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Summary With recent stories of anti-gay bullying and tragic suicides of gay youth at the forefront of the national conversation, experts say they are increasingly seeing evidence that middle school is the toughest time for gay youth — a time of intense self-discovery, but also one when bullying and intolerance is at its peak.

Author Jocelyn Noveck

Citation Associated Press; MSNBC

Link http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39639709/ns/us_news-life/

By the time she was in eighth grade, Rory Mann was so aware of the differences between her and other students that she couldn’t bear to enter the cafeteria. Instead, she ate lunch alone on the cold, hard bathroom floor, propped against a wall.

Sometimes Mann, who’d known she was gay for about a year but dared not tell anyone, would cut herself on the arms with a razor blade. Her long sleeves hid the evidence of her misery from classmates and family.

“Everyone’s trying to figure out who they are in middle school,” says Mann, now 18 and a high school senior in Newport, R.I., where she is active in a gay students group.

“They turn into vicious people. They are really insecure, and they exploit someone else’s differences so people won’t see who THEY are.”

Summary This article, which references the experiences of many middle schoolers, talks about the challenges facing gay and lesbian students in middle school. While "being young and gay is no longer an automatic prescription for a traumatic childhood," there's still a great amount of verbal and physical harassment (and worse) that occurs. As a a result, many schools form Gay-Straight Alloiances (GSA's), where students discuss school safety, plan events, read up on news, talk about navigating the outside world, and offer support.

Author Benoit Denizert-Lewis

Citation New York Times Magazine, September 27, 2009

Link http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/27out-t.html

Austin didn’t know what to wear to his first gay dance last spring. It was bad enough that the gangly 13-year-old from Sand Springs, Okla., had to go without his boyfriend at the time, a 14-year-old star athlete at another middle school, but there were also laundry issues. “I don’t have any clean clothes!” he complained to me by text message, his favored method of communication.

When I met up with him an hour later, he had weathered his wardrobe crisis (he was in jeans and a beige T-shirt with musical instruments on it) but was still a nervous wreck. “I’m kind of scared,” he confessed. “Who am I going to talk to? I wish my boyfriend could come.” But his boyfriend couldn’t find anyone to give him a ride nor, Austin explained, could his boyfriend ask his father for one. “His dad would give him up for adoption if he knew he was gay,” Austin told me. “I’m serious. He has the strictest, scariest dad ever. He has to date girls and act all tough so that people won’t suspect.”

Austin doesn’t have to play “the pretend game,” as he calls it, anymore. At his middle school, he has come out to his close friends, who have been supportive. A few of his female friends responded that they were bisexual. “Half the girls I know are bisexual,” he said. He hadn’t planned on coming out to his mom yet, but she found out a week before the dance. “I told my cousin, my cousin told this other girl, she told her mother, her mother told my mom and then my mom told me,” Austin explained. “The only person who really has a problem with it is my older sister, who keeps saying: ‘It’s just a phase! It’s just a phase!’ ”