Description:
A timely, affecting collection of first-person accounts of the lives of sexual minority youth, In Your Face grew from Mary Gray's thesis work in anthropology. In collaboration with groups of young people (some of them from queer online chat groups), she designed a series of questions and then arranged for her subjects to interview each other on tape, hoping the answers would be more open and interesting than those she could elicit as an adult. The resulting book contains its share of the inevitable horror stories of growing up queer in America, but it is also refreshingly candid and spirited (and, yes, ungrammatical), with memorable details. Alan Wiley, for instance, remembers keeping a journal in his sophomore year of high school in which he referred cryptically to his gayness as "Problem No. 1." As Gray argues in her introduction, "combined homophobia and ageism, fixtures of our social landscape, have effectively rendered the realities of lesbian, gay, bi and transgendered young people invisible to both the queer and straight worlds." From the hopeful to the bleak, the queer youth of In Your Face help fill in the picture. --Regina Marler
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