Out and Ignored

Erica Barton* has liked girls since kindergarten, but it took her eight years to tell the world that she was gay—and coming out in a small town like Lawrence, KS, wasn’t easy.

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Despite all she went through, Barton doesn’t regret coming out at 13. “I decided to stop hiding myself and to go for it,” she says. “Times have changed, and it’s a lot easier now because people are more accepting.”

Thanks to the growing number of gay characters on TV shows like Desperate Housewives, Will and Grace, and MTV’s Real World—and the more than 3,000 Gay-Straight Alliances in high schools nationwide—Barton is one of the three million gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth who are coming out as early as middle school rather than in college or later in life. With as many as 20 percent of all adolescents having some degree of same-sex orientation, according to Ritch Savin-Williams, author of The New Gay Teenager (Harvard, 2005), it’s surprising that many teens still say they don’t have access to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT)–related resources in their schools.

According to the 2003 National School Climate Survey, a biannual study by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), an organization which ensures safe schools for LGBT students, only 50 percent of students say they have access to community LGBT Web sites, such as Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (www.pflag.com), and gay-related resources in their media centers.

The numbers are hugely disappointing because so many gay kids find school libraries to be safe havens and still go there to find resources even though information is so widely available elsewhere, says Dan Woog, founder of OutSpoken, a Connecticut-based support group for LGBT teens and author of School’s Out: The Impact of Gay and Lesbian Issues on America’s Schools (Alyson, 1995).

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Barton, who says she’s probably read every gay-themed book in her school library, agrees. “Reading gets me in touch and makes me feel better knowing that there are other people out there like me,” says the teenager, adding that books such as Night Diving (Spinsters Ink, 2003) by Michelene Esposito and Love Rules (Morning Glory, 2001) by Marilyn Reynolds made her feel “very comfortable coming out.”

Arla Jones, Barton’s librarian at Lawrence High School and founder of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, has become the school’s de facto counselor for gay teens because of her extensive gay literature collection and the fact that she’s a lesbian herself. Her school library’s Web site says “of the 85 to 90 percent of teens who aren’t themselves gay or lesbian, almost every one of them has a friend, teacher, parent, future coworker, or significant associate who is.” Kids are way ahead of adults, Jones says. “They are more sophisticated about having gay friends and of gay people who are out. Most students couldn’t care less; it’s the adults who are really uptight.” Her advice? Don’t make a big deal out of building a gay collection—just make sure books are well cataloged so kids can easily find them.

Former American Library Association (ALA) President Ann Symons, who until recently was a media specialist at Juneau Douglas High School in Alaska, knew she had failed as a librarian when she read the introduction to Young, Gay, and Proud! (Consortium, 1995). Written by one of her former students, Don Romesburg, Symons discovered that he couldn’t find anything on his school library shelves as he struggled to define his sexuality while growing up. Symons, who learned her lesson, advises taking a “proactive stance” to starting an LGBT collection by “building the collection you feel you need and dealing [with the controversy] later.”

Internet-filtering software on school computers and the lack of federal and state funding for school libraries are partly to blame for the inadequate school library services for gay teens. But librarians themselves are the most likely culprits because they dislike controversy. “There’s nothing more important to the school administration than keeping its name out of the news,” says Pat Scales, director of library services for the Governor’s School for the Arts in Greenville, SC, and a frequent speaker on intellectual freedom. Gay teens may stress the importance of identifying with characters in books, but when someone like Laurie Taylor, the Fayetteville, AR, parent who recently challenged 58 sexually explicit books in her local school library, gets national attention, the spines of many librarians and administrators suddenly go limp.

What’s the risk? Michael Glatze, the editor-in-chief of YgA, a bimonthly magazine with a circulation of 10,000 that targets young gay America, says it best: “Librarians shouldn’t be in the business of denying information.” Without vital books and resources, gay kids can end up in high-risk situations involving online predators or turn to drugs to help them cope. “Confidence comes from information and knowing that you’re not alone,” Glatze says. Just 13 years ago, when Glatze was a high school student in Tumwater, WA, he was so starved for information about anyone like himself that when a Time magazine cover article about homosexuals hit the newsstands, he kept a photograph of a gay couple featured in the article under his pillow for a whole year.

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The consequences of failing to build a gay literature collection can be enormous, says Riley Snorton, GLSEN’s spokeswoman. For one, it could discourage the teasing and bullying that still goes on in so many schools. An alarming 82 percent of the estimated 887 13- to 20-year-olds recently surveyed by GLSEN say they’ve been verbally harassed at school because of their sexual orientation, and more than 90 percent say they frequently hear remarks such as “faggot,” “dyke,” or “that’s so gay.”

Although physical attacks are less common, Kat Forrest, a 16-year-old junior from Olathe, KS, is one of the nearly 20 percent of teens who say they were assaulted because of their sexual preference. Hostile school environments have an adverse effect on LGBT teens’ ability to learn, damaging their sense of belonging, their academic performance, and their educational aspirations, says Kevin Jennings, GLSEN’s executive director. Students who report frequent harassment, for example, have grade point averages that are more than 10 percent lower than those who did not, and those who are verbally attacked are less likely than other students to say they plan to attend college, the survey says.

Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old University of Wyoming student who, in 1998, was robbed, beaten, tied to a fence and left to die, all because he was gay, has put a public face on the horrible crimes that are committed by ignorant people, says Glatze. “The mistake we often make about young adult literature is that it’s only for the student who can identify with it,” adds Scales. “But straight kids need to read Annie on My Mind [Farrar, 1982, by Nancy Garden] and Deliver Us from Evie [HarperCollins, 1994, by M. E. Kerr] to learn about tolerance.”

In the three decades in which Scales has defended the right to read, she’s found a direct correlation between a political shift to the right, which started in the 1980s during the Reagan Administration, and a huge spike in the number of censorship cases. Overall, there’s been a tenfold increase in the number of book challenges across the country, and since most are objections to sexual content, homosexual-themed books are often targeted, Scales says. The situation has gotten so bad, that one-third of the top-10 book challenges last year were gay titles.

Librarians such as Jeff Blair at Olathe High School admit to a certain level of self-censorship. In 1993, the Olathe School District was at the center of a lawsuit involving the censoring of Annie on My Mind, the novel that began a trend of high-quality young adult literature with homosexual protagonists who were not punished for their sexuality. While the district lost the case because of its “obvious bias against homosexuality,” says Blair, the school board ended up instituting a selection policy for all district school libraries, essentially bringing in a censor to approve the purchase of all books. “Literally thousands of books go through her,” says Blair, referring to the four high schools, eight middle schools, and 32 elementary schools that must still get a green light from the “library coordinator.” “She can reject any book, and she doesn’t have to have a reason.”

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Librarians may want to take comfort in the knowledge that the law is on their side, says Glatze. Administrators who question the purchase of gay literature may think twice if they hear about Jamie Nabozny, a gay student who won a $900,000 out-of-court settlement in 1996 when he sued his Ashland, WI, school district for violating his rights by not protecting him from years of harassment by fellow students. Nabozny was kicked, mock-raped, and suffered continual verbal abuse. As a result, many administrators who fear lawsuits understand the need to create safe environments for gay students, says Woog, a varsity soccer coach at Staples High School in Westport, CT, who helped found the state’s first high school Gay-Straight Alliance. Celebrating Gay Pride Week, Gay History Month, GLSEN’s Day of Silence, an annual vow of silence to bring attention to harassment in schools, and ensuring your school has policies in place to protect students’ sexual orientation and gender identity are a few ways to build awareness.

The growing number of gay-themed titles for young adults over the last five years means kids today shouldn’t have to scrounge for information. Fortunately for librarians, quality books are everywhere. “What safer place is there to get this information than in a book?” asks Lynn Evarts, a media specialist at Sauk Prairie High School in rural Wisconsin whose library boasts an extensive fiction and nonfiction gay-themed collection. Besides, says Evarts, it’s easy to defend books with literary merit.

“A gay book has to be good in order to get published,” says author David Levithan, who wrote Boy Meets Boy (Knopf, 2003), adding that books by writers Julie Anne Peters, Alex Sanchez, and Francesca Lia Block attract both gay and straight readers, win prestigious awards, and receive favorable reviews. Major children’s book publishers such as Random House, Scholastic, and Penguin Putnam realize that gay literature has become so mainstream that their plots no longer hinge around a teen coming out—they’re just high school students who happen to be gay. “There are gay teens in every high school, whether they’re in or out, or struggling with their sexuality,” says Levithan. And that’s why it’s so critical to “normalize” everything, says author Savin-Williams. “We’re talking about millions of kids who have same-sex attractions to varying degrees,” he adds. “So the point is to demystify same-sex sexuality and to understand that it is a normal part of human life.”'

* Not her real name.

About the photographs

The cover and inside images were featured in Exuberance! A Celebration of GLBT, an exhibit at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, from April 25 to May 3, 2003. The show featured more than 300 photographs of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered young people by Michael Glatze, Benjie Nycum, and Rachelle Lee Smith.