The New York Times Magazine this Sunday will feature an article by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, an XY Magazine alumnus. You can read “Coming Out in Middle School” online now, or wait until the weekend to see it in print. Either way, it’s excellent. Here are a few choice excerpts:
“When I first realized I was gay,†Austin interjected, “I just assumed I would hide it and be miserable for the rest of my life. But then I said, ‘O.K., wait, I don’t want to hide this and be miserable my whole life.’ â€
I asked him how old he was when he made that decision.
“Eleven,†he said.
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“What is clear is that for many gay youth, middle school is more survival than learning — one parent of a gay teenager I spent time with likened her child’s middle school to a “war zone.†In a 2007 survey of 626 gay, bisexual and transgender middle-schoolers from across the country by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (Glsen), 81 percent reported being regularly harassed on campus because of their sexual orientation.”
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“I certainly don’t believe school districts should force a sexual agenda on the community,†says Finn Laursen, the executive director of the Christian Educators Association International, “but we can’t just put our heads in the sand and ignore the kind of harassment that’s going on.”
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“I would have preferred that he not come out in school, but he wanted to be honest — he wanted to be true to himself,†Austin’s mother, Nadia, told me. “So I took a job as the lunch lady at school because I felt like I needed to be his bodyguard. It seems like I spent the entire year in the principal’s office trying to get them to protect my son. But they would say things like, ‘Well, what did he do to provoke them?”
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“They’re a lot better now, but the first thing one of my relatives did when I told them I was bisexual was hit me on the head with a Bible,†she told me. “So while I was dealing with that insanity at home, I at least had a safe place at school to talk about what was happening.â€
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“A new kind of gay adolescent was appearing on the page — proud, resilient, sometimes even happy. We profiled many of them in [XY] magazine, including a seventh grader in suburban Philadelphia who was out to his classmates and a high-school varsity-football player from Massachusetts who came out to his teammates and was shocked to find unconditional support.”