Homosexuality in Literature for Young People

This paper reports on an ongoing project, Out of the Closet and Into the Classroom: Homosexuality in Literature for Young People, which commenced in 1989. The project is to record the books that are available for young people in which there are gay, lebian, or bisexual characters, or in which issues related to homosexuality are discussed. A secondary aim is to investigate the access that young people actually have to these books through their school or public libraries. The majority of the books are novels for teens or sub-teens, but there are also picture books for young children, the latter aimed particularly (though not exclusively) at chidlren growing up in gay or lesbian families. In general it seems that, for a variety of reasons, young people may not have ready access to many of these books.

Complicating parents’ gender and sexual expectations for children: A comparison of biological parents and stepparents

When social scientists argue that “families” reproduce and sometimes challenge gender and sexual norms, they tend to refer to biological, cisgender, and heterosexual families. We consider how one alternative family form—stepfamilies—might, like gay and lesbian families, challenge these norms. Interviews with 20 biological and stepparents reveal that whereas biological parents held relatively intense feelings about their children’s gender and sexual conformity, stepparents were indifferent and far less inclined to police their children’s behavior. We conclude that stepfamilies, similar to gay and lesbian families, might be a source of less rigid expectations and greater liberty than biological families, and we consider the implications for the future of traditional gender and sexual norms in the face of the proliferation of alternative family forms.