Queer Praxis

Abstract

During the mid-to-late 1980s, I researched lesbian and gay youth in what would become Growing up Gay in the South. Focusing on a baker’s dozen of “sexual rebels,” my ethnographic case studies ran the gamut of challenges faced by queer youth (that phrase, of course, was not in vogue at the time). There was Malcolm, who suffered from his father’s physical and verbal abuse, the raging conflict between his father and mother, their religious fanaticism, and the repression of homosexual feelings. Malcolm seriously considered suicide on multiple occasions, as did two-thirds of this sample. Then there was Everetta, who not only attempted suicide but, like forty percent of the sample, also used alcohol and drugs regularly. Harassed by her peers and rebuffed by her would-be sweetheart, she was one of the few to have found a supportive teacher and a knowledgeable school district psychologist. A majority of the entire sample, as adolescents and young adults, reported feeling isolated, fearing being discovered or coming out, having low self-esteem, being harassed because they were “different,” often wishing they were someone else, and wanting to leave home on many an occasion. These data and the young adult narratives that accompany them fit the profile of the “gay teen” that has emerged during the past two de-