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"The Battle for Gay Teens"  [message #36301] Mon, 02 October 2006 05:14 Go to previous message
Whitop is currently offline  Whitop

Toe is in the water
Location: USA
Registered: June 2005
Messages: 73



I recently read a very interesting cover article from TIME Magazine of last October (’05) which I found encouraging for the gay and wondering teens coming along. I checked with Timmy to see if it had already appeared here & he suggesting I post it. The complete article is at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1112856-12,00.html

The following summary was posted at gayteens.org.

Quote
Kids are disclosing their homosexuality with unprecedented regularity--and they are doing so much younger. The average gay person now comes out just before or after graduating high school, according to The New Gay Teenager, a book Harvard University Press published this summer. The book quotes a Penn State study of 350 young people from 59 gay groups that found that the mean age at which lesbians first have sexual contact with other girls is 16; it's just 14 for gay boys.
The article covers the high rate of growth among Gay/Straight Alliances in American schools:

In 1997 there were approximately 100 gay-straight alliances (GSAs)--clubs for gay and gay-friendly kids--on U.S. high school campuses. Today there are at least 3,000 GSAs--nearly 1 in 10 high schools has one--according to the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN, say "glisten"), which registers and advises GSAs. In the 2004-05 academic year, GSAs were established at U.S. schools at the rate of three per day.

Leaders of gay organizations are quoted in the article. Kevin Jennings, head of the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) explains,

"We're gonna win," says Jennings, speaking expansively of the gay movement, "because of what's happening in high schools right now ... This is the generation that gets it."

In a telling paragraph the story covers young Exodus Christians:

For their part, several of the young Exodus Christians seemed more stereotypically gay--"I love that Prada bag!" a 16-year-old boy at the Youth Day squealed several times--than some of the Point scholars who had been out for years. Others had gone to Exodus with no intention of going straight. Corey Clark, 18, belongs to his GSA at Governor Mifflin Senior High in Shillington, Pa., and says he sees nothing wrong with being gay. He attended Youth Day because he wanted to better understand his evangelical church and friends who say gays should change. "Actually," he says, "I've heard so many good things about gay pride"--in the media and at school--"but I hadn't heard directly about the downside." (Emphasis added.)

The article goes in depth about the so-called "ex-gay" movement, including the divisions faced within the evangelical movements over the treatment of gays.

"Few young gays actually want to change: six surveys in The New Gay Teenager found that an average of just 13% of young people with same-sex attractions would prefer to be straight.

On the success of conferences created to help gay teens "convert" out of homosexuality, the article has this interesting item:

Carrasco says Exodus has helped him develop some heterosexual attractions, but I met very few at the conference who claimed to be completely straight. (At least two of the young men--one 21, the other 18--hooked up that week and still keep in touch.) (Emphasis added)
End quote

I found the entire article well worth reading, and in preparing this post found (there) the link to ‘Reader Responses’ and the author’s replies which I haven’t read yet. Sounds like progress.

Mac
 
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