This question is for people in high school, who teach high school, who have children in high school, etc.
Are there any/many openly gay kids in high school today? Are they generally accepted or is there a lot of bullying? Is it a big deal to come out as a teenager today? I’m writing a story and I want it to accurately reflect the experience of gay kids in high school. I realize there is going to be a wide variety of experiences, but a general idea would help. If you could give your geographical location, that would also help. So, please share your anecdotes.
Thanks!
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that I graduated high school 14 years ago :eek: and my own experiences may not be that representative of the world in 2010. (I went to high school in a liberal area, but I didn’t know ANYONE who was out at the time, although of course I know now through Facebook that several of my classmates are gay. It makes me sad that none of them felt okay about coming out at the time, I think it probably would have gone okay.)
I went to high school in northern VA, graduated last year. Our gay-straight alliance was large and active, and several of my friends were openly gay and known to be gay. However, my friends have experienced harassment for their sexual orientations, nor enough that they were afraid to express themselves, but enough that it went beyond just a minor annoyance. I think most of the problems people faced came from their parents, who ranged from totally accepting to “if we never ever mention this it might go away” to borderline abusive in response to their kids coming out to them.
I think it depends on a lot of things. It depends on the school, the personality of the individual, and most probably the gender as well. When I grew up in the late nineties in SE-Michigan (about an hour from where you live now), nobody would dare be publicly out, male or female. People were bullied just for suspected gayness. Most of my high school friends were gay or bisexual but it was without question of necessity to keep it a secret.
My 19-year-old SIL is a lesbian, and has never felt the need to keep it a secret at high school or otherwise, and she grew up not far from where I did. She’s kind of a fearless rebel, so it was kind of like she came out at age 14 and dared anyone to give her any shit. She got into a fight in high school drama class with some other chick over some other chick, in front of the whole school, and nobody treated it like anything other than another territorial pissing contest. She went to prom in pair of skater jeans, shirt and tie with her girlfriend. She was pretty popular. I honestly don’t think she’s ever gotten any shit, ever, for being gay, not even from her homophobic family members.
So I think it’s perfectly conceivable that someone could be out with relatively little backlash in a public high school. However, that doesn’t mean it would be ‘‘no big deal’’ to the person as they discover his/her sexuality. I mean, it was definitely a significant thing for her, personally, to come to terms with it. But once she figured it out she just took it and ran. Furthermore, I think it’s more likely, as Electric Warrior suggests, that peers are going to be cool with it – but parents? That’s trickier. I’ve seen some ugly, ugly shit coming from parents of out teens. I’ve seen kids thrown out of the house, all their possessions, diaries, photographs burned, being cut off socially from anyone they associated with previously, gay or straight, and told that they would rather have given birth to a murderer than a homosexual.
Now, Kyla, you are living in the Gay Mecca, you know that right? These gay kids around you right now just came from high school. You should just go the Diag or something and start taking notes.
I have two High Schoolers and a just graduated. Their school has a GLBT Group and their social circle has at least two gay kids that I know personally. You want to know how I found this out? Both conversations went something like this:
Me: Your friend Blah Blah Blah came by.
Kid: Which one Black Blah Blah Blah or Gay Blah Blah Blah?
As you can probably guess, this is a much abbreviated version; I’ve completely given up on political correctness. At least they’re tolerant. I vote barely on the radar. We’re just outside of Stockton, CA.
I’m in hillbillyville California- graduated in 2004, taught high school on and off the last three years. All the public schools around here have huge Gay Straight Alliances, all very active.
Even at the Catholic school I worked at, there were openly gay kids. They got picked on a bit, but I’d say no more than other kids got picked on for other things. Very minimally, at least in my view.
When I graduated from high school in 1995, there were no openly gay members of my graduating class (although at least three have since come out) and calling someone gay or a lesbian was a huge, massive shaming insult.
The much-younger brother of one of my classmates is currently attending that same high school. He is openly gay, posts pictures of himself and his boyfriend on his Facebook page (and has a huge number of his classmates as friends there) and from what I can tell, experiences little to no harassment about it. I think he takes more shit for being a smart kid than for being gay, actually. (Some things never change.)
Girl, you know I’m originally from San Francisco, right? Ann Arbor is actually the most conservative place I’ve ever lived in the US.
I don’t want to intrude on the cute snuggling couples on the Diag anyway! I have seen gay couples being coupley out on that…lawny area…at the corner of North U and State. It was pleasing to mine eye.
I teach in an urban, not-quite-inner-city high school in TX. We have a GSA, but it’s not that active. There are a lot more girls that are “out” than boys: maybe 1 boy per class, and it’s much less likely to be an “in” kid. Girls seem to have an easier time of it.
I also think that a lot of kids are still “working it out” in high school: in retrospect they see that yes, they were always gay and they always knew, but 14-18 I think a lot of them know something but they are still figuring out exactly what it means. They haven’t entirely come out to themselves.
The kids that are “out” seem to do fine–not a lot of overt harassment. However, that’s a skewed sample–the ones who come out are the ones that are really comfortable with themselves and their orientation, and tend to be the ones with good people skills, the ones with a knack for deflecting bullies before things escalate–the ones who would be unlikely to be harassed for any difference that might get another kid bullied.
Kids who are already misfits, awkward, uncomfortable with their peers? They don’t come out, and with good reason: it would be totally normal for a teenage kid to have a gay friend and turn around and bully the crap out of another kid for being gay. Kids are not consistent.
In my second-hand knowledge, the kids who are “out” tend to be better off than the kids who are not, or really, who are suspected of being gay. Sure, being out is no defense from bullying, but the bullies tend to focus more on the kids who are likely closeted, or straight-as-an-arrow but unfortunately for their social circles more effeminate.
And of course, it’s harder for boys than for girls. Girls can be a “little bit gay,” and depending on their attractiveness to boys, this is understandably a plus for most boys (and, ahem, men). Even if they come out completely homosexual, there’s still a large crowd of boys who enjoy the company of tomboy girls. But boys themselves still have it harder, especially if they’re questioning their sexuality.
Remember the rules of societal acceptance, folks: girls can be straight, gay, bi- or flirty after a fruity drink… boys are either straight or gay, nothing in between is allowed. Holds true in high school, college, and the rest of life, it seems.
Oh, no I had no idea. That is so sad, because for me, growing up in Michigan, it was like some kind of liberal utopia. Me and my friends fled there every weekend as teens. In our school we didn’t have a Gay/Straight Alliance, we had a ‘‘Multicultural Diversity’’ club which was full of closeted gay white people. It was rather unofficially recognized as the Gay Club. I was quite the little fruit fly in my day.
I love it too. But you know what’s weird? I’m living on the East Coast now and I don’t think anyone could get away with gay PDA on my current campus. Though we do have some openly gay profs, there are problems with discrimination within our administration–which I remind you is in the social work department. I just sort of assumed East Coast = socially liberal and while that’s mostly true, I still think Ann Arbor is the most gay-friendly place I’ve ever lived.
A friend of mine in my program is gay, and he actually grew up here. (He seems to be in a permanent state of disbelief that he ended up going to grad school at UM.) He once described Ann Arbor as being tolerant of homosexuality, but not particularly welcoming of it.
I think the university community is pretty good, though. I’m not gay myself, so I don’t have a lot of first hand experience, but I do see a lot of people with little rainbow ribbons and pins to indicate that they’re queer or allies. I have a little ribbon on my backpack (a lot of people in the policy school do, actually, they gave them out at some event and many of us tacked them onto our bags and promptly forgot about them) and I’ve never gotten a single comment on it.
I currently work in the high school that I used to attend.
Back when I went there (graduated in 04) nobody was out. There were people who were obviously gay but did not come right out and say it. Many of the friends and aquaintences waited until after high school to come out.
Now, it seems to be a little different for the females at least. I worked with tenth graders and I can think of at least 4 or 5 girls who I knew were out (and I don’t even have a close relationship with them.) They would casually talk about how they were hanging out with their girlfriends this weekend or would write it up on the write board whenever our daily group question could relate to that. I’ve also heard of hand holding in the hallways and a few rumors of some messing around in the bathroom stalls. Compared to when I went, it seems that a lot more females are fine with being out and from what I have seen haven’t been treated any differently from anyone else. I still think it’s a completely different story for the guys, though.
I graduated fairly recently (rural Minnesota). We had a small group of goth-ish girls, many of whom identified as lesbian/bi. They seemed to have more problems at home than at school (I’m generalizing big time, obviously). There were also a couple of girls on the outskirts of that group (more theatre-ish, maybe) who were bi or lesbian. No big news there either.
Guys were slightly more problematic, but just because they were a bit more integrated into social scenes. By the time I was graduated, I’d say there were 6 or 7 guys who were in varying degrees of out-ness, mostly upperclassmen and mostly affiliated with theatre or choir stuff. Bullying was mostly taunting from stoner-types, but nothing too serious.
We had male-male and female-female couples at proms (this was a very conservative area). On the whole, coming out in high school was probably a bit strange and those who did were definitely subject to some ribbing, but if there were major problems, they weren’t evident in school. People didn’t care.
ETA: No GSA action. Getting a teacher to officially run it was a hurdle, IIRC.
I’d be curious to know how this is going in Calgary high schools - I don’t think Calgary is a very gay-friendly town (in my 20 years of living here, I’ve seen openly gay displays of affection once or twice).
I had pretty much the same experience as you. I went to high school in the late 90s/early 2000s. There were some of us who were open to each other; we fooled around with each other, experimenting, etc. I mean, I had sex with a girl for the first time about 6 months after having sex with a boy for the first time. But outside our group, no one admitted to being gay or lesbian or bi. I didn’t have my first real girlfriend until college, when I felt a little more comfortable with it.
But my sister? She’s 20 and had a ton of gay friends in high school. She was also very active in the Straight Gay Alliance. In college now, she’s got at least a half dozen friends/good acquaintances who are gay/lesbian and open about it.