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Afterword I finally see how our lives align at the core, if not in the sorry details. I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a gay brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the coffin world of the closet. Yes yes yes, goes a voice in my head, it was just like that for me. When we laugh together then and dance in the giddy circle of freedom, we are children for real at last, because we have finally grown up. —Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story M ore than two decades separate my experiences in adolescence and young adulthood from those of the research participants profiled in this book. It would therefore be easy and convenient for me simply to assume the role of “objective” researcher on the issues affecting LGBTQ youth and view the findings from a purely empirical perspective. I might reasonably justify this stance on the grounds that these young people have grown up in a very different society than the one in which I began my coming-out process at the relatively late age of twenty-one. Certainly, schools, communities, and families are far different now than they were during the 1980s. Temporal differences aside, however, there are ways in which I believe my experiences and those of the research participants “align at the core,” if not in the details of time, place, and circumstance, then certainly in their essence. Most adults who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer have our own trauma stories to tell about homophobic or transphobic bullying and the silencing and self-doubt that were associated with it when we were growing up. Paul Monette’s depiction of a “narrow escape from the coffin world of the closet” rings true as I look back at my own journey of resilience, just as I suspect it might for many LGBTQ adult readers. As I listened to the stories of relentless school-based harassment related by participants such as David, Lindsey, and Jason, I felt fortunate that my own experiences at school were never such that they drew me to a suicidal turning point like those in Afterword 171 these young people’s accounts. In my case, the harassment generally took the form of one or two assailants at each level of my schooling (the names and faces would change every few years, but they were always boys) who subjected me to daily verbal taunts. These were often spoken in hushed tones, so as not to draw the attention of teachers, as the harassers used epithets such as “faggot,” “queer,” and “femme” just loudly enough to humiliate me in front of the very peers whose acceptance I sought. This pattern continued even as late as college, when a young man in the dormitory in which I worked as a hall monitor assailed me verbally—again, in pointed but whispered tones to avoid others’ attention—whenever he entered the building. Like Kate, David, Kim, and many of the other participants in this research , I rarely felt safe telling any adults at school what was happening— and I never felt safe sharing it with my family. In addition to what Travis aptly terms unwritten “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies both at home and at school, the shame of being marked as gay (which was certainly not how I wished to be identified at the time) kept me silent. I also believed, as many of the participants here did, that if I told teachers, school administrators, or my family about the harassment I was experiencing, they would take little or no action and would find me at least partly responsible for what was happening. Hearing Kim’s story about the damaging effects of homophobic language used by teachers, which seems to have played a significant role in her decision to drop out of school, brought me back to experiences with adults whose responses to the fact that I was “different” ranged from sincere acceptance to quiet disdain to, in a few instances, open hostility. Kim’s account particularly reminded me of an incident during my last year of elementary school involving “Field Day,” an Olympics-like event in which all fifth-grade classes competed to determine which would be named best in the school. I’d hoped to use Field Day as an opportunity to be a hero for my class and to show those who had made fun of me for being a “femme...

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