Gideon Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2012: Growing Up Gay Today

Abstract

We need to reconsider ways of thinking about queerness based on the experiences of pervasive invisibility in order to comprehend the experiences of today’s and tomorrow's kids, growing up in a culture that acknowledges queerness and does so by attempting to integrate it into the commercialized array of cultural products, niche-marketed demo slices and voting blocks. Much LGBT [pre-queer] theorizing presupposed invisibility and rare stereotypic representations as a limiting and distorting condition of growing up. What do we say now about growing up with reasonably common news and entertainment presence and with the opportunities for exploration and contact offered by the Internet? One way is to deny the meaningfulness of identity and theorize the problem away. But most kids are still experiencing isolation and vulnerability in enemy territory, and for them these admittedly problematic media images are far from trivial psychic/cultural resources.