Integrating selections by gay and lesbian teenagers with older writers' reflections on growing up lesbian or gay, this anthology features works by James Baldwin and Quentin Crisp.

This groundbreaking new book weaves personal portraits of lesbian and gay Southerners with interdisciplinary commentary about the impact of culture, race, and gender on the development of sexual identity. Growing Up Gay in the South is an important book that focuses on the distinct features of Southern life. It will enrich your understanding of the unique pressures faced by gay men and lesbians in this region--the pervasiveness of fundamental religious beliefs; the acceptance of racial, gender, and class community boundaries; the importance of family name and family honor; the unbending view of appropriate childhood behaviors; and the intensity of adolescent culture. You will learn what it is like to grow up gay in the South as these Southern lesbians and gay men candidly share their attitudes and feelings about themselves, their families, their schooling, and their search for a sexual identity. These insightful biographies illustrate the diversity of persons who identify themselves as gay or lesbian and depict the range of prejudice and problems they have encountered as sexual rebels. Not just a simple compilation of “coming out” stories, this landmark volume is a human testament to the process of social questioning in the search for psychological wholeness, examining the personal and social significance of acquiring a lesbian or gay identity within the Southern culture. Growing Up Gay in the South combines intriguing personal biographies with the extensive use of scholarship from lesbian and gay studies, Southern history and literature, and educational thought and practice. These features, together with an extensive bibliography and appendices of data, make this essential reading for educators and other professionals working with gay and lesbian youth.

Recounts the author's experiences of growing up gay during the 1950s and his involvement in the early gay rights movement

Sure to become a modern LGBTQ+ pride classic, this “amazing” celebration of the pains and joys of growing up gay features personal stories from around the world (The Huffington Post) Based on the hugely popular blog of the same name, Born This Way shares 100 different memories of growing up LGBTQ+. Childhood photographs are accompanied by sweet, funny—and at times, heartbreaking—personal stories. Collected from around the world and dating from the 1940s to today, these memories speak to the hardships of an unaccepting world and the triumph of pride, self-love, and self-acceptance. This intimate little book is a wonderful gift for all members of the LGBTQ+ community as well as their friends and families. Like Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, Born This Way gives young people everywhere the courage to say, “Yes, I’m gay. And I was born this way. I’ve known it since I was very young, and this is my story.”

Through photographs and their own words, a young man and a young woman relate their experiences growing up homosexual in America's heartland. Intimate, moving, and generous, this collection of photographs from MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE photographer Rita Reed establishes a level of understanding difficult to achieve with words alone. 60 photos.

Integrating selections by gay and lesbian teenagers with older writers' reflections on growing up lesbian or gay, this anthology features works by James Baldwin, Rita Mae Brown, Quentin Crisp, Audre Lorde, Martina Navratilova, and David Leavitt

Danny, Growing Up Gay & Creative is a collection of fifty full-color drawings based on my memories of growing up "different". All along the way of development, I was told I was doing it wrong. Like all gay or creative kids, I knew I was different from the others and they knew it too. I wanted to create this book to help illustrate those moments, but also to help the reader remember their own stories. I wasn't the only little boy who put on something fun and tried to entertain their parent's guests, I'm sure of it. If you grew up with a different point of view, this book is for you. Flip the pages and watch Danny grow from birth to eighteen in fifty drawings. Each page a step in personal discovery. When I grew up there was no help for me. There was no one telling me that I was fine just as I am. I needed to make sure that the adult me sent out the word that you are not only fine but beautiful. Be you. It's your life and the people who love you deserve to know you not the person you play. If you have someone in your life who doesn't fit the mold, I hope this book helps you to see it's OK to be different. Enjoy Danny's growing up. I did! --Dan Crowley, Author & ArtistPraise for Danny, Growing Up Gay & Creative "Danny, Growing Up Gay & Creative, shows us what it means to grow up heart-open and human. But few saw us that way when we were kids. So Danny, with his winsome humor-filled drawings, reminds us of those wonder years, as we struggled to find our place under the rainbow. I feel like I am coming home again, but this time, in a happy and healed way. Bravo, Danny! Shine on!! --Christopher Radko, award-winning designer "Dan Crowley explores with humor and empathy all the various childhood pitfalls in growing up gay in a less than fabulous world. Many were right out of my childhood, such as spotting a doll you always wanted in the bedroom of a friend's sister. So much of it hit home." --Mel Odom, Artist "Dan Crowley's book, Danny, Growing Up Gay & Creative is a wonderful thing. It speaks to children who may need to know they're not different and that their lives are not a mistake. Youngsters who are curious about their own sexuality before even knowing what that word means. And it speaks in a way their straight parents may be unable to because they don't have the words nor the experiences. It does so in a sweet, gentle, and funny way. And adults will learn, too; about same-sex relationships from a "knowing" point of view. This book is a gift in every sense of the word." --Steve Kmetko, award-winning journalist "Dan Crowley has a natural gift for homily, for taking lived experience and expressing stories of love and gratitude, inspiration and grace. He also has a silly, sweet (and slightly wicked) sense of humor. Danny, Growing Up Gay & Creative combines personal and universal stories about growing up gay -- the good, the bad, and the embarrassing -- and reminds us it's all worth it, if only we will persevere." --Tom Bachtel, Illustrator, and Caricaturist, Longtime Illustrator fo the New Yorker's Talk of the Town

LGBTQ kids reveal what it’s like to be young and queer today Growing Up Queer explores the changing ways that young people are now becoming LGBT-identified in the US. Through interviews and three years of ethnographic research at an LGBTQ youth drop-in center, Mary Robertson focuses on the voices and stories of youths themselves in order to show how young people understand their sexual and gender identities, their interest in queer media, and the role that family plays in their lives. The young people who participated in this research are among the first generation to embrace queer identities as children and adolescents. This groundbreaking and timely consideration of queer identity demonstrates how sexual and gender identities are formed through complicated, ambivalent processes as opposed to being natural characteristics that one is born with. In addition to showing how youth understand their identities, Growing Up Queer describes how young people navigate queerness within a culture where being gay is the “new normal.” Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation, Robertson argues that being queer is not just about one’s sexual and/or gender identity, but is understood through intersecting identities including race, class, ability, and more. By showing how society accepts some kinds of LGBTQ-identified people while rejecting others, Growing Up Queer provides evidence of queerness as a site of social inequality. The book moves beyond an oversimplified examination of teenage sexuality and shows, through the voices of young people themselves, the exciting yet complicated terrain of queer adolescence.

More than an anthology of coming out stories, From Boys to Men is a stunning collection of essays about what it is like to be gay and young, to be different and be aware of that difference from the earliest of ages. In these memoirs, coming out is less important than coming of age and coming to the realization that young gay people experience the world in ways quite unlike straight boys. Whether it is a fascination with soap opera, an intense sensitivity to their own difference, or an obsession with a certain part of the male anatomy, gay kids — or kids who would eventually identify as gay — have an indefinable but unmistakable gay sensibility. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it is harrowing, and often it is deeply moving. Essays by lauded young writers like Alex Chee (Edinburgh), Aaron Hamburger (Faith for Beginners), Karl Soehnlein (The World of Normal Boys), Trebor Healy (Through It Came Bright Colors), Tom Dolby (The Trouble Boy), David Bahr, and Austin Bunn, are collected along with those by brilliant, newcomers such as Michael McAllister, Jason Tougaw, Viet Dinh, and the wildly popular blogger, Joe.My.God.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER (The Globe and Mail) A moving memoir about growing up with a gay father in the 1980s, and a tribute to the power of truth, humour, acceptance and familial love. A true "It GOT Better" story. Alison Wearing led a largely carefree childhood until she learned, at the age of 12, that her family was a little more complex than she had realized. Sure her father had always been unusual compared to the other dads in the neighbourhood: he loved to bake croissants, wear silk pyjamas around the house, and skip down the street singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. But when he came out of the closet in the 1970s, when homosexuality was still a cardinal taboo, it was a shock to everyone in the quiet community of Peterborough, Ontario—especially to his wife and three children. Alison’s father was a professor of political science and amateur choral conductor, her mother was an accomplished pianist and marathon runner, and together they had fed the family a steady diet of arts, adventures, mishaps, normal frustrations and inexhaustible laughter. Yet despite these agreeable circumstances, Joe’s internal life was haunted by conflicting desires. As he began to explore and understand the truth about himself, he became determined to find a way to live both as a gay man and also a devoted father, something almost unheard of at the time. Through extraordinary excerpts from his own letters and journals from the years of his coming out, we read of Joe’s private struggle to make sense and beauty of his life, to take inspiration from an evolving society and become part of the vanguard of the gay revolution in Canada. Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is also the story of “coming out” as the daughter of a gay father. Already wrestling with an adolescent’s search for identity when her father came out of the closet, Alison promptly “went in,” concealing his sexual orientation from her friends and spinning extravagant stories about all of the “great straight things” they did together. Over time, Alison came to see that life with her father was surprisingly interesting and entertaining, even oddly inspiring, and in fact, there was nothing to hide. Balancing intimacy, history and downright hilarity, Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter is a captivating tale of family life: deliciously imperfect, riotously challenging, and full of life’s great lessons in love. Alison brings her story to life with a skillfully light touch in this warm, heartfelt and revelatory memoir.