The Next Big Front in the Gay Liberation Movement: LGBT Kids

by Gary Cottle

After ignoring LGBT youth for decades, adult members of our community are starting to turn their attention to the plight of our young. Most of us have painful childhood memories, and many of us are loath to stir them up, and that’s understandable. If we want to keep running once we get past our teen years, who can blame us? All of that fear and confusion, bullying and rejection… Who would want to dwell on all of that for very long? The only trouble is that there are always members of our tribe stuck back there in adolescence and young adulthood, and many of them are going through hell. Some of them won’t survive, and many of them who do will join the legions of our walking wounded.

I think for the longest time our community believed that if we worked toward legal parity and if we came out, and thus dispelled all those odious myths about our kind, and if we continued to challenge homophobic assumptions, our success in creating a more accepting and tolerant society would filter down to our kids. This seems reasonable, and in many respects things may be easier now for a select few young members of our community. But in the past year we have become keenly aware of the alarming suicide rate among our youth. And the stories of some of the individuals who have died have brought an ugly fact into sharp focus; many LGBT kids are being ruthlessly bullied, and some are being bullied to death. It may be true that some gay kids have benefited from our more open and accepting society, some may be reaping the rewards of the Gay Rights Movement, but it seems that things might actually be worse for many LGBT kids.

I suspect the cause for this is rooted in the fact that it is harder for young LGBTs to hide now. Being more open and visible has made straight people more aware of us. Gays are no longer that strange group of sex freaks who live in San Francisco or New York. It is now common knowledge that LGBTs are all over. Everyone knows that you’ll find us in nearly every family, every small town, every school, and every church. In nearly every place where there is more than a few human beings, you will most likely find a member of our tribe. Twenty, twenty-five years ago, those who lived in rural and suburban areas were, to a large degree, ignorant of the LGBTs living in their midst. Being a member of the gay community back when I was in college was like belonging to a secret society. But now that many of us have come out, and now that many of us have chosen to live in smaller towns rather than escaping to the gay Meccas, our secret is out.

It used to be easier for young people to deny they were gay. But now if kids are in any way different, they’re not just going to be labeled queer, many of their peers are going to assume that the label is accurate. Online social media may amplify the bullying, too. The internet may be a great place for likeminded individuals to form virtual communities, but sites like Facebook can be gossip mills for teens. And the medium can be a place where bullies can signal to their classmates that certain individuals are fair game.

The Christianist hate campaign has more than likely influenced the attitudes of the young, too. How could our kids miss all the hostility directed toward LGBTs by those who claim to be moral and Godly? How could it not send a signal to them that our tribe is not worthy of respect? The Christianists have even begun to overtly train their kids not to respect their LGBT classmates. The kids are being targeted by so-called “ex-gay” ministries and organizations like Focus on the Family. And parents are regularly misinformed about LGBT issues by members of the Christianist hate machine.

Knowing that our youth is on the frontlines of the culture war, and becoming more keenly aware that many of them are dying, has galvanized our tribe. Many have become vocal advocates for our youth. Many are working hard to get schools to recognize their LGBT students. Many are demanding that our schools implement effective anti-bullying programs. Many are trying to convince school boards and legislatures that students need to learn about LGBT issues and about historic and notable members of our community. And we have learned that we can reach out and give encouragement to LGBT youth via social media. For the longest time many adult members of our tribe were reluctant, even afraid to talk to an LGBT young person because of the myth perpetuated to this day by Christianists that LGBTs are pedophiles and that we want to seduce kids into our fabled “lifestyle.” Finally this lie has lost enough of its strength to give many of us enough backbone to talk to young people who may need our help.

So we’re now talking to LGBT youth, mainly about bullying. We’re giving them pep talks about getting through these tough years. And we’re starting to dialogue with school teachers and administrators about the needs of the LGBT youth in their charge. But there is one group of people that we’re still ignoring: parents. Parents are supposed to be their childrens’ number one cheerleader. They’re supposed to offer support. They’re supposed to offer guidance. They’re supposed to impart wisdom. But way too many kids feel the need to simply tune their parents out once they reach a certain age. And since so many of us who survived our childhoods remember tuning out our own parents, we may not be consciously aware that we’re viewing this as an acceptable and expected reality when it shouldn’t be.

That five or six year journey from childhood to adulthood is difficult to navigate, and many kids, gay and straight alike, don’t get the support and guidance they need. Some parents may not care enough, others are too caught up in their own lives, some are put off by their kids’ willfulness, some are embarrassed, and some just can’t accept the fact that their kid isn’t nine years old anymore. It’s a shame when any teenager can’t rely on their parents to help them figure out how to be an adult in this world, so generally speaking, parents need to be encouraged to address the specific needs of their teenagers. But we need to face the fact that parental neglect is disproportionately affecting LGBT youth. How many LGBT adults do you know who have claimed they had an open and nurturing relationship with their parents when they were teenagers? How many members of our tribe were able to talk openly to their parents about sex, crushes, relationships, broken hearts, loneliness and the agony of unfulfilled longing? How many of us were able to talk freely about our feelings and experiences with our parents when we were young? In many cases, even liberal parents aren’t very helpful. They seem to take the attitude that “we don’t know how to be gay, so what can we do?” Maybe they don’t know how to be gay, but for their kids' sake, they need to find out.

I know a lot of people manage to squeak by and survive. Some may even flourish. But our community is paying a price for going without parental support during those crucial years. That’s when we develop our sense of self-worth, that’s when we learn social and dating skills, and it’s when we develop our attitude toward sex. Going without guidance and support during these years results in many of us not being prepared for adult life, and this can lead to a lot of pain and suffering that could otherwise be avoided.

Christianists are often pointing to drug use and higher rates of HIV among our community as proof that we are, as a general rule, reckless and licentious. Well, it is true that many of the ills that plague us are avoidable. And perhaps the LGBT community could do more to teach our young adults to party and engage in adult activity more safely and more responsibly. But I don’t think we’re ever going to get those suicide rates, depression rates, drug abuse rates and HIV rates down significantly until we get parents involved. Telling twenty-year olds about the proper use of a condom is all well and good. Telling twenty-year-olds about how they need to value their own lives and look for loving and caring mates is all well and good. Telling twenty-year-olds about how to be a loving and caring mate is all well and good. But the time to start telling young people about this stuff is when they’re 12, 13 and 14 years old. It needs to be engrained by the time they start jumping into the deep end. Kids who have been neglected during their teen years are likely to have the mentality of thirteen-year-olds when they start going out to clubs and having sex. LGBT adults who have went through all of this might be able to help a little by way of social media, by just being open and serving as role models, and by mentoring whenever possible, but we can not, by and large, raise LGBT youth. So we need parents to step up.

I don’t know how we can get parents to be more responsive to the needs of their LGBT kids. I’m just pointing out that there is a profound deficit here, and the cost we’re paying is huge. LGBT youth need parents they can count on just as much as any other teenager. There really is no substitute. And until we figure out how to solve this, young members of our tribe are going to continue to suffer. We may be opening ourselves up to more charges of indoctrination if we start pushing parents to train their LGBT kids to be healthy and happy LGBT adults, but we need to stand up to that bullying. I think most of us know that our kids need their parents to be understanding and supportive. I think most of us instinctively know that parental neglect of LGBT youth is widespread and serious. I think most of us instinctively know that the depression, suicide rates, drug abuse and HIV rates are linked to parental neglect and lack of understanding. So it’s time to start exploring how we can reach out and educate parents even if it does mean yet more nasty catcalls from Christianists. We can’t let them deter us. By attempting to block effective anti-bullying programs and the like, they have already proven that they simply don’t care about the safety of our youth. They want to push us back into the closet even if it means more of our young people will die. We can’t be afraid of the names these people may call us or of the vile suggestions they’ll make. Who, besides us, can LGBT youth rely on to tell their parents what they need to know to be supportive of them?