Cross-Cultural Awareness of Queer Issues for Teens:
Awakenings and Contexts for Young Adults

I've been working with teens a lot this year, while teaching on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico; at this university; and while founding a charter high school for at-risk teens in Boulder. In favor of awareness in education, then, I'm here to speak on "Cross-Cultural Awareness of Queer Issues for Teens," reflecting methodologies for introductory studies at both the secondary and undergraduate university levels.

Although queer teens are disproportionately over-represented among youth suicide rates, kids who openly identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual during adolescence are in a vast minority, among their peers. Acceptance is growing nationally, but there is still tremendous stigmatization attached to identifying as gay/lesbian/bisexual, among young people. I've developed some ways to address this, pedagogically, over the last 8 years, and would like to open this up for discussion in this forum.

I am remembering, for example, the old days, in 1988-89, when a certain program director called me into his office, to let me know that undergraduates were "too young" for queer studies. Imagine, then, what it's like at the high school level -- especially among communities of color that often have very entrenched value systems regarding compulsory heterosexuality (my own ethnic culture, for example).

I've found that these deeply-held notions of "gender-appropriate" behavior often inform young people's decisions about how they will respond to topics of sexuality. While students vary by ethnic, socioeconomic, regional cultures, and by access to education, student groups that begin semesters very divided on the subject of "race" are often quick to rally around a fairly shared agreement on gender roles. That is, there may be hot discussions, in the classroom, about interracial dating, but opening the topic of gay relations often brings shouts of sullen dismissal, followed by uncomfortable silence.

I ask these students to identify for me what they understand to be the differences between sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual practices. Most of them confuse at least two or three of the "categories." Using a History of Science model, we thus begin to examine whether there is really such a thing as a binary male/female distinction, among newborns, given scientific data on the proponderance of counter-examples of hormonal, anatomical and chromosomal distributions at birth. We review scholarship on these issues, such as the following:

Anatomically, a person's gonads -- the sperm- or egg-producing organ (testicles in males, ovaries in the female) -- may not be fully developed, or they may be composed of both ovarian and testicular cells. Similarly, both the internal sex organs (seminal vesicles and prostrate gland in the male; uterus, fallopian tubes, and vagina in females), may be atrophied or ambiguous. For example, a large clitoris can be mistaken for a penis, or testicles may not have descended at birth. These cross-sex anatomic anomalies are actually not that rare. Estimates are that between two and three newborns in every 100 live births have some sort of genital anomaly. That means approximately four million people in America have genitalia that are neither or both male and female, but are sex-assigned either male or female (Science News, 1972:376). Finally, sex hormone proportions in some adults conform more to the other sex than to their own. Consequently, it is entirely conceivable for a child to be chromosomally, anatomically, and/or hormonally sex-inconsistent.

--Laurel Walum Richardson, The Dynamics of Sex and Gender (5-6)

Students are generally intrigued with the ideas that "male" and "female" may not have the force of pre-determination. Talk of "anatomically-correct" dolls versus Barbie and Ken dolls usually lightens this learning unit, as teens begin to identify for themselves and each other what types of assumptions they bring to the classroom regarding sex-assigned anatomy.

Working then with a post-structuralist model of mutability, we discuss why it might be (or might have been, at some point) important for humans to distinguish themselves as "male" and "female." Questions such as what actually defines "male" and "female" are vigorously examined: if a man is sterile, is he still "male"? If a woman is past menopause, is she "female"? When there are one or more secondary sex characteristics of the "opposite" sex present in a person, how is that defined? And so on.

Having opened our minds to the vagaries of such categories, we discuss what is "appropriately" "masculine" and "feminine," within our individual cultures. I tell students that, in my culture, it is still a sort of unspoken taboo for a woman to have short hair: this makes her "unfeminine." I remind students that, in the last century, a woman could be arrested for wearing pants or for smoking in public; she would, in fact, be considered a "transvestite." Teens are then full of ideas about recent controversies, whatever the year, about girls going to military school, or wanting to participate in historically "masculine" sports. Although students will often take a feminist line here, in supporting girls' inclusion in historically male roles, they will often retrench when asked if such girls are still "feminine."

Next, we move on to discussing sexuality. "How many of you," I often ask, "know a girl who can't go to the store and buy a box of tampons, without putting ten things in the cart over it, so she won't have to carry that one little obvious package to the check-out line?" While they're laughing and blushing, I ask how many boys have trouble buying condoms, and whether boys are comfortable purchasing tampons, or with girls asking for condoms. Investigating the blushing and giggling is part of the learning process of understanding how teens feel about their bodily functions, and why. "It's just embarrassing," they say, year after year. Why?

I believe a baseline shame about bodily functions related to sexuality is often key to helping students past homophobia. I tell teens that, if they're not comfortable with their individual sexuality, they're not ready to judge someone else's.

"Yes," they argue, "but dykes and fags do perverted things." I insist that there is no sexual practice in which homosexuals and bisexuals engage that heterosexuals do not also enjoy. Plus, I tell them, being gay is different than having sex. "Then how do you know you're gay?", they always ask. "Can you be a virgin and know you're straight?" I respond. They giggle, but say yes, they can. That's how I explain the difference between sexuality and sexual practices, while vaguely explaining that queers, like straights, exist within a spectrum that includes virginity, celibacy, and everything in between, up to the rampant promiscuity they all believe queers must practice.

A serious discussion of who is most at risk of AIDS is also in order here: students generally do know that heterosexual women are developing the HIV virus more quickly than any other group, today, but they have some very strange notions about how that happens. This is a good point to talk about STDs and who is at risk from what. Part of this is often, ironically, helping students to reconcile their fears about pedophilia and bestiality. I tend to just stick to statistics, on that count.

Once they've been sensitized to these issues, I begin introducing cross-cultural readings and nonprint materials on queer teens. Short pieces from Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian; In the Life; a review of children's books like Heather Has Two Mommies; and films like Tongues Untied and Lianna or French Twist can be useful, for this age group. We study these works in their ethnic, regional, and socioeconomic contexts, allowing for some connections between reader and artist.

As we review these materials, we discuss the nature and history of homophobia, from our knowledge of prescribed gender roles, to the early "sexologists" and the fundamentalist "family value" proponents of today. I remind students always to think critically, rather than judgmentally, and to look for contradictions in their systems of logic. At no point do I attempt to persuade them that they should displace their value systems; rather, that they should adopt values that are based on clear thought. If they are opposed to homosexuality for religious reasons, for example, I suggest that honoring their beliefs shouldn't mean they should have to be afraid of homosexuals.

In the end, we talk about diversity as valuing difference, and make critical connections between racism, sexism, and homophobia. Many students are horrified by the high suicide rate for queer kids, as well as by newspaper reports of hate crimes. Peer pressure will still rule out, for most teens, but at least I know that they've truly begun to analyze compulsory heterosexuality against their fervent commitment to choice. And this sort of pedagogy makes the few "out" teens a great deal more comfortable in speaking, during class periods. More often, however, I see these students a year or two later on campus, when they've outgrown their base peer group, and they always tell me how their thinking has changed. And that can be a wonderful thing.