"To Middle America, gay teens
are arrogant aliens from another culture, at the margins of society with
multiple body piercings, purple hair, and pointedly non-Abercrombie and Fitch
clothing; to gay adults, they are supposed to be the next generation of
political activists who will fight for gay rights and against heterosexism,
racism, sexism, and classism." (p. 219)

In his latest book Ritch Savin-Williams explores
what it is like to be a "gay" adolescent today.  As the quote above suggests, it is not much
like what either straight or gay adults fear or hope it is; as the quotation
mark around "gay" in the preceding sentence suggests, it is not much like
what any of us thought it was.

Savin-Williams’ background as a
developmental psychologist informs his approach to this work, which includes
(allow me to speak as a developmental psych person myself) as lucid and
thoughtful a treatise on many developmental issues as you are likely to
find.  Take, for example, the seemingly
simple prospect of estimating the number of adolescents who are gay.  The traditional approach of asking someone
how he or she identifies (e.g., check one of the following boxes:  heterosexual; gay/lesbian; bisexual; don’t
know) is, by any reasonable account, inadequate, in particular for
adolescents.  Not only will adolescents
often not tell the truth, they may not know the truth, and their definition may
be different than the researchers. 
Would an adolescent who has fantasies about same-sex people but has
never acted on them check the gay/lesbian box? 
What box might an adolescent who has had sexual experiences with both
genders but romantic relationships with only one check?  Savin-Williams explores the domains of
sexual orientation, sexual behavior, and sexual identity as overlapping but not
identical components of sexuality, and concludes that "estimating the
number of gay adolescents depends on what counts as gay." (p. 39)  He also discusses the inherent difficulties
and limitations in operationally defining homosexuality in adolescence.

He goes on with a brief review of
the invention of the gay adolescent, a phenomenon first recognized in the
literature in the 1970’s.  The early studies
described a grim population:  troubled,
if not destitute and suicidal young men (the adolescent lesbian had yet to be
discovered) who were at high risk for physical and psychological problems.  Researchers at the time did not make much of
the fact that subjects in these studies had been recruited from mental health
facilities and were quite likely to be runaways, delinquents, or
prostitutes.  The focus on the
psychological fragility of gay adolescents continued into the 1980’s and
1990’s, as did the reliance on mental health facilities for subject
recruitment, but change was coming. 
Some researchers began expanding their subject pool by, for example,
administering surveys to school-based populations.  Others began interviewing adult gays on their adolescent
experiences.  Lesbians were officially
discovered around this time, though they still did not receive as much
attention as male homosexuals.  (The
only area in which lesbians receive more attention than gay men is in research
on gay parents, which is overwhelmingly more likely to mean lesbian mothers
than gay fathers). There was even a glimmer of a paradigm shift:  perhaps young people with same-sex
attractions might not all be screwed up and miserable. Perhaps, some of them
might even be healthy (Savin-Williams downplays his role in ushering in that
position).  Currently, researchers tend
to focus on resilience, or gay adolescents’ reserves of strength, fortitude,
and self-confidence that enable so many of them to emerge from adolescence in a
homophobic culture relatively unscathed. 

Savin-Williams also spends a good deal of time
discussing evidence for various theories of the development of
homosexuality.  In general, support for
the notion that sex atypicality in childhood (tomboyishness in girls and
effeminate behavior in boys) is a precursor to adult homosexuality is fairly
weak.  Childhood feelings of being
different from other children are similarly poor predictors of future sexual
status.  Even the presence of childhood
same-sex attraction is not as reliable an indicator of adult same-sex
attraction as we might think.  While
some gay individuals report a history of some or all of these characteristics,
so do many heterosexuals.  With more
cultural openness and acceptance of non-heterosexual identities, the picture is
only likely to grow murkier.

Certainly, adolescents today are
growing up in a different world from the one we middle-aged gay and lesbian
folks knew.  Mainstream movies and
television shows routinely have gay characters; thousands of high schools have
Gay-Straight Alliances, whose aim is to provide a safe space for gay,
gay-friendly, and questioning students; gay proms, or gay students openly
attending proms with their same-sex dates, are not uncommon; and gay marriage,
while not uncontroversial, is a reality in some areas of the country.  Many of the young people Savin-Williams
quotes espouse a "post-gay" philosophy, maintaining that their
sexuality is only one component, not the primary component, of their
identity.  They view activism as an
anachronism, something that may have been necessary in the deep dark past (say,
ten or twenty years ago) but no longer. 
They are more likely to define themselves by their professional goals,
personality traits, or political viewpoints than they are by their sexual
identities.  While some of us may have
an initial knee-jerk, middle-aged response to such seeming obliviousness, upon
further thought I believe that this is as it should be.  Viewing gay people as ordinary people rather
than as a category so unique as to warrant its own niche in the psychological
universe may be the wave of the future. In the future, Savin-Williams suggests,
research may well focus on how utterly ordinary the lives of gay adolescents
are.

In the meantime, this book contributes
immensely to our understanding of the next wave of gay youth.  It is a valuable resource for anyone who
cares about or works with adolescents, or has any interest in looking at a
snapshot of a generation coming of age in these most remarkable times.

©
2005 Elizabeth O’Connor

Elizabeth O’Connor, Ph.D. is
co-author with Suzanne Johnson of For Lesbian Parents (Guilford, 2001)
and The Gay Baby Boom: The Psychology of Gay Parenthood (NYU Press,
2002).

Categories: Sexuality, ChildhoodDisorders