Gay
& Lesbian
Community Notes
No Sex, Please, Were 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 Californias 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 ODonnell
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 schools 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 isnt learning how to put tab A into
slot A or what lube to use or what two women do
togethermost 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 afterthe fight for marriage
equality and the AIDS epidemicare also making
it almost impossible to have informed, healthy, and
sane discussions about sexual desire and sexual activity.
Thats 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
equalityand the elevation of marriage as the idealized
pinnacle of appropriate and healthy homosexualityhas
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