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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 20, 1995)
34 ▼ oc tobar 20. 100S ▼ just out Z^Ch Newman - A Different K in d o f Real Estate Professional Exploring the tribe California author Linnea Due finds that queer teens often see the larger community not as a help but as a hindrance N o m atter w ho yo u are, Z ach listen s! You won 7 w ind up in the d og h ou se with Z ach ! evv m n f* Honest and frequent communication. Experienced and skillful problem-solving and negotiating. No bull, no hype, no pressure, no song-and-dance. Just a firm com mittment to work hard to help you realize your goals. ▼ by Richard Shumate Whether you're selling or buying a home, you owe it to yourself to call 7.ach! Mifiui m n n 281-4040 323-2323 > v 1 l £ y n mutcms IB PFAtTOi t WHEEL ALIGNMENTS & TIRES LESBIAN HALLOWEEN BASH CODE BLUE P o r ï l c m d s P V e m le ^ e R o fa firv q W o m e n s A J if e c lu b p r e s e n t s irs A PHOTO 5+k y\rvr\ua I-HI alloweeia IP a rfy work on queer teens was named as one of the top s she started out on her exploration six underreported stories of the year by the watch of the lives of gay and lesbian dog group Media Alliance/Project Censored. teens, author Linnea Due expected Primarily a novelist, Due admits she was at to find drastic improvement from first somewhat ambivalent about this nonfiction the days of her own youth, when project. she learned what she knew about gay life She by pursued it because so little has been written about gay and lesbian teens, and most of secreting lesbian pulp fiction from the store shelves what is available is dry and academic. But after and was unceremoniously tossed from Sarah hearing the teens’ stories and traveling around the Lawrence because of her sexual identity. country promoting the book, she has become com After all, that was more than 25 years and a mitted to being an advocate for them. “They con vinced me they need advocates,” she says. Due’s chronicle contains a wide variety of life experiences: two lesbians at an elite prep school near the lesbian mecca of Northampton, Mass., the son of the founders of a homophobic religious sect Stonewall ago. A visible gay and lesbian commu in Georgia, a gay man in rural New Mexico whose nity exists now that didn’t exist then. Melissa contact with other gays consists mostly of the Etheridge is all over the radio. But, after in-depth Internet, an African American lesbian suffering interviews with two dozen teens for her new book. Joining the Tribe: Growing Up Gay and Lesbian in the ’90s, Due found those ex pectations “completely shattered.” Gay liberation, she found, has left behind many teens, who still remain iso lated and afraid, confused and abused— people who find that “Melissa Etheridge doesn ’ t come and talk to you as an authen tic human being.” “What is different is that [gay and lesbian teens today] don’t grow up think ing that they are the only one. They know that somewhere out there is a community. They have some optimism, and that is positive,” says Due. “But what they told me they wanted was some acknowledg ment from the [adult] community that they exist. They convinced me that what they need are advocates—and that they can be their own advocates if we will just let them speak.” One of the main impediments Due found to meaningful interaction between younger and older queers was fear over the old chestnut that gay men and lesbians recru it and prey on children. Vic Edminster, a lesbian teen from Missouri featured in Due’s book, found that, at 16, her attempts to reach out to women in the larger community were rebuffed. “Nobody meant to do it. It wasn’t like, Linnea Due ‘We hate young queers,’ ” Edminster said. extreme ostracism at a Catholic college in New “It was more, ‘You can take care of yourself.’ Now Orleans. While many of the subjects she inter I can take care of myself, but back then I wanted to viewed were at first reluctant to be candid, they know 1 existed.” Even at 18, Edminster, who eventually opened up and described how they are looked much older, found that women she met dealing with their sexual identities in sometimes would get angry when they found out how young painful, often humorous, detail. she really was. “They were hungry. They really wanted to talk. “The point is that the kids want help now, and They really wanted to tell their stories,” says Due. they don’t really care if adults want to be safe,” “Everybody I met was sort of looking for their own says Due. “If we keep behaving as if we were child family—their chosen family.” molesters, it’s as if we’re saying that argument is And what is it that lesbian and gay teens say true, when we know that it’s false.” Due also found that young people are coming they need most? out to themselves as gay or lesbian at a much “Primarily, what they need to do is to socialize younger age than people of her generation, at 11 with each other. What they want from adults is and 12 instead of 16 or 17. whatever we can do to make that happen,” says Due, who points as examples to the City Nightclub “In a sense, this makes it more difficult be in Portland, Ore., and a theater group for teens in cause it means that [kids are] stuck longer in this Seattle. Wash., funded by adult gays. completely homophobic limbo, listening to [anti gay] comments from their family and from their “The problems that are affecting gay and les peers,” Due said. bian youth are solvable problems,” says Due. “And The genesis of Joining the Tribe was a series of that ultimately makes me optimistic.” articles Due wrote on gay and lesbian teens for The Joining the Tribe b \ Linnea Due. Anchor Books. Express, an alternative newspaper in Berkeley, 1995; $12.95paper. Calif., w here she is an associate editor. 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