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| navigate: home: magazine: spring/summer 2000: article | |
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Workshops place new research on sexual minority youth into the hands of Pennsylvania educators by Celena E. Kusch | |||||||||||||
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Recent concerns about youth violence and the state of education in the United States have prompted a flurry of self-critical examination into the needs of the nation’s youth. This has been particularly true of those who study the needs of youth who have been marginalized and targeted for violent outbursts in schools. For Dr. Anthony R. D’Augelli, community psychologist and Penn State professor of human development, the challenges faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth have long been an area of concern. “It’s important to remember that all schools have LGBT youth in them, even junior high schools,” D’Augelli said. “Youths who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender live in fear of people learning about them, which interferes with their learning and their mental health.” Incidents like the brutal murder in Wyoming of gay college student Matthew Shepard have only provided further evidence of the urgency of these issues. D’Augelli’s research and outreach efforts of the past 15 years demonstrate a commitment to both the scholarship of understanding sexual minority youth and the project of communicating that research to the educators and counselors who work with youth every day. This widespread interest in sexual orientation issues for youth is relatively new, according to D’Augelli. “There was a time when we thought that lesbians, gays and bisexuals were all in their twenties,” he said, “but growing numbers of youth are coming out earlier and earlier and speaking out to their parents and friends.” The results of this shift have not always been positive and have even placed youth at risk as they face threats and abuse from community and peers. D’Augelli spoke about the inadequacy of school policies to meet the needs of LGBT youth. According to D’Augelli, too often the strategy schools adopt is simply to “ignore these youths.” “Schools encourage homophobia in a number of ways, but especially by not condemning it. There have been increasing numbers of lawsuits about school districts failing to protect LGBT youths from victimization,” he added. As a result, many youth support professionals are attempting to adapt to the increased demands for expertise and experience with sexual minority youth. To help meet these needs, D’Augelli has led continuing education workshops titled “Understanding Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth” for the past three years. The fall 1999 workshops at The Nittany Lion Inn attracted nearly 60 school personnel, youth counselors and other mental health professionals from throughout Pennsylvania and the northeast states. The workshops provided the most up-to-date information about the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth and included discussions, lectures, a film and a panel of young people sharing personal experiences and describing their needs. In a presentation titled “Personal, Family and Community Challenges for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth,” Dr. Gerald Mallon, assistant professor of social work at Hunter College and author of We Don’t Exactly Get the Welcome Wagon: The Experiences of Gay and Lesbian Adolescents in the Child Welfare System, emphasized the range of psychosexual development of sexual minority youth. While public awareness of the sexual identity of lesbians and gays is at an all-time high, Mallon remarked, bisexuals and transgender persons, especially youth, often face challenges based on confusion about their sexual orientation. Bisexual youth are capable of experiencing attraction with members of both genders, although not necessarily concurrently. As a result, Mallon explained, their needs can be neglected when adults or peers see them fitting intermittently into heterosexual norms. By contrast, transgender youth do not fall into the sexual minority due to sexual attraction, but rather due to their internal feelings about their gender identity. Mallon defined the transgender experience through the metaphor of “goodness of fit.” Transgender people wear their physical gender like “wearing a left glove on the right hand” and may adopt cross-dressing or androgynous behavior as a means to cope with the difference between their internal identity and their physical body, he said. While such identity dilemmas might prove daunting to adults beginning to identify themselves as a part of the sexual minority, workshop speakers stressed that often youth, not adults, are the ones coping with these challenges. Dr. Margaret Rosario, associate professor of psychology at the City University of New York, shared the results of her study of the sexual orientation development in adolescents that revealed that sexual orientation develops before age 11—much earlier than researchers had previously believed. “Youth are very young when they begin to develop their sexual identity,” Rosario explained. “Freudian theory tells us that this makes sense: when you reach puberty, you discover your sexual orientation. And it happens as children make the move to junior high school. As a consequence, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth are facing two large challenges at once. All this is occurring when they have limited experiences and limited coping ability, and yet the youth are coping with momentous issues about identifying themselves sexually simply because they live in a context where heterosexuality is the norm.” Dr. Janet LaFontaine, associate professor of counseling at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, concurred that the context of social denigration only exacerbates the problems of young people coming out in the school years. She called for more accurate information about sexual orientation in schools, saying, “The majority of schools are unwilling or unable to combat the ignorance that surrounds this issue. Many have even mandated gag orders. The effect is that the gag orders prevent adult-led intelligent discussion, but they do not prevent the student-led slurs and harassment from crossing the schoolroom door.” To help youth cope with their developing sexual identities, she advocated changing the goal of youth support from dealing with youth problems to “working with schools to effectively assist lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth.” In so doing, she said, the focus shifts productively from the sexual minority youth themselves to the many steps our public schools must take to make our schools safe for all students. “Switching our focus demystifies the problems facing sexual minority youth—including their higher suicide attempts and drop-out rates. Now we need to look beyond the symptoms to the sources of the problems, and we will find those sources are not in the kids themselves,” LaFontaine added. If we are to begin finding those sources, Rosario’s research may be a good place to start. The study she presented at the workshop attempted to determine the ages when lesbian, gay and bisexual youth first experience cognitive sexual attraction; when they initiate sexual activity with a partner; and when they develop an awareness of sexual identity as lesbian, gay and bisexual and begin to label themselves as such. According to her data, the majority of these youths engage in some sexual activity with members of the opposite sex before beginning activity with same sex partners. Furthermore, although sexual attraction and awareness of sexual identity occurred at roughly the same rate in homosexual and heterosexual youth, the urban youth she studied engaged in sexual activity before their urban heterosexual counterparts, leading Rosario to conclude that external pressures have an influence on their behavior. According to Rosario, these pressures can place youth at greater risk as they “experiment with their sexuality in order to verify the messages that they are getting from the outside world that conflict with the messages they receive internally.” “Many of these youths are under tremendous personal stress—worrying about their own identity, worrying about their family finding out, worrying about their friends finding out,” D’Augelli added. He sees the workshops as a step toward alleviating that stress by “breaking the silence that is unfortunately the norm in Pennsylvania schools.” Since the first workshops in 1997, D’Augelli has seen positive outcomes in the form of new programs and conversations in the schools. “Today, the people who attend the workshops are certainly more aware. More schools are dealing with their responsibilities to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth, but we have a long way to go, ” he said. An outreach program of the College of Health and Human Development | ||||||||||||
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