Gay Teens Research Articles

Gay as cute: Unpacking cuteness in contemporary gay teen drama series

Gay as cute: Unpacking cuteness in contemporary gay teen drama series

“Will there always be this dark side?” Gay teenage boys’ sexual experiences with adult men

BackgroundSexual assault in the LGBTQ+ community has received only limited scholarly attention. Gay and bisexual adolescent boys are especially vulnerable, partly due to their engagement in relationships or sexual encounters with older men. ObjectiveThe study explored the experiences and meaning assigned by Israeli gay adolescent boys to their sexual or romantic experiences with older men, in retrospect. Participants and SettingParticipants self-identified as gay and during their adolescence were involved in sexual encounters or romantic relationships with men at least five years older than them. MethodsEmploying a qualitative-phenomenological approach, 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted. Interviews were fully transcribed and analyzed according to the interpretative phenomenological framework. ResultsThe analysis yielded four themes: (1) dimensions of closet and risk; (2) mentoring versus exploitation; (3) dimensions of self-agency; and (4) the effects of the sexual experiences on the subsequent lives of the participants. These themes reflect complex experiences of the participants that varied between “dark” experiences to more “lightful” ones, with many different “shades” in between. ConclusionsOur analysis portrays the complexity and ambivalence inherent in the experiences of gay adolescent boys in their sexual experiences with older men. We propose that these experiences be viewed on a spectrum with different variations, thereby contributing to the body of knowledge on the subject, which has tended to depict these experiences in a dichotomous manner as either positive or negative. The findings also shed light on several possible aspects enabling age-discrepant relationships, such as being in the closet and a need for gay men role models.

Confession, Coming Out, and Postfeminism: Gendered Representations in Love, Simon and Alex Strangelove

ABSTRACT I argue that the gay teenage coming-of-age films Love, Simon and Alex Strangelove enact two conservative gendered representations. First, both films portray a post-feminist, single-issue LGBTQ allyship which rationalizes a male-centered understanding of coming out at the expense of the girl best friend. Second, both movies display gendered spatial arrangements which reify problematic gender dynamics by physically displacing the girl best friend with the lead’s new boyfriend. While both films ought to be celebrated for their portrayal of positive environments for closeted teenagers to come out into, they simultaneously deliver narratives which should be further investigated by rhetoricians and media theorists. This essay invites scholars to interrogate gay teenage coming-of-age movies to better understand coming out in the modern era.

Analysis of Factors Causing Homosexual Behavior in Gay Teens

During the development phase, adolescents have developmental tasks that must be fulfilled. One form of adolescent development tasks is the correct sexual desire and attraction towards the opposite sex. But in reality, there are still developmental tasks that are not in accordance with norms and deviant behavior in the form of a tendency for someone with the same sex. There are many reasons that cause a person to be homosexual, for biological, psychological and environmental reasons as well as various other reasons. This study is a qualitative study aimed at analyzing the factors that cause homosexual behavior. Subjects in this study amounted to three people with criteria including the subject feeling attracted to fellow men, the subject realizes that he is attracted to the same sex, and the subject has or is in a same-sex relationship. The instruments or tools used in this study were interview and observation guidelines. To describe the factors causing gay behavior in this study, a thematic analysis was carried out by carrying out a transcript of the interview that had been verbatim. From this research, it is revealed that the factors causing gay behavior in the research subject include (1) the condition of the family background in which the relationship between the research subject and the parents has a significant influence on his decision making to be gay. The main factor found is the parenting style of parents, especially fathers, which greatly contributed to the subject's deviant and unnatural behavior, (2) the effect of the social or social environment also contributed to the subject's decision making to be gay. Therefore, it is necessary for parents to create intensive communication with their children, so that parents know and follow their children's development in order to achieve the correct sexual orientation and not deviate. The care and attention of parents towards the child's life has an important role in shaping the child's own behavior.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Teens: Information for Parents

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Teens: Information for Parents

Cigarette-Related Behaviors in Sexual Minority Youth

Adolescent cigarette use is in decline. However, sexual minority youth (SMY), including lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) teenagers, are more likely to

Embodiment, Gender, and RE ‐ligion

Embodiment, Gender, and RE‐ligion Stephanie Y. Mitchem Her shirt: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” Photo by author from Women's Convention, Detroit, MI, October 2017 Father's sneering comment to his young son: “That's one of them funny people, she used to be a man.” Son: (after a moment of silence) “I hope that never happens to me.” “I'm seriously offended that there is such a thing as this [LGBTIQ+] movement. Society cannot and should not except [sic] this behavior. I have a right to be offended and will always be offended by this fake movement which requires no special attention but by people with an altered ego and fake agenda.” From a Facebook post by Madison County, Alabama, Deputy Jeff Graves, following a black gay teen's suicide. “‘Liberty, Guns, Bible, Trump, BBQ:’ Deputy on Leave After Writing an Anti‐LGBTQ post Mocking Bullied Dead Teen” Kyle Swenson, The Washington Post, April 24, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/24/liberty-guns-bible-trump-bbq-deputy-leave-after-writing-an-anti-lgbtq-post-mocking-bullied-dead-teen/?utm_term=.635fc8265af5 Historians trace eras and anthropologists research societies where a gay or trans‐person had a place and purpose in those social structures. This body of scholarship across time and culture proves that gender categories are socially constructed. In the last fifty or so years, medical researchers and biologists have proven that the binary constructions of sex, strictly male or female, are not true representations of biology, which are much more complex than a simple box 1 or box 2. This essay will not spend time focusing on any of these disciplines. Instead, I'll hold all this as background and foundational for the direction I'm taking: a religious and sociocultural consideration of gender‐focused oppressions and connections with other oppressions. Issues of gender identity had been hardwired into the United States’ various cultures, evident in the above father‐son conversation and in the heartless post by an Alabama deputy responding to a black teen's suicide. However, these ideas of binary‐only identities are being challenged by the number of people recognizing their own sexual realities and publicly claiming their identities. Gendered restrictions are challenged by some who support social acceptance of non‐conforming gender identities. Yet, unlike the woman in the T‐shirt at the beginning of this essay, there is serious pushback against gender diversity. As a result, GLAAD, with the Harris Poll, conducted the 2018 Accelerating Acceptance report and the results are mixed: For decades, as more and more LGBTQ people were out, visible, and threaded through all walks of life, non‐LGBTQ people became more comfortable. This year, more non‐LGBTQ U.S. adults reported being uncomfortable learning a family member, doctor, or child's teacher is LGBTQ. However, 79 percent of non‐LGBTQ U.S. adults still agreed with the statement ‘I support equal rights for the LGBT community.’ But there is another layer of complications: The emphasis on LGBTQIA+ issues often has a male face, particularly in the media. This reflects the male bias in American society. A black gay man who considers himself a progressive wrote: “Masculinity operates like whiteness: It demands control over any space it enters. It plants itself in the center and shoves anything coded as feminine to the edges…. And just as these ideas confine the minds and hearts of men, they corrode public life.” The very extension of the categories—LGBTQIA—causes confusion for some people: Where did all these forms of sexuality start? Is it, as the deputy claimed, just some kind of movement? Is it some people choosing to perform weird sex acts? A bizarre lifestyle? Lesbian and gay, transgender women and transgender men, intersexed and bisexual people, are not new species of humanity caused by, say, recent solar flares. Yet, binary sex identity is promoted too frequently, and anything else is denigrated too often, transmitted on many frequencies, indicated by the father‐son conversation above. Not a choice of a lifestyle, no person can catch LGBTQ, and no person can promote gender fluid identities. The seeming expansion of identities involves people...

The privilege of knowing better: Female millennial demographics and the representation of homophobia on teen TV

Abstract The 2010–11 seasons of 90210 (2008–13), Degrassi (2010–15), Glee (2009–15) and Pretty Little Liars (2010–17) represent homophobia as arising from closeted teens, cisgender male ‘jocks’, racialized characters and immigrants. Rather than locating homophobia and heteronormativity within the social fabric and minds of all who have been steeped in American and Canadian hegemonic beliefs, homophobic characters are framed as rare, anachronistic and out-of-step with the seemingly post-homophobia ethos they exist within. Drawing on media trade publications, I place these patterns for representing homophobia in their market context, arguing that profit motives encourage representations of gay teens and homophobia that suggest homophobic beliefs are the domain of ‘others’, apart from the privileged viewer of teen TV: affluent, educated, female, white and non-white millennials aged 18–34. The target viewers are invited to see themselves as innocent and enlightened in relation to homophobic others, while prescribing a cure to homophobia that emphasizes individual change over social change.

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

Revising Hegemonic Masculinity: Homosexuality, Masculinity, and Youth-Authored Harry Potter Fanfiction

Youth participation in the production and consumption of slash fanfiction (fanfiction that queers texts by depicting homosexual relationships) can be considered revolutionary for a number of reasons, but particularly because it elucidates what youth determine to be appropriate content for themselves and because it strategically shifts focus from the discourse of non-heteronormativity to the pleasure and romance of non-heteronormative relationships. Indeed, in a study in Sweden, youth respondents to a questionnaire about their interest in slash fanfiction cited both the lack of books about gay teenagers whose relationships are accepted as normal and the opportunity to explore varying sexualities as part of the appeal of slash (Wikström and Olin-Scheller 92). However, most studies of sexuality and slash fanfiction published to date examine the sexualities of those who produce and consume it rather than the fan-authored texts themselves. This article will seek to begin to fill this gap in research by exploring the conjunction of masculinity and sexuality in Maya’s Underwater Light, a Harry Potter–inspired slash fanfiction published online in installments between the release of Goblet of Fire (2000) and Order of the Phoenix (2003).

“It Gets Better”: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity

In September 2010, a video titled “It Gets Better” was uploaded to YouTube, responding to suicides of gay teens who had suffered from homophobic bullying. Before long, thousands of Internet users added their own versions of the clip, creating a mass appeal to young people while simultaneously negotiating the norms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) collective identity. Conceptualizing this body of videos as an Internet meme, we examine the extent to which participants imitate or alter textual components presented in previous videos. A combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of 200 clips shows that in an arena ostensibly free of formal gatekeepers, participants tend to police themselves, toeing the line with conformist norms. We also identify domains of potential subversion, related not only to the content of the videos but mainly to the forms facilitated by digital media.

The discursive construction of gay teenagers in times of mediatization: youth's reflections on intimate storytelling, queer shame and realness in popular social media places

New media applications such as social networking sites are understood as important evolutions for queer youth. These media and communication technologies allow teenagers to transgress their everyday life places and connect with other queer teens. Moreover, social media websites could also be used for real political activism such as publicly sharing coming out videos on YouTube. Despite these increased opportunities for self-reflexive storytelling on digital media platforms, their everyday use and popularity also bring particular complexities in the everyday lives of young people. Talking to 51 youngsters between 13 and 19 years old in focus groups, this paper inquires how young audiences discursively constructed meanings on intimate storytelling practices such as interpreting intimate stories, reflecting on their own and other peers' intimate storytelling practices. Specifically focusing on how they relate to intimate storytelling practices of gay peers, this paper identified particular challenges for queer youth who transgress the heteronormative when being active on popular social media. The increasing mediatization of intimate youth cultures brings challenges for queer teenagers, which relate to authenticity, (self-) surveillance and fear of imagined audiences.

Normal straight gays

This paper is aimed at contributing to the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality by investigating collocation patterns in a corpus of Serbian gay teenagers’ online personal ads. Lexical collocations of words denoting masculinity and non-masculinity are found to index the dominant values among the ad writers, revealing strong associations of masculinity with positive characteristics, and effeminacy with a range of negative properties. It is argued that in such subtle but salient ways the ideological construct of hegemonic masculinity is perpetuated by these teenagers, while the cultural stigma associated with homosexuality is discursively shifted only to non-masculine gay men. A process here termed recursive marginalization is used to account for these patterns. The article also aims to make a methodological point by demonstrating that corpus-based collocation analysis offers a productive means for understanding ideology, as lexical co-occurrence may shed new light on complex webs of identities, discourses and social representations in a community.

Isolation, Exploration, Affirmation: Dominant Patterns in Four Books for Gay Teens

Find information about UTP Journals. University of Toronto Press is Canada’s leading academic publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America, with particular strengths in the social sciences, humanities, and business. The Book Publishing Division is widely recognized in Canada for its strength in history, political science, sociology, Indigenous studies, and cultural studies. Internationally, UTP is a leading publisher of medieval, Renaissance, Italian, Iberian, Slavic, and urban studies, as well as studies in book and print culture.

Teenage queerness: negotiating heteronormativity in the representation of gay teenagers in Glee

Despite a significant increase in gay representation in contemporary television fiction, many media scholars argue that the representation of gay men and women is governed by heteronormativity. They postulate that even rounded and heterogeneous representations of gay men and women are characters that desire to participate in institutions, practices, norms, and values that consolidate the heterosexual matrix. Yet, within a cultural studies tradition, television is considered an ambiguous medium that is able to both consent to and contest normative assumptions about sexuality. Taking into account this ambivalence, the study is interested in how popular teen television portrays gay teenagers and to what extent it negotiates heteronormativity in its representation of gay youth. As the objective is an in-depth investigation of representational strategies, the study examines one teen series that is authoritative in its representation of gay teens, namely the American musical series Glee. By means of a qualitative textual analysis, the article demonstrates that Glee represents gay youth as suffering victims or as teens aspiring to heteronormative values. On the other hand, Glee also provides counter-narratives in which gay teens are represented as happy, self-confident, and able to position themselves beyond the boundaries of the heterosexual matrix.

Dialogues and Debates From Hogwarts to the boxing ring: Courage, creativity and psychological well-being

Content and FocusThis paper considers the role of courage and creativity in promoting psychological wellbeing, particularly in the face of social and interpersonal risk. It uses contemporary fiction and sport alongside classical humanistic-existential insights and asks the reader to identify with ‘Tom’ a young, gay teen needing to overcome discrimination and bullying.ConclusionsCourage and creativity can be useful attributes to nurture when needing to protect ourselves from discrimination and oppression. It is suggested that this is true of in the face of racism, sexism and homophobia. These attributes may also be usefully considered at the group, community and global level to help tackle wider challenges that we face.

Proust and Ambient Medico-Literary Homosexualities 1885-1922

It is indeed true that Proust's many-faceted portrait of homosexuality, and especially of the gay baron de Charlus, constituted, as he tried to impress upon early potential publishers of A la recherche du temps perdu, something quite original in French literature, so original in fact that it was unsettling, if not shocking, to many critics and readers. As we know, the poet Francis Jammes, horrified by the early lesbian scene at Montjouvain, begged Proust to remove it from his novel, and after Proust's death, he labelled A la recherche as a whole an abomination. This was but one of the many comments, Irom quibbles and reservations to cries of indignation, that greeted Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe from critics such as Paul Souday, Gustave Binet-Valmer, Paul Lombard, the critic of L'lntransigeant, Andre Germain and others. (2) But did Proust's writing about homosexuality, as Antoine Compagnon's epigraph to this essay might suggest, happen in a literary vacuum? There are indications that Proust was not unfamiliar with the treatment of homosexuality we see in middle-brow and popular fiction of the 1885-1910 period. Smitten as a gay teenager by Verlaine and by Baudelaire (as we know, Proust surprised Gide by asserting that Baudelaire was also homosexual (3)), and confidently embracing his own love for young men, as one sees in letters from the lycee years written to or about Jacques Bizet, (4) Proust would certainly have been aware of much of the literature dealing with lesbianism and male homosexuality of the period we are exploring. In mentioning his familiarity with Musset's pornography and Verlaine's Femmes and Hombres, Proust recalls in fact how schoolboys love to pass around to their friends copies of the latest racy works they get their hands on (A propos de Baudelaire, csb, 630). Nor was Proust immune to an attraction to erotic materials in later life. In a 1908 letter to Georges de Lauris where he speaks of having purchased some pornography, including deux Verlaine secrets, immondes et stupides, he light-heartedly offers to share his purchases with his friend. (5) By examining lesbian, gay and erotic texts by Catulle Mendes, Henri d'Argis and Marcel Prevost from the 1890s and late 1880s, I will attempt to provide an early literary context for Proust's writing about homosexuality. Examples will show how place and personal names, episodes such as the retrospective discovery of lesbianism in a lover, the danse contre seins, and lesbian love-making performed for a fee, were available to Proust in then-contemporary fiction as he himself began to write short stories with erotic or homosexual themes. It is useful and illuminating, I believe, to re-examine one novel of homosexuality in particular that Proust definitely did read--Lucien by Gustave Binet-Valmer--partly because of Proust's violent reaction to it: he described the work as livre le plus imbecile que j'aie jamais lu. But Lucien is not as imbecilic as all that. Rather its publication was an incursion into what Proust was hoping to claim--via his character Charlus--as his private turf, and it came precisely at a moment when he was beginning to sound out editors such as Alfred Vallette, the publisher of the Mercure de France, about taking on his novel. However, there is perhaps an additional personal reason for Proust's irritation, and for our interest in Binet-Valmer's novel: it is that the plot of Lucien doubles certain aspects of Proust's own family life. Binet-Valmer and Proust knew each other, though not well, as early as 1902-1903, and it is not impossible--though there is no hard evidence for it--that Binet-Valmer had Proust's family configuration in mind when composing his novel. And finally, there is the broader issue of how Proust's and Binet-Valmer's novels negotiate their positions in relation to late-19th-early-20th-century theory about, and physical and moral diagnoses of, homosexuality. Which of these novels, the imbecilic Lucien or the monumental A la recherche du temps perdu, is more anchored in the past? …

The crimes of Elagabalus: the life and legacy of Rome's decadent boy emperor

The four short years of Elagabalus' rule have generated nearly two millennia of sustained attention, from salacious rumor to scholarly analysis to novels that cast him as a gay hero avant la lettre. Here, Martijn Icks succeeds in distinguishing the reality of the emperor's brief life from the myth that clouds it - and in tracing the meaning of the myth itself to the present day. In 219 ce, when the fourteen-year-old Syrian arrived in Rome to assume the throne, he brought with him a conical black stone, which he declared was the earthly form of the sun god El-Gabal, who gave Elagabalus his name and lifelong office as high priest. Shoving Jupiter aside, the new emperor did the unthinkable, installing El-Gabal at the head of the Roman pantheon and marrying a vestal virgin. Whether for these offenses, his neglect of the empire, or weariness from watching the emperor dance at the elaborate daily sacrifices, the imperial guards murdered Elagabalus and put El-Gabal in a packing crate. Sifting through later accounts of the emperor's outrageous behavior, Icks finds the invented Elagabalus as compelling as the historical figure. In literature, art, and music from the fifteenth century on, Elagabalus appears in many guises, from evil tyrant to anarchist rebel, from mystical androgyne to modern gay teenager, from decadent sensualist to pop star. These many reincarnations reveal as much about the ages that produced them, Icks shows, as they do about the bad-boy emperor himself.

Community a Factor in Suicide Attempts by Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Teens

use preventive health services less than their heterosexual peers and may be at greater risk of obesity and breast cancer. There is some evidence that older transgender individuals may have some adverse health outcomes after many years of sex hormone use. Despitehavingsomeinformationabout thehealthofthesepopulations,enormous gaps remain that can only be addressed byresearch,andthereportcallsuponthe USDepartmentofHealthandHumanServices to set a comprehensive research agenda. For example, Graham said, the committee hopes that all applicants for grants from the National Institutes of Healthwillbeaskedtostatehowthestudy will address nonheterosexual individuals or those who are transgender, just as applicantsnowmustsayhowwomenand other minority groups will be addressed in their proposed study. Additionally, the report notes the importance of considering the unique needs of each group, as well as subgroups within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities. “A lot of research has lumped lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals together,” he said. “That makes about as much sense as lumping African American, Hispanic, and Asian populations together in studies.” The report also provides an extensive overviewof thehistoryof stigmatization that individuals from lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities have experienced, and how this experience shapes “how they perceive and interact with all aspects of society, includinghealth-related institutions.”Graham saidheandthecommitteehope thispart ofthereportwillbeusedinmedicalschool curriculums to help boost the cultural competenceofnewlytrainedphysicians, andthat itmightalsobeauseful resource for the wider community as well.

Data Sound Alarm on Gay Teens' Heightened Suicide Risk

Data Sound Alarm on Gay Teens' Heightened Suicide Risk