Growing Up Gay: The Sorrows and Joys of Gay and Lesbian Adolescence. - book reviews

Progressive, The, Jan, 1998 by Anne-Marie Cusac

So thank goodness for Growing Up Gay: The Sorrows and Joys of Gay and Lesbian Adolescence, by Rita Reed (W.W. Norton). It tells the stories of two gay youth in their own words, and with seven years of pictures. As the owner of our local feminist bookstore put it when she recommended the book, "These are photographs you don't see." And these are words that many of us don't hear. Rita Reed spent hundreds of hours with her subjects, photographing them at school, at home with their parents and in their first apartments, with their girlfriends and boyfriends. Reed serves primarily as a conduit for two lives and two stories. She stays out of the way.

We meet Amy Grahn at age fifteen when she is just starting to grapple with her sexuality: "I was different from what they think is normal. I mean, look at me, it's quite evident that I'm not the picture-perfect woman from Minnetonka. . . . You know, have your makeup on and big hair. It's so unnatural. . . . That's the way society makes women feel. It's all just a big game."

Amy drops out of high school and moves to Minneapolis, where she falls in love for the first time: "One weekend when she came to see me that summer, we made love and I cried. It was the first time that ever happened. It was an incredible feeling. I didn't know what to do with it. It was kind of overwhelming, but it was wonderful."

Jamie Nabozny, Reed's other subject, recognized his gay identity at an early age. "When I was seven, my uncle brought his partner home for Thanksgiving. The family talked about them behind their backs . . . about how they lived together, were kind of married, and that they were homosexuals. I was in the other room, but I could hear what they were saying, and it made a lot of sense to me. I kind of figured that I was that."

After enduring years of hostility from classmates, Jamie began to stand up for himself at high school and formed a gay and lesbian youth group. "I may have been the only member, but it was there in my town of 9,000 people," he writes.

But Jamie remained a target. The jeering escalated. One morning, before school started, a group of boys surrounded Jamie. One kicked him repeatedly in the stomach while the others watched and laughed. He was so badly hurt he needed abdominal surgery. "Going to school was the hugest effort--just to get there and survive the day," he writes. In 1996, a federal court held the Ashland, Wisconsin, school district--and two school principals and one assistant principal--liable for not preventing students from physically abusing Jamie.

I hope young people will have easy access to Growing Up Cay. It could make life better for many, many teens.