answers the question, "Can you be gay and a good Christian at the same time?" affirmatively. Scott was raised a Methodist, married and had two daughters and became a pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana . While in the pastorate, Scott came to terms with his homosexuality and separated and eventually divorced his wife, who has been supportive of him throughout this dramatic adult life shift. Now, a director of programs to provide housing for people living with AIDS, Scott is candid about his life with his partner, his former wife, his daughters, and his former church. He is also upbeat in his discussions of theology, the Bible, and homosexuality.
Still another upbeat profile is that of Dorothy Hudson, who was the first openly gay lesbian officer is the Chicago police force. Hudson, who came out publicly while in the police training academy, talks about the valuable role she can play in the often macho police force and in serving the gay communities of Chicago.
Among others, teen readers meet Carol Sadtler and Jackie Taylor, lesbian parents of two adopted children from Peru , Ed Kassing, a gay man who has had a successful military career, and the ebullient Terrence Smith, who doubles as drag artist Joan Jett Black. Hearing Us Out presents role models who in addition to being homosexuals are black, white, young, old, poor, wealthy, professionals, and school drop outs. They are diverse, but they share two traits: they are gay and they are out to the rest of the world. Some of their stories are happy and some are not, but they are all worth sharing.
Michael Thomas Ford's OUTspoken: Role Models from the Lesbian and Gay Community (Beech Tree, 1998) introduces young adult readers to an Olympic silver Medalist boxer, a cartoonist, a rabbi, a business executive, a doctor, a New York City police officer, a corporate computer executive, and a magazine editor who all share two things in common among their very diverse lives. They are gay and lesbian and they lead highly successful lives. The operative word in Ford's series of 11 interviews is "surprise." Impressionable G/L/B youths who may be convinced that homosexuals cannot have families, find spiritual communities in which to worship a God who loves them, or aspire to careers such as law enforcement, or television and movies will be pleasantly surprised to meet happy, successful adults such as Jennifer Levin, Rabbi Lisa Edwards and Sgt. Edgar Rodriguez. Ms. Levin is both a successful novelist as well as a very busy mother of two adopted children from Cambodia . Like millions of other moms, she has to balance a busy work life with all the joys and stresses of being a full-time parent. Her life with Julie, her partner, and her children Mak and Vannarith is shining. Can gays become police officers? Yes. Meet Sgt. Edgar Rodriguez, one of New York City 's finest who is also the president of the New York chapter of GOAL, Gay Officers Action League, a nation-wide organization of law enforcement persons who are gay, lesbian and bisexual. As with all the other subjects in Ford's book of success stories, Rodriguez has not had an easy path to follow. He faced discrimination as a Puerto Rican American and as a gay man, but he has ultimately triumphed and is a successful person who is proud of himself as a gay man. Rabbi Lisa Edwards is the religious leader of the oldest lesbian, gay, and bisexual synagogue in the world. She chronicles her experiences of growing up gay, finding a loving partner and of becoming a rabbi in the Jewish faith in a wonderfully positive chapter of OUTspoken devoted to homosexuals and religious faith.
Between the eleven interviews, Ford poses and answers questions that may well be formulating in the minds of teens: Why are some people gay or lesbian? How many gay people are there? Don't all gay people get AIDS? How do I come out? Ford's answers are direct and to the point, plus he provides the bonus of directing readers to outstanding resources related to each question or to the lives of his subjects. For example, following his interview with Canadian Olympic boxer Mark Leduc, Ford lists books about openly gay athletes such as ice skater Rudy Galindo, baseball umpire Dave Pallone, and tennis superstar Martina Navratilova. Following his interview with Rabbi Edwards, he provides four pages of listings of religious and spiritual organizations across the country representative of diverse faiths that provide counsel and support for homosexuals.
OUTspoken is also refreshing in its diversity of subjects. Jews and Christians, blacks and whites, are all represented, but there is age diversity, too. One of the most intriguing portraits is that of Dr. Martin Palmer, 71, a practicing physician in Anchorage, Alaska . Palmer served in the U. S. Army in World War II, graduated from medical school in the 1950s, and has witnessed five decades of tragedy, progress, and hope in America 's gay community. His story alone makes this inexpensive paperback resource worth its bargain $4.95 price.
One of the strengths of The Journey Out (Puffin, 1995) by Rachel Pollack and Cheryl Schwartz is the common-sense writing found within its pages. Although individual case studies form a part of the text, this is not primarily a book of individual profiles of homosexuals. More, it is an examination of the process of coming out. The book is organized around an evolving set of premises and questions that examine the likely passages gay people face whether in their teens or later in life. "Who Am I?" and "The Journey to Self Acceptance" are the first two chapters. Throughout the book, Pollack and Schwartz answer such basic questions as "What is sexual orientation?" "Do I have to have sex if I am gay?" and "Do I have to be 'out' if I am gay? The answers provided are succinct, direct, and non-judgmental. The book is perhaps of greatest value in the safety and precaution advice the authors present. No matter how much some young people would like to 'come out' there are some environments where doing so would be highly unsafe.
The wisdom of their advice was echoed in a recent conversation I had with a 23 year-old young man who lives in Denver and is studying to be a teacher. Marcus related his high school experiences to me:
"I was very active in sports, physically big, and very masculine, so my sexual orientation was never a question in high school. But, I also learned to be very secretive. The derogatory locker room jokes about fags and queers convinced me that high school was not a safe place for me to come out. Plus, while I was in high school a gay youth did come out. He was so harassed and threatened that he eventually had to move to another school to finish high school. I was not about to come out in such an environment even though I was a star athlete with many friends."
The Journey Out authors not only promote "safe sex" but sane and safe living, too. Further, they provide much good information about the law and fundamental rights that all youth and all citizens have. They dispel myths that some gay youth may unknowingly accept as truths. The Journey Out is not as autobiographical in focus as the other books discussed in this review, but it is a book filled with wisdom as well as with pages and pages of outstanding resources and references for the gay community and educators. One of the best things about the book is the factual information provided about the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers. Both organizations have called for an end to harassment of gay students and the establishment of support programs for them. As far back as 1974, NEA added "sexual orientation" to its list of nondiscriminatory policies. One wonders. Is it not about time for NAGC and other organization that advocate for gifted youth to honor the same commitment NEA made 24 years ago?
In citing Adam Mastoon's The Shared Heart as a "notable children's book" for 1997, the National Council for the Social Studies, citation read, "These young people are an inspiration to us all, no matter what our individual sexuality. The narratives of lesbian, gay, and bi-sexual young people provide a strong intellectual and emotional argument against homophobia."
The value of books such as The Shared Heart is unquestionable. Although conditions for young people may be improving in some places, many gay youth continue to feel very much alone. At least 80% of G/L/B youth report severe social isolation. This lack of positive role models and the profound sense of aloneness these youth continue to experience makes all the more important the availability of books about youth who are open about their sexual orientation, have come to terms with who they are, and are positively making very fine and good lives for themselves.
