what if i was a gay vampire poet living in a victorian mansion in the caves of a mountain in the woods, and my husband was a artist and we both robbed the houses of the rich and gave their money to the queer youth?
Given the great strides toward equality the LGBTQ+ community has made in recent years — including the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide and increased representation of queer people in media — it would seem to hold that today’s queer youth have much better lives than their predecessors.
But beyond the most sweeping victories for LGBTQ+ rights, today’s queer youth still face massive challenges, which are compounded where they intersect with race. Feeling unsafe at school and feelings of worthlessness plague young queer people, as do startlingly high rates of depression and lack of sleep.
These revelations and more were exposed in the groundbreaking new “LGBTQ Youth Report,” conducted by the Human Rights Campaign in conjunction with researchers at the University of Connecticut. A survey of over 12,000 LGBTQ+ teenagers across the nation, it paints an intimate portrait of the obstacles queer youth face at home, in school, and in their communities — and found that supportive families and schools are key to their wellbeing,
An alarming 77 percent of LGBTQ+ teenagers, defined in the report as youth 13 to 17 years old, reported feeling depressed or down over the week preceding the survey, and 95 percent expressed having trouble sleeping at night. The report notes that these high rates could be explained by the variety of stressors young queer people face, including harassment, family and peer rejection, bullying from their peers, isolation and a lack of a sense of belonging.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents, for example, say they’ve heard family members make negative comments about LGBTQ+ people. “I overhear anti-LGBTQ slurs on the bus every single school day,” says one respondent. Overall, only 26 percent of LGBTQ+ youth report to feeling safe in their schools, and only 24 percent say they can “definitely” be themselves at home with their family.
The mental health crisis facing LGBTQ+ teens is compounded by lack of access to adequate and affirming counseling services. Only 41 percent of respondents say they have received psychological or emotional counseling to address their mental health issues within the past 12 months. And only 37 percent of respondents of color say they’ve received psychological or emotional counseling in the past 12 months. Youth who have received counseling, the report notes, reported better mental health outcomes.
“These harrowing statistics show the devastating toll rejection by family and peers, bullying and harassment, and apathy on the part of too many adults is having on America’s young people,” says HRC President Chad Griffin in a press release. “When this administration rescinds guidance protecting transgender students, or when lawmakers attempt to grant a license to discriminate to schools, colleges, and universities, it further erodes the fragile landscape for young people across the nation.”
Young LGBTQ+ respondents also say they hesitate to come out in healthcare environments, which can prevent their specific needs from being met. A majority of them, 67 percent, say they have not revealed their sexual orientation to their care provider, and 61 percent say they have not revealed their gender identity.
“I live in the Bible Belt,” one respondent says. “Also I’m afraid that any information or questions that I have aren’t confidential between me and my councilor. I’m afraid he’ll call my parents or try to convince me that my sexuality is wrong.”
But the report also shows signs of hope. 91 percent of youth report feeling pride in being an LGBTQ+ person, and 93 percent are proud to be a part of the community. Three out of five LGBTQ+ students, meanwhile, say they have access to an LGBTQ+ student club at their school, which has been shown to improve quality of life.
I mainly drew this so I could print it out and stick it on my classroom door. My students and I have a running thing where they draw me lots of shark pictures on post it notes, which adorn the wall behind my desk in a vast and ever-shifting gallery. They love to look at it to appreciate new additions. I’ve got a scrap book full of older ones which had to be cleared to make room for new submissions.
It Gets Better Yellowknife is an organization that was created in 2011 to support queer and trans youth in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories in Northern Canada.
even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.
The lyric is:
Well maybe I’m the faggot America
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda
I don’t know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I’ve never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don’t know what it’s like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.
And it’s hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren’t slurs when I was your age.
I was 17 when this song came out. “Gay” was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn’t like. “Pop quiz? That’s so gay!” A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. She didn’t deny it, so her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow “nobody saw”. The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn’t do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be “endorsing homosexuality.” My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she “wasn’t supportive of Catholic values.”
The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard’s murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn’t finish writing a play titled “The Lemon Tree” about two girls whose love for each other couldn’t survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn’t like I was losing anything, right?
I didn’t have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society’s homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.
(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang’s sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn’t get radio play here when I was young.)
And yes, “faggot” was worse than “gay”. “Gay” just meant, you know, “bad”, but “faggot” meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.
So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day’s anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn’t believe that for once somebody was on my side.
Green Day’s image was tough and angry and loud, and it’s an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying “maybe I’m the faggot” was them saying Come and get me. You can’t scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I’ll own it, and I’ll use it to lure you into punching range. You’re wrong and I can fight you and win.
It was like a transmission from an alien planet. This was someone so much braver than I could ever imagine being. What that song said to me was that somebody was willing to stand up for me. I had viewed homophobia as an all-powerful cultural force I could either submit to or escape by hiding until I found a safe community, but pro-LGBT punk rock was what taught me that I also had the option to fight.
Given the great strides toward equality the LGBTQ+ community has made in recent years — including the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide and increased representation of queer people in media — it would seem to hold that today’s queer youth have much better lives than their predecessors.
But beyond the most sweeping victories for LGBTQ+ rights, today’s queer youth still face massive challenges, which are compounded where they intersect with race. Feeling unsafe at school and feelings of worthlessness plague young queer people, as do startlingly high rates of depression and lack of sleep.
These revelations and more were exposed in the groundbreaking new “LGBTQ Youth Report,” conducted by the Human Rights Campaign in conjunction with researchers at the University of Connecticut. A survey of over 12,000 LGBTQ+ teenagers across the nation, it paints an intimate portrait of the obstacles queer youth face at home, in school, and in their communities — and found that supportive families and schools are key to their wellbeing,
An alarming 77 percent of LGBTQ+ teenagers, defined in the report as youth 13 to 17 years old, reported feeling depressed or down over the week preceding the survey, and 95 percent expressed having trouble sleeping at night. The report notes that these high rates could be explained by the variety of stressors young queer people face, including harassment, family and peer rejection, bullying from their peers, isolation and a lack of a sense of belonging.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents, for example, say they’ve heard family members make negative comments about LGBTQ+ people. “I overhear anti-LGBTQ slurs on the bus every single school day,” says one respondent. Overall, only 26 percent of LGBTQ+ youth report to feeling safe in their schools, and only 24 percent say they can “definitely” be themselves at home with their family.
The mental health crisis facing LGBTQ+ teens is compounded by lack of access to adequate and affirming counseling services. Only 41 percent of respondents say they have received psychological or emotional counseling to address their mental health issues within the past 12 months. And only 37 percent of respondents of color say they’ve received psychological or emotional counseling in the past 12 months. Youth who have received counseling, the report notes, reported better mental health outcomes.
“These harrowing statistics show the devastating toll rejection by family and peers, bullying and harassment, and apathy on the part of too many adults is having on America’s young people,” says HRC President Chad Griffin in a press release. “When this administration rescinds guidance protecting transgender students, or when lawmakers attempt to grant a license to discriminate to schools, colleges, and universities, it further erodes the fragile landscape for young people across the nation.”
Young LGBTQ+ respondents also say they hesitate to come out in healthcare environments, which can prevent their specific needs from being met. A majority of them, 67 percent, say they have not revealed their sexual orientation to their care provider, and 61 percent say they have not revealed their gender identity.
“I live in the Bible Belt,” one respondent says. “Also I’m afraid that any information or questions that I have aren’t confidential between me and my councilor. I’m afraid he’ll call my parents or try to convince me that my sexuality is wrong.”
But the report also shows signs of hope. 91 percent of youth report feeling pride in being an LGBTQ+ person, and 93 percent are proud to be a part of the community. Three out of five LGBTQ+ students, meanwhile, say they have access to an LGBTQ+ student club at their school, which has been shown to improve quality of life.
By Dean Hamer, Co-Producer/Director of “Kumu Hina” –
Many U.S. schools serve groups of kids who are diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, age, religious or non-religious belief, national origin, family situation, ability, sexual orientation and gender identity. This diversity is especially vibrant here in Hawai'i, where many people describe their ethnic background as “chop suey,” Christians are in a minority and gender-nonconforming individuals are not only accepted but are respected and admired for their important role in perpetuating cultural knowledge and traditions.
For two years, we were given the opportunity to film a remarkable māhū (transgender) native Hawaiian teacher, Kumu Hina Wong-Kalu, as she created a “place in the middle” where every student at her small Honolulu charter school felt welcome, included and ready to learn to the best of their ability. Hina’s story is portrayed in our PBS feature documentary Kumu Hina, which is being nationally broadcast on Independent Lensas of May 4, 2015.
But we also wanted to bring Hina’s teaching to K-12 schools, which led us to produce a youth-friendly, short version of the film called A Place in the Middle that has been excerpted for the Perspectives for a Diverse America anthology. Here are some ways these video clips can be used to help students appreciate the value of inclusion, the strengths they inherit from their cultural heritage and their own power to create a school climate of honor and respect.
Celebrate Difference. In the scene “Welcome to Hawai'i,” Kumu Hina is preparing the students for a hula performance by handing out lei necklaces, yellow for boys and white for girls. But 11-year-old Ho'onani decides that she wants to wear both colors—a decision that her classmates meet with envy rather than scorn. In a later scene,“Kāne-Wahine and Wahine-Kāne”(Boy-Girls and Girl-Boys), Hina explains that she has created this “place in the middle” so that gender-creative students have a specific space they can call their own.
These clips are a reminder to teachers that students who are perceived to be different, in one way or another, deserve to be celebrated preciselybecause of those differences, not simply tolerated despite them. And it’s a jumping off place for students to think and talk about how every person’s identity is comprised of multiple interacting facets. A good discussion prompt is to note that Ho'onani is in the middle between male and female, then ask how many other ways people can be “in the middle”; for example, being more than one race or bilingual, being part of two households after a divorce and so on.
Use the Power of Heritage. In “Hawai'i Poniʻī,” the principal of the school urges her students to take seriously their lessons on Hawaiian culture because, “We didn’t get to sing ‘Hawai'i Poniʻī’ (the Hawaiian national anthem) in our schools. We had to pledge allegiance to the flag that took over Hawai'i.” Her approach works: By the end of the film, even the students who began the year with little enthusiasm have become full participants in the school’s activities.
You can use this clip to inspire students to inquire into their own heritage, starting with well-known aspects, such as food, holidays, etc., and progressing to a deeper conversation that incorporates social, cultural, political and historical contexts. Ask students to bring in food dishes typical of their heritage, and after the Smorgasbord is consumed, ask what ideas, values or practices their home cultures could contribute to their classroom or school.
Another clip, “Hawaiians Live in Aloha,” uses Polynesian-style animated figures to tell the history of how early Hawaiians respected and admired people with both male and female spirits, giving them the special name of māhū. Asking students to interpret images from this animated portrayal of Hawaiian history prior to and after viewing the film is a good ice-breaker for what some consider a sensitive topic. You can follow up by asking them to draw their own interpretation of what it means to be “in the middle.”
Teach With Aloha. Many people think of “aloha” as just a cute way to say hello or goodbye, but as Kumu Hina explains in a clip about her transition, the deeper meaning is to have love, honor and respect for everyone. Ask students how the characters in the film demonstrate aloha, and then how they do (or could) demonstrate it themselves. Most important, how do you rate your own classroom and school on living up to this standard?
You can help spread the concept of aloha by hanging aPledge of Aloha poster in your classroom or by handing out Pledge of Aloha postcards that can be signed and returned to Kumu Hina in Hawai'i. The module can be considered a success if students use this opportunity to share what they’ve learned about Hawai'i and its uniquely inclusive approach to gender and many other types of diversity.
