Tag Archives: gay teens

“Crotchwatchers” finds a home

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I’m thrilled to announce that my short story “Crotchwatchers” has found a home at Diverse Voices Quarterly, Vol. 3 Issue 11-12.

The issue went live today, and is available for download (free) here.

A word to the wary (or voyeuristic) – “Crotchwatchers” is not erotica.  It’s hardly graphic at all.  The title comes from one of the characters’ observations:

“The world is divided into two kinds of people:  people who check out a guy’s crotch when he walks by, and people who don’t.”

That gem of wisdom (paraphrased from an ex-boyfriend) was calling out to me to be parlayed into a story.  It turned into a coming-of-age piece that was influenced by my work with urban gay teens in the 1990’s, and my personal experience.

The setting — New York City’s Christopher Street Piers — was once an unlikely refuge for gay and transgender teenagers, some of them homeless, some of them looking for a place where they could be themselves, hang out with friends and people watch.  Gentrification had yet to come to the spare, concrete platforms jutting out into the Hudson River.

In the early 90’s, I was not much more than a teen myself, and my boyfriend and I would walk out to the end, holding hands, and watch the sun set, while the area filled up with a diverse crowd of ‘bangie boys,’ ‘butch queens,’ boys in drag, and ‘baby dykes.’

Around that time, I started working at an LGBT youth center.  A lot of the kids spent time on the Piers, particularly the lower income Black and Hispanic boys.  There were perils to the Piers.  Some kids got involved in street prostitution, and many complained about being harassed by the police.  Gradually, kids were displaced from the area due to Greenwich Village residents complaining about crime and vagrancy.  The riverfront area went through renovation to become a tidier urban park.

In part, “Crotchwatchers” is a tribute to a vibrant street phenomenon that sadly has no equal nowadays in New York City.  Groups of queer kids still hang out on Christopher Street, outside the bars and shops where they are either too young to enter or don’t have the money to spend anyway.  The neighborhood very well may be safer, but it’s lost some of its soul.

Why Are Gay Teens Killing Themselves?

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Over the past year, there have been a string of high profile teen suicides. Three were clustered in a Minnesota school district. The most recent suicide happened in rural Indiana. The common thread is that the victims were all being harassed because they were—or were perceived to be—gay.

Suicide is about isolation, loss of hope, feeling like the emotional pain is too much to bear. It will probably always be a reality, particularly for adolescents who feel the full force of their emotions, at times like a crushing weight. In the US, the number of teens who kill themselves each year has largely stayed the same over the past 30 years, and suicide is consistently the second or third leading cause of death among teenagers. A 1989 landmark federal study brought attention to the fact that gay teens are much more likely to commit suicide than their non-gay peers. Family rejection, ostracism at school, and loneliness can overwhelm and lead to desperate decisions.

When I was thirteen, I tied a belt around my neck and sat in my bedroom closet, contemplating. I hated my lumpy, pre-pubescent body. I was reminded about being overweight by friends and felt piercing embarrassment about having to change and shower in the locker room, back-to-school shopping for clothes that never fit and being mistaken for a girl by strangers due to my shapeless body. In a fuzzy sense, coming to terms with being gay figured in at that moment. I felt inadequate around other boys and thought I’d never fit in with my effeminate shyness and sensitivity.

Luckily, I was too afraid to try to hurt myself, and things got better as my height started catching up with my weight and I made a deal with myself to never, ever consider that I could possibly be gay.

That was 27 years ago, and I’ve since come out and worked as a social worker for LGBT youth for most of my adult career. But when I read about the recent gay teen suicides, I found myself wondering: Haven’t we made progress?

From a time when coming out in high school was near impossible, we now have gay student council presidents and homecoming kings and gay couples attending proms and Gay/Straight Alliances and high school theater productions of Rent and students organizing a National Day of Silence to protest homophobia and primetime TV shows featuring popular gay teens.

But we still have gay kids getting viciously harassed and killing themselves.

For sure, change has yet to come to many areas of the country. At the Minnesota school where three kids killed themselves, the district had a specific policy forbidding teachers from discussing gay issues even in the context of “tolerance” education or anti-bullying policies and despite student complaints of anti-gay harassment by students and even by some teachers. This is the attitude, the culture in many suburban and rural communities.

But studies show that as many as 60 percent of gay teenagers consider suicide, and they’re not all growing up in places where coming out remains strenuously taboo. Family support makes a big difference, and I think another factor is the complexity of adolescence, at times—and by its nature—resistant to outside meddling.

There’s a saying in developmental psychology. Adolescence is paradox. It’s a sky high feeling that anything is possible, and it’s the depths of futility. It’s demanding to be taken seriously as an individual but wanting more than anything to blend into the crowd. It’s protesting unequal treatment while perpetrating hateful, aggressive acts against those less powerful than you.

Gay teens find themselves in this mix, at turns encouraged and supported and at others despondent and ashamed. Their cues from the outside world are pitched at odd angles. ‘Be yourself’ is the message from the mainstream media, and ‘Don’t step too near’ is the refrain from the well-publicized political battles happening across the country. At best, public attitudes have moved from hostility to ambivalence. Polls now show just a slim majority of the general public believes gays and lesbians should be “accepted” in society.

It’s the wrong time to get complacent. I don’t think that we can expect political change or even school policy change to completely eliminate gay teen suicide, but it can make a difference. As disturbing as these stories are, it counts as progress that they have claimed attention and not been buried by the squeamishness of the past.