contents
O.K. by Courtney Gillette
A Gay Grammar by Gabe Bloomfield
It's Not Confidential, I've Got Potential by Eugenides Fico
Snow and Hot Asphalt by Benjamin Zumsteg
When You're a Gay Boy in America by Danny Zaccagnino
I Smell the Gas of My Father's Fishing Boat by Adam K. Boehmer
Fourth of July by Lauren Rile Smith
MY DIARY: DOCUMENTED. DONE. by L. Canale
Crying Wolfe by Jack Lienke
Trans-ventures of an F2M by Alexzander Colin Rasmussen
Queer: Five Letters by Kat Wilson
Falling Off My Bike and Riding into the Sunset by Christopher Wilcox
The Night Marc Hall Went to the Prom by J. J. Deogracias
Don't Tell Me That I'm Overly Sensitive and Paranoid by Alex Weissman
My poems by Isaac Oliver
Sacagawea by Laura Heston
A Fairy's Tale by Travis Stanton
A Boy in the Girls' Bathroom by Dylan Forest
Our Space by Jovencio de la Paz
Four Photos by Justin Levesque
Break-up in Slow Motion by Joshua Dalton
A Story Called “Her” by Alison Young
Moment: This Could've Been Me by Evin Hunter
A Quietly Queer Revolution by Laci Lee Adams
Hatchback by Kaitlyn Tierney Duggan
Walking the Tracks by Eric Knudsen
The Most Important Letter of Our Life by JoSelle Vanderhooft
Without a Trace by Anthony Rella
body isn't this by Zara Iris
Nice Ass by Jesse Cameron Alick
“Girl + Faggots” by Caspian Gray
Something for the Ladies by Danny Thanh
Click and Drag by Joel de Vera Moncada
Jill Sobule and Four Other Torture Devices by Ella Pye
Gaydar by Jesse Bernstein
The Short Version by Grover Wehman
All You Need Is Love by Stefanie Davis
That Night by Matthew Mayo
Continuation of the Life by Tyrell Pough
Three Sunsets by Robert Brittain
Notes to the Reader
I have a confession to make.
As much as I hate to admit it, and as weird as it sounds for me to introduce these pieces by acknowledging I made a mistake while first reading them, it's true—and in a collection such as this, in which truth and honesty are being celebrated as each of these young writers reveals to us, bravely but sometimes painfully, their individual takes on the world we're all living in, it seems important to write this so that you may be less likely to make the same mistake as me.
It may be obvious to you that the queer experience has changed severely over the past decade. It may also be obvious that things are still changing, I would like to think for the better. But as obvious as this is, I'm still surprised when I talk to older friends about their experiences in high school and college, especially when, while sharing coming-out stories, I'm told that someone didn't even know they were gay until they were much older.
Having realized relatively young that I was queer, and having come out to a few friends shortly after, the idea of going through adolescence and partway through adulthood before figuring oneself out seems foreign to me, almost impossible, though I know it isn't.
I had heard of people being gay and not wanting anyone else to know. Even if from the moment I knew at least a few other people did, too, I can relate to those who kept it hidden. But keeping sexuality hidden isn't as easy as it once was. We live in a society that labels people, for better or for worse. Long before I started being attracted to guys, I was aware of the fact that other men were. I've come to understand that a big part of my being comfortable with my sexuality so early on was due to my having understood this to be a possibility. I was forced to defend my sexuality long before I had a firm grasp of what any of it meant. I had no clue if I was gay or not, but after spending years having to think about it and having to explain myself when, at sixteen, I started being attracted to men, I knew immediately.
This isn't to say that I expect it is the same with everyone else. All of my friends seem to have different sets of experiences. Some knew younger than I did and waited to tell; others still aren't sure or don't think it's as important as everyone seems to think. But one thing that most people have in common is an ability to say, even if only to themselves, where in the spectrum they fall at any particular moment.
Which is why, when I made a friend recently who wasn't willing to state his sexuality, it made me uneasy. Even if people don't think sexuality is important, they usually still told me where they stood, individually. Even if people preached that labeling another is wrong, they were usually willing to label themselves. I hadn't realized how much I relied on knowing how people categorize themselves as a way of better understanding them.
When after a year of coffee talks and lunches, poem critiques and class gossip, my friend finally talked about, for lack of a better term, his sex life, I found myself instantly more comfortable with him. This really made me think about the sexual politics I preach. How can I agree that labeling people is destructive, that sexuality is fluid and doesn't fit into neat categories, and still expect people to label themselves in order for me to be comfortable? How can I stand behind queer theorists who advocate acceptance and rail against the concept of “normality” and still expect this friend of mine to out himself in order for me to feel close to him? And, most of all, how can I be compiling an anthology of voices and in fact giving voice to the various queer people of my generation if I'm not able to practice the acceptance I preach?
Which brings me to my confession. Only after my realization did I further realize the mistake I had made reading the hundreds of pieces that were sent in for consideration: I didn't only have this expectation of my friend, it turns out; I had the same expectation for each of our writers.
Because the selection process was anonymous and I didn't know the name, age, or gender of each speaker as I was reading his or her work, I found myself reading initially to figure out what category of “queer” the entrant was. Is this one a guy or a girl, an F2M or an M2F? Is she gay, bi, curious? Is he still questioning or is he certain? And only after I found that information out could I enjoy the important part of each piece, which was never the revealed sexuality but the revelation of what sexuality means.
I invite you to read on, with all of this in mind. What you'll find is a sampling of voices not unlike your own, voices tense with longing but rich with experience. They each have their own individual truths to tell, though rarely are they looking to confess. So be patient and accepting, and they will tell you in their own time what they've seen or felt to be real.
But keep my mistake in mind. In the end, I don't think I would have chosen the pieces differently, so perhaps my apology is unnecessary. Still, it isn't enough to say that society labels people or that expecting labels from one another isn't productive. Society, after all, is made up of each of us. The theory I had preached turned out only to be theory, meaning that unless we make our ideals a reality, they're only words on paper.
—Billy Merrell, October 2005
This book would have been very different if it had been compiled fifteen years ago, when I was in high school. It would have been different ten years ago, or even five years ago. I have faith that in five years, times will have changed enough to alter our snapshot here. And in ten years. And in fifteen years. This is a remarkable time to be young and queer in America. There is progress, and there is backlash. There is love, and there is hate. There is hope, and there is despair. Things are changing fast, and they're not changing fast enough. We know who we are, our friends know who we are, our families (for the most
part) know who we are, and we are all able to look our identities in the eye. It's the rest of the culture, the rest of society, that hasn't quite gotten it yet. We still don't have equal rights. We still can't walk most streets holding hands without that fear creeping in. We are still seen by our protestors more for what we are rather than who we are. But a change is going to come. Maybe in five years. Maybe in ten. Maybe longer. Maybe sooner.
One way to effect change is to share truths. To tell our stories. To make our hearts and minds heard.
This anthology started in many places at once. It started in the lives of the writers contained within its pages. It started because Billy Merrell and I wanted more LGBTQ voices than just our own and those of our author friends to be a part of teen literature. It started because our editor, Nancy Hinkel, heard a LGBTQ teen panel moderated by Robert Lipsyte and wondered why there hadn't been a major-publisher anthology of young queer voices.
Billy and I set up a Web site—www.queerthology.com—to accept submissions. All the writers had to be under twenty-three, and all the writing had to be nonfiction. (Some of the names within the stories have been changed to protect the identities of the people being written about, but all of the stories are true and all of the writers' names are real.) We spread the word through our author friends, our own Web sites, and good old-fashioned word of mouth. Then we had the good fortune of partnering with GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), the leading national education organization focused on ensuring safe schools for all students. Proceeds from the sale of this book will go to GLSEN to support what they do.
Of course, there is no way for a single anthology to encompass the fullest spectrum of today's young LGBTQ experience—to do that, we'd have to have essays from every single LGBTQ individual, since every story has its own unique place on the spectrum. We've aimed to present as wide a range as possible within the confines of the book's length; some parts of the spectrum are better represented than others, and there are still voices to be heard from. We view this as a start, not an end.
There are a number of people we have to thank—many of whom we don't know yet. Thank you to all of the contributors. Thank you to everyone who submitted their stories. Thank you to everyone—authors, teachers, friends, librarians, editors—who spread the word. Thank you to everyone at Knopf, especially Nancy (for her amazing dedication), Allison Wortche (for her incredible support), and Melissa Nelson (for her fantastic design). Thank you to everyone at GLSEN and all the other organizations that have supported this project, its contributors, and LGBTQ youth. Happily, there are more of them than we could possibly list. Thank you to all of the students, LGBTQ and straight, who are allying for equal rights. Billy and I have been lucky to visit towns and cities where communities are coming together to make a safe, tolerant, encouraging space for all people. We hope, in its own small way, this book helps.
One of my favorite e-mails ever came from a seventy-year-old who, looking at LGBTQ youth now, said, “Things sure have changed since I was a teenager in the 1940s.” Well, I'm happy I can say, “Things sure have changed since I was a teenager in the late 1980s and early 1990s.” May they continue to change. For the better of us all.
—David Levithan, October 2005
For more, check out www.queerthology.com
O.K.
by Courtney Gillette
My first kiss was a girl.
It was almost like a pity kiss, a kiss to get me through that rite of passage, the way I wanted it. Rose was the only person who knew I liked girls, she was the only one I trusted enough to tell. We went to junior high together in a small town in Pennsylvania. She had frizzy hair and a mother who took Prozac and yelled a lot. Rose lived on this surreal plane of reality, allowing the world to be as dramatic as it was at the age of fifteen, and I loved her for that.
We were in color guard together. While marching band appeared to be lowest rung on the ladder of popularity, color guard managed to go even below that, to a subterranean territory of uncoolness. I don't really remember what we were doing there. I had played the trumpet but was always last chair, so when they told me I had to join marching band, that I had to go out in those stupid costumes under those bright football-game lights, I opted for color guard instead. As if wearing costumes of yellow spandex and glitter while tossing six-foot metal poles with red flags was a better option. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Rose and I were ugly, misfits. Most of the girls in color guard were social outcasts: frumpy girls too fat or too awkward for cheerleading. They became flag twirlers, “chicks with sticks.” I remember how much the bus would stink with our sweat and girl smells, the odor of panty hose and too much eye shadow, coming home from cavalcades in the fall. The seats were made of a sticky material, and Rose and I would be squished in the small space, sitting beside each other. We would each have a headphone from my Walkman on, listening to Björk and trying to drown out the chatter of thirty girls talking about the new cute boy in the trombone section. The other girls knew we were weird and kind of left it at that. They didn't like me because I refused to wear makeup. The captain of the squad, a short, fat girl with greasy brown hair, would yell at me as she wielded red Maybelline lipstick. “It's part of the costume,” she'd hiss. “You have to wear it.” I finally conceded and let them smear the cheap colors on my face, only to get back at them the next week when I came to practice with my hair dyed blue with Manic Panic. It was the week before championships, and our coach cried when she saw me. “What are we going to do?” she sobbed, pointing at me like I had lost an appendage, as if I was completely incapable of spinning a flag now that my hair was blue. We borrowed a scratchy brown wig from the theater department and I had to be very careful not to turn my head too fast, lest the synthetic locks go flying off my head and land on the fifty-yard line as I marched past, performing a flag routine to some Gershwin song. Rose and I came to enjoy being the social outcasts of color guard. It was an extra badge of strangeness for us.
Besides, Rose and I were deep, much deeper than those other girls who read YM and wore sweaters from the Gap. Rose and I were into poetry, we would read e. e. cummings to each other over the phone, part of long marathon conversations about the meaning of life. We were fifteen, we were invincible, we were enlightened. I would get off the yellow school bus and run home, dropping my schoolbag and picking up the phone as soon as I came in. I would always lie on the gray carpet in the family room as we talked for hours. My brother would play Nintendo and sometimes scowl at the weird things I said about true love and art and suffering. Rose had spent a few months in a mental hospital when she was younger, so she was my idol as far as real-life drama went. She never really told me why, kept the story mysterious, only saying that one day in the car with her mother she said something about death that caused her mother to drive her straight to the psychiatric ward of the local state hospital. I was fascinated. Rose was my Sylvia Plath, my muse and my heroine. As we trundled through the muddy waters of adolescence, I could tell Rose anything I felt, and she would agree, validating my virgin emotions. It was in all this intensity that I fell in love with her.
Rose had a boyfriend. He was kind of pudgy and had a really annoying laugh. They would hold hands as we walked around the mall, drinking milk shakes from the Dairy Queen. I didn't like it when they held hands. Her boyfriend couldn't understand how deep Rose and I were. I humored him because Rose did.
“Do you love him?” I would ask on the phone, watching the blocks of sunlight that came in through the window make patterns on the carpet. Rose would sigh dramatically.
“Yes, but I don't think he knows. I don't think he understands love like I do.”
I nodded emphatically. I understood love. Rose and I had charted the entire emotion out in terms of desire, affection, and completion. Solitude was to be savored, but being in love was a privilege.
It was this concept of affection that stalled our philosophies on love and intimacy, because I hadn't been kissed before. Once a boy
at the roller rink in the seventh grade tried to kiss me, but I turned my face away and mumbled something about having a cold. There was something about boys I just didn't want. I would act like I wanted them, imagine that somewhere in the world there was a sensitive boy with long hair who played guitar and read books on feminism, and he would be my boyfriend. Then I would kiss boys. But at a high school where the homecoming football games were so big the whole town shut down for the occasion, I wasn't holding my breath on finding a sensitive, artistic boyfriend anytime soon.
In the ninth grade Rose's boyfriend went away to Bible camp for the summer and came back deciding Rose was just too weird. He thought he should be spending his adolescence having romances with good Christian girls, not with a girl who was obsessed with death and the color black. I was secretly relieved that he was gone. Now maybe I could hold hands with Rose at the mall. If we both knew so much about love, couldn't we be in love? I pondered it for weeks, listening to Tori Amos, lying in bed and staring at the trees outside, desperate for an answer. I finally asked Rose one day, during our afternoon phone conversation. “I have a question,” I posed formally, my body sweating with anticipation.
“Okay,” Rose said. I could hear her breathing softly, probably lying on her bed, in the room with the lavender curtains her mother had decorated the whole house with.
I thought I was going to puke with the anxiety of what I was about to say. I took a deep breath and said very slowly, “If I kissed you, would you kiss me back?”
Rose didn't say anything. I wanted to crawl under the gray carpet and die. I heard her clear her throat and then say, carefully, “Yes. But not with that tongue thing. I never liked that.”
I don't remember what we said after that.
That weekend Rose came over to spend the night. We did what we did every time we had a sleepover—we looked up lyrics to Björk songs on the Internet, we read comic books, we watched Saturday Night Live and ate ice cream sundaes. Turning off the TV, we went upstairs to my room to hang out. Rose had bought new incense at the mall, so we burned it by the window and lit a bunch of candles, too, sitting on the bed with the lights turned out. My room was a circus of Sailor Moon posters, dried flowers, and books spilling off the shelves, piles of paperbacks and journals in stacks on the floor. She sat across from me, looking at me with a sly grin. “I dare you,” she said.