Underage queer teens go shopping

In 1991, while writing a feature article, I tagged along with the East Bay chapter of Queer Nation on a couple of actions. Almost everyone in QN was under 25; more than half of them were too young to get in the straight clubs they wanted to "liberate." After a debate, they decided on a mission of holiday visibility, and so a few weeks before Christmas, I met them in front of a crowded mall in Richmond, California. Cruising around with jackets bedecked with decals [DYKE, QUEER, FAG], flanked on all sides by grim-faced security men whispering urgently into walkie-talkies, the QN forces explored the mall, attracting stares, laughter, and a few startled thumbs-up.

After a couple of hours, everyone was exhausted, so we headed for a sunken conversation pit to regroup before leaving. It was a bad choice. The pit was circled by balconies three stories high, and those balconies were soon mobbed by people, most of them also under 25, many dangling over the railings to better pelt us with abuse, hard candy, and anything else they could grab from the nearest trash cans. There were just 20 of us, a couple hundred of them, and the hate and passion on their faces was all-consuming.

I don't remember driving home. In my dreams I saw those tiers of twisted faces looming over me, eyes bright with malice. For more than a week I wandered around in shock, feeling vulnerable and stripped. Then I went to the QN wrap-up meeting. "Terrific action," everyone said. "A real success."

"How can you call that a success?" I demanded.

"We got under their skin," they explained. "We made them see how they really feel."

How they really feel was exactly my problem. I had either never known, or not known with such immediacy, or blissfully forgotten how they feel. But the intensity of the revulsion with which we were greeted was no surprise to the Queer Nationals. After all, they said, they'd seen it every day in junior high and high school, and they were still close enough to the secondary school experience to remember how horrible it was. "But hasn't all that changed?" I asked. It wasn't like when I was a kid, when I believed I was the only lesbian on earth. Now we've had Stonewall and parades and a growing body of literature and film festivals and gay games...

"It's exactly the same," a couple kids asserted. "They don't televise the gay parade in Cincinnati, you know. And we could never get those books and records."

But a lanky guy in a leather jacket was shaking his head. "It's worse," he said.

"Worse?"

"Sure. Now they know we're here."

Lindea Due is a writer and senior editor of the Berkeley, CA, Express.
Queer Teens Go Shopping is from her recent book, Joining the Tribe: Growing Up Lesbian and Gay in the '90s [Anchor, $12.95].

Due's Express article on gay & lesbian teenagers won a Media Alliance award as one of 1992's top six underreported stories. That article, Young and Gay, which appears on page 35, was Due's inspiration for Joining the Tribe.

Gay Youth has been updated and shortened for space; the original version is located at http://www.cyberspaces.com/outproud/oasis.