October 2005
Volume 18 Number 10

NEW VIDEOS

QUIDDITY:
The Roberts Nomination

DISASTERS:
Hurricane Katrina: Natural Disaster or Crisis in Policy?
ANTIWAR:
Between the Crosses
INDONESIA:

Calls for Tribunal in East Timor
BLACKLISTING:

Schooled in Revolution
GAY & LESBIAN COMMUNITY NOTES:

No Sex, Please, We're Gay Teens

PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY:
Argentinian Movements at a Crossroads
OVERSIGHT:
Who's Policing the Police?
LESSON PLANS:  
Weapons of Mass Instruction
CULTURAL ORGANIZING:
Poetry as Resistance
PSYCHOLOGY:
Depathologizing the Spirit of Resistance

THE COURT: 5 TO 4:
The Unclear Future of Abortion
HUMAN RIGHTS:
How Liberty is Lost
CELEBRITY WATCH:
How Rock Stars Betrayed the Poor
FOREIGN POLICY:
Haiti After the Coup
NUKES:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
FOG WATCH:
Pursuing Democracy

MUSIC REVIEW:
Chavez Ravine
BOOK REVIEW:
Storming Caesars Palace
BOOK REVIEW:
The War at Home
FILM REVIEW:
The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Pandey
HOTEL SATIRE:
Disneylands for the Rich

Gay & Lesbian
Community Notes 

No Sex, Please, We’re Gay Teens 

By Michael Bronski

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This is the good news. Over the past two decades, queer communities have paid more and more attention to the needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth. We, and they, have fought for high school gay-straight alliances (GSAs) and created state- funded projects like the Massachusetts Safe Schools Program and California’s Safe Schools Coalition. More books, both fiction and nonfiction, are aimed at a gay-youth market, and teen-oriented TV shows, such as “The Real World” and “American Candidate,” feature gay participants. 

Now the bad news. The GLBT movement is seriously failing queer young people in matters of sex. Sure, TV talk show hosts Ellen Degeneres and Rosie O’Donnell have come out and we can all laugh at evangelical Christians targeting Bert and Ernie and SpongeBob SquarePants as dangerous queer role models. But where can young gay men and lesbians learn about queer sex? Probably not from their parents or from their school’s sex-ed programs. Not from safe- sex and HIV-prevention programs that, in recent years, call attention to the dangers of sexual activity. Not from TV shows like the “L Word” and “Queer As Folk” or website advertisements for circuit parties or porn sites that depict silly, overblown sexual fantasies that have nothing to do with human sexual interaction. 

The trouble isn’t learning how to put tab A into slot A or what lube to use or what two women “do together”—most people can figure that out. Nor is it with learning what one likes sexually, which can be figured out through trial and error. Rather, it concerns how to think about yourself as a sexual person, what sex means to you, and how it is intrinsic to your identity, your life, and your relationships. 

Young queer people today are growing up in a world where gay and mainstream culture give them mixed signals about sexuality and sexual behavior. The two historical circumstances that made growing up gay so unique for those born in the mid-1980s and after—the fight for marriage equality and the AIDS epidemic—are also making it almost impossible to have informed, healthy, and sane discussions about sexual desire and sexual activity. That’s because in recent years the clanging of wedding bells and the insistent bad news about HIV transmission (much of it fueled by anti-gay hysteria in the mainstream media) has distorted how the gay and lesbian community talks about sex. Over the past five years, safe sex education, seen from the mostly gay-run AIDS non-profits, has shifted from promoting healthy sexuality and sexual behavior to the “be afraid to have sex” scare tactics of the 1980s. Moreover, the fight for marriage equality—and the elevation of marriage as the idealized pinnacle of appropriate and healthy homosexuality—has moved front and center in gay politics and, to a large degree, in the imagina- tions of young gay people, much to their detriment. 

While the conservative and religious right (and even many moderates and liberals) accuse the gay movement of injecting sex into everything, in fact, the movement