“Every week, all over country, parents call me,” Ryan said. The next generation is growing up with gay characters on their televisions, pansexual rappers on their playlists, and queer micro-communities on their Tumblr feeds.īut the change also means that there is a new generation of families scrambling to raise LGBT kids who have specific needs and challenges - kids who are growing up in a society that, while increasingly LGBT-tolerant, is still plagued by hate crimes, job discrimination, and the more banal, everyday sort of homophobia borne by casual ignorance. The forces that kept many older generations confined to the closet until college and beyond - fear of intolerance, self-loathing over unidentifiable feelings of otherness, living without exposure or access to other LGBT people - are steadily losing their power.
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On one hand, LGBT people coming out at increasingly younger ages is a testament to American culture becoming less hostile toward queer people.
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“The information age has removed barrier that prevented earlier generations of LGBT adults from figuring out who they were,” Ryan said. “People are coming out younger because they’re seeing themselves, finally, in mass media.”Īs public favor for LGBT rights steadily grows, the number of resources for those who are queer or questioning undergoes tangential upswings. She cited television contemporary shows with queer characters like Orange Is the New Black, One Big Happy, and Orphan Black. “The media is starting to celebrate different kinds of families and identities that didn’t use to be celebrated at all,” Owens-Reid said. “And it’s dropping down even more.”ĭannielle Owens-Reid and Kristin Russo, co-founders of Everyone Is Gay and co-authors of This Is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids, attribute lower coming-out ages to the power of representation.
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“We found the average age of coming out was a little over 13,” she told BuzzFeed News. at San Francisco State University’s Family Acceptance Project who has been researching LGBT adolescents for over 25 years, began extensive outreach and in-depth interviews with queer youth in the early 2000's. While studies in the 1970s documented LGBT people coming out, on average, in their early twenties, the latest research demonstrates that the average age has dropped to anywhere between 14 and 16. Kids like Kate Reese have been coming out as LGBT at increasingly younger ages. Now I know people like me are out there.” I thought something was wrong with me until I saw all this research. “Now I understand LGBT terms, and that it’s not a choice. “Now I understand what ‘queer’ means, because all of the information is online,” said Reese, who privately started identifying herself as queer sometime in the fourth grade.
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But she was able to seek the language to describe herself, and assuage her worries, in a way older LGBT people never could - she had the internet. Reese may have gone quite a few more years thinking that the innocent schoolyard crushes she harbored were indications of her deviance. “I saw girls holding hands and thought, I could go for that. “I began realizing I wasn’t necessarily straight when I was around 5 or 6,” Reese said. Kate Reese, a 13-year-old living in Reno, Nevada, used to think there was something wrong with her.