Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Report: Kids Coming Out Earlier These Days

(Link) Time Magazine reports the younguns are waking up -- and kicking down the closet door -- in their early teens. If you had it to do all over again, would you have come out at 16?

2 comments:

LNewsEditor said...

JIC Post:
From Hindustan Times

Kids in the United States are disclosing their homosexuality with unprecedented regularity they are doing so much younger and appearance of so many gay adolescents has worried social conservatives and surprised gay activists, a media report said today.

Time magazine says in the 1960s, gay men recalled first desiring other males occurred at an average age of 14 and 17 for lesbians.

By the 1990s, the average had dropped to 10 for gays and 12 for lesbians, according to more than a dozen studies reviewed by Ritch Savin-Williams, author of The New Gay Teenager, who chairs Cornell's human-development department.

The book, Time says, quotes a Penn State study of 350 young people from 59 gay groups that found that the mean age at which lesbians first have sexual contact with other girls is 16; it's just 14 for gay boys.

The average gay person now comes out just before or after graduating high school, according to the book.

"Same-sex marriage that's out there. But something going on in a more fierce and insidious way, under the radar, is what's happening in our schools," Mathew Staver, president of Liberty Counsel, an influential conservative litigation group, was quoted as saying.

Earlier this year, the group had won a court order blocking a new Montgomery County teachers' guide that disparaged Evangelicals for their views on gays.

Anonymous said...

You punks get off my lawn! Except for you baby dykes. You can stay. ;-)