“It’s Going to Be Okay”

Acknowledging that the youth of Spectrum tend to disclose their sexual and gender identities to parents at a relatively young age, this chapter explores the role of family in the formation of these youths’ sexualities and genders. It was often the case with Spectrum youth that, rather than rejection, they encountered loving support about their sexuality from their parents. The youth of Spectrum are of a generation of kids who are the first to grow up in a society in which same-sex couples and genderqueer parents rearing children have become significantly socially acceptable. The chapter argues that young people are sharing their queer sexual and gender identities with their parents at a younger age because of gender non-conformity that leads parents to make assumptions about their child’s sexuality because they are more frequently exposed to LGBTQ family members and loved ones and because these particular parents do not conform to the white, middle-class, heteropatriarchal regime of the Standard North American Family. Queer family formation has broad implications not just for same-sex couples but for the way U.S. society understands and recognizes family in general.

“That Makes Me Gay”

This chapter shows how some young people become sexual by highlighting how gender non-conforming behavior and characteristics are used to explain how people know that they are gay. Heteronormativity acts as a straightening device, meaning that it’s not enough to be heterosexually oriented; one must also be appropriately masculine or feminine to be straight. Further, heteronormativity is so entrenched in society that young people may interpret their violations of heterosexual scripts as necessary evidence that they are not straight. Beyond genderqueerness and homoerotic desires—consistent with a queer of color analysis—Spectrum youth have formed their queer identities based on their experiences with class, race, ability, nationality, and more, exposing the ways that heteronormative culture is not just straight but white and middle class. Therefore, finding a place like Spectrum, which serves as a release valve from the pressures of heteronormativity, is often the first time these young people start to have a sense of belonging in society. Spectrum then is a place of socialization where young people experiencing a queer subjectivity learn the language and the culture of queer.

“Let’s Be Trans”

This chapter examines how the youth of Spectrum are forming gender identities in the context of transgender phenomena, a paradigm shift in the way gender is represented, understood, and explained. As a space where genderqueerness is accepted and embraced, Spectrum is a kind of queer utopia. At Spectrum young people are allowed to feel ambivalence about their gender and can play with pronouns, gender expression, and identity. For those queer young people whose gender expression and identity is ambiguous, meaning that what they look like challenges mainstream society’s notions of what a boy or a girl is, Spectrum may be the first place they feel the liberation of not having to be one or the other. Spectrum youth are learning to complicate gender, be aware of the role gender attribution plays in our interactions with each other, and forge resistance to the entrenched gender binary.

Conclusion

The book concludes with a discussion of the importance of broad-based coalitional organizing that moves beyond over-simplified identity politics. As society evolves away from binary understandings of sexuality and gender, identities that essentialize those binaries will become less and less useful. Further, by acknowledging that as LGBTQ becomes more normal the boundaries between normal and queer get redrawn, adults who are concerned about the well-being of young people would be wise to pay close attention to how bodies are queered beyond simply sexuality and gender. The conclusion points to the Black Lives Matter and transgender movements as examples of twenty-first-century social justice movements that are responding to the ways the identity-based movements of the late twentieth century often failed to protect their most marginalized members.

“Google Knows Everything”

This chapter shows how important alternative media is to the formation of queer cultural scenarios that speak to the sexual subjectivities of the youth of Spectrum. While acknowledging that there are now far more representations of queerness in mainstream media, I challenge the assumption that mainstream media has handily embraced homoeroticism and genderqueerness. The chapter shows how queer media, like erotic fan fiction and anime, have an established history of providing alternatives to the heteronormative mainstream, alternatives that, thanks to the internet, are more and more accessible to young people of all walks of life. In this way, queer media that resists heteronormativity has the power to influence the sexual subjectivity and gender identity formation of young people. Therefore it’s not that mainstream media are becoming less homophobic and shifting cultural norms in the United States but, rather, that young people have access to so much more media outside the mainstream—including self-produced media like fan fiction—which then influences their understanding of themselves and the world they live in.

Welcome to Spectrum

This chapter places Spectrum into geographical, social, and political context for the reader. It explains where Spectrum is located, what it looks and feels like, its role in relationship to contemporary LGBTQ youth centers and gay-straight alliances, and describe the differences in the U.S. political climate in which the research was conducted compared to when the book started the publication process. LGBTQ youth activism and spaces are relatively new phenomena that are influencing how young people across the sexual and gender spectrum understand themselves in society. This chapter challenges some of society’s assumptions about risk and resilience among LGBTQ youth and helps the reader to better understand Spectrum as a living, breathing, evolving space. It ends with a discussion of the post-2016 presidential election political climate for LGBTQ issues.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to Spectrum—the LGBTQ youth drop-in center that is the focus of this ethnography. Using Sara Ahmed’s concept of queer orientation it argues that this is not a universal story about LGBTQ youth but, rather, one about queer youth specifically. The term “queer” is used both to describe a way of being in the world that opposes normal, as well as to describe sexual conduct and behavior. It argues that the dominant discourse about LGBTQ youth as either at risk or resilient results in an incomplete understanding of what it means to be young and queer. The chapter includes a discussion of the challenges of doing sexualities research with youth and explains the theoretical significance of the sociology of sexualities and queer theory to the analysis. The introduction also addresses the methodological approach used to conduct the research, researcher reflexivity, and specific details about the use of language.