Nurturing Queer Youth

Youth are coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered at increasingly younger ages. This burgeoning population of sexual minority youth, along with their families, is looking for help from therapists in order to manage the stresses of late childhood and adolescence. Nurturing Queer Youth provides therapists and other mental health professionals with the insight and guidance to assist these families. By integrating complex ideas about sex, gender, and identity, Stone Fish and Harvey go beyond accepting queer youth, to appreciating the gift that queer youth have to offer, not despite their identity, but because of it. As youth come out at younger ages, the process of identity development is necessarily a family process and therapeutic work undertaken to address sexual identity must involve the family. Despite this fact, as well as decades of research indicating that sexual minority status is a normal variation on a continuum of sexual identities, the field of family therapy has not contributed a family model that nurtures queerness. Stone Fish and Harvey recognize this disjunction between available therapeutic models and the actual needs of clients. Drawing on data from developmental research, the concepts of queer theory, as well as their own extensive clinical experience as family therapists, the authors develop an effective model of family therapy that nurtures queer youth and their families. The key processes of the model are creating refuge, fostering difficult dialogues, nurturing queerness, and encouraging transformation. Each therapeutic process is addressed in a single chapter which articulates the basic concept of the process, presents the research supporting the importance of the process, and then shows how to put the process into action in the therapeutic context. In the course of developing and illustrating these four key processes for helping queer youth and their families, Stone Fish and Harvey introduce readers to five families whose experiences of learning to nurture their queer youth are basic to the therapeutic lessons presented here. The approach is, above all, one that is sensitive to the specific dynamics of individual families and respectful of the challenges that all family members must face and overcome in the course of nurturing each individual's gifts as well as the gifts of the family unit. The families, whose stories readers will follow from chapter to chapter, are as much teachers as they are students in the collaborative family therapy presented with such vividness and narrative force by the authors. Nurturing Queer Youth is a book for all family therapists and mental health professionals. This transformative approach to family therapy will enhance clinical work with all families because the model challenges cultural and familial assumptions that are harmful to all intimate relationships. Today every therapist needs to be familiar with how sexual identity issues present in the family context, and how to work with queer youth and their families toward a family dynamic that is positive and nurturing of queerness. Therapists who specialize in treating sexual minority youth will also profit from having an effective guide to conducting family therapy, including a relational map to family dynamics and ideas for intervention.

Coming Out, Coming In: Nurturing the Well-Being and Inclusion of Gay Youth in Mainstream Society describes the process of "coming in" to a welcoming and nurturing family, from both the teen's and the parents' perspective. Linda Goldman draws on her personal and professional experience as a school guidance counselor, child and adolescent therapist, parent, and a member of the national group PFLAG to build a common language and a new paradigm for understanding sexual orientation and gender identity as a part of mainstream culture. Through the information, exercises, anecdotes, and extensive bibliography of additional resources provided in the book, parents, school administrators & educators, community groups and counselors will find the tools needed to facilitate nurturing and safe environments for our LGBT youth.

Want a sneak peek? Download this free sample of This Is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids by Dannielle Owens-Reid and Kristin Russo. Written in an accessible Q&A format, here, finally, is the go-to resource for parents hoping to understand and communicate with their gay child. Through their LGBTQ-oriented site, the authors are uniquely experienced to answer parents' many questions and share insight and guidance on both emotional and practical topics. Filled with real-life experiences from gay kids and parents, this is the book gay kids want their parents to read.

Therapeutic Conversations with Queer Youth is for practitioners who seek culturally responsive, socially-just ways of engaging queer youth in conversations that evoke imagination, provoke possibility, and honor the courageous resistance and arresting inventiveness of their you...

This collection explores the representation and performance of queer youth in media cultures, primarily examining TV, film and online new media. Specific themes of investigation include the context of queer youth suicide and educational strategies to avert this within online new media, and the significance of coming out videos produced online.

Gloria Filax explores how youth identities have been constructed through dominant and often competing discourses about youth, sexuality, and gender, and how queer youth in the province of Alberta negotiated the contradictions of these discourses. She juxtaposes the voices of queer young people in Alberta with discourses that claim expert knowledge about young people's lives. She also explores what queer youth have to say about their lives in relation to renditions of homosexuality from the Alberta Report, a weekly magazine published in the 1990s that, despite its fiscal marginality, had significant impact on social values in Alberta.

The 2000 case of Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium v. Customs Canada provided Canada’s highest court with its first opportunity to consider whether the analysis set out in R. v. Butler - in which the Supreme Court identified pornography as an issue of sex discrimination - applies to pornography intended for a lesbian or gay male audience. The Court held that it did, finding that, like heterosexual pornography, same-sex pornography also violates the sex equality interests of all Canadians. Christopher Kendall supports this finding, arguing that gay male pornography reinforces those social attitudes that create systemic inequality on the basis of sex and sexual orientation - misogyny and homophobia alike - by sexually conditioning gay men to those attitudes and practices. The author contends that as a result of litigation efforts like those brought by lesbian and gay activists in the Little Sisters case, the notion of empowerment and the rejection of those values that daily result in all that is anti-gay have been replaced with a misguided community ethic and identity politic that encourages inequality. This is best exemplified in the gay male pornography defended in Little Sisters as "liberation" and "central to sexual freedom." Gay Male Pornography rejects the equality claims of gay male pro-pornography advocates and argues that there is little to be gained from sexualized conformity. To date, no one has taken the position that gay male pornography violates the legal right to sex equality. This book does that and, as such, it will be of value to scholars of law, sociology, and gender studies, as well as to all who have an interest in equality and justice.