Y


Yourcenar, Margue­rite (pseudonym of Marguerite de Crayencour; 1903-1987)
Outstanding Belgian-born wo­man of letters, writing in French. A novel­ist, short story writer, essayist, poet, play­wright, and translator, in 1980 she became the first woman elected to the French Academy. Long a United States resident, in 1982 she was named to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Although not an extremely pro­lific writer, Yourcenar published books beginning in 1921. As her output was on a consistently high level, she built up a reputation for being an author's author. Well versed in the world of classical antiq­uity, she was seen as a writer dealing with the universal issues of life and death in a detached, but hardly indifferent light. Translation of many of her works into English helped her win the broader audi­ence she always deserved. Extremely reti­cent about her private life, Yourcenar was working at the time of her death on her autobiography The Labyrinth of the World, of which the first two volumes (about her mother's and father's families) have been published.
Throughout her career, Yource­nar showed much interest in male homo­sexual behavior. She wrote a significant essay on the poet Constantine Cavafy and the book Mishima, or the Vision of the Void. Her most important pre-World War II fictional works, the two short novels Alexis (1929) and Coup de Grace (1937), inspired by Andre Gide's use of the first-person form, deal with homosexual feel­ing without direct statement of the theme. In the two major novels of her later years, The Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) and The Abyss (1968), homosexuality is treated in broader social contexts, the Roman em­pire and sixteenth-century Europe, respec­tively. Yourcenar admired Rainer Maria Rilke and Thomas Mann. She translated novels by Henry James and Virginia Woolf into French. Her fictional works were collected in 1982 in a Pléiade edition, signaling literary canonization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Mathieu Galey, With Open Eyes: Conversations with Marguerite Yourcenar, Boston: Beacon, 1984; Pierre L. Horn, Marguerite Yourcenar, Boston: Twayne, 1985.
Peter G. Christensen

Youth
Perhaps the most forgotten, invisible minority in the modern indus­trial world is gay and lesbian teenage youth. This condition is changing as an increasing number of young people are exploring and expressing sexual identities beyond the heterosexual ones tradition­ally recognized by society and its agents. Teens are faced, however, with both a hostile and an unbelieving world; they are told "You can't be a homosexual - I won't allow it," which amounts to saying "Soci­ety won't allow it."
Historical Patterns. The concep­tualization of adolescence as a stage be­tween childhood and adulthood is rela­tively recent, along with many current beliefs regarding the sexuality of teen­agers. Today's parental and pedagogical concern over the development of a homosexual identity by teenagers could not have arisen when the concept of homosexual identity had not taken root - a situation that persists in much of the Third World today.
Through much of the world, and during much of Western history, the so­cially significant role of male youth in cultural patterns of homosexuality is and was as the junior partner in pederasty. In cultures which viewed pederasty as an accepted part of life, involvement with adult men was not held to have any lasting effect on the sexuality of the boy con­cerned; he would be sexually involved with an adult male while a teenager, then as an adult would marry and father children, while possibly taking a boy himself during the interval between those two stages. In ancient Greece, for example, it was considered acceptable for a citizen boy to take a receptive, "feminine" role in sex with another male, but once he reached full manhood he was limited to the aggressive "masculine" role.
In a few cultures, all boys were expected to gather some homosexual ex­perience, and it might even be required for the ritual transition to manhood, as with some Melanesian tribes in the Pacific cultural sphere.
Basic Features of the Current Situ­ation. In contrast to many other cultures, Western industrial societies remain per­meated with negative attitudes regarding teenage homosexuality. Yet it is not clear what effect these negative views have on the youth discovering his or her homo­sexuality. From their later vantage point, few adults can pinpoint exactly when they first became aware of their sexual orienta­tion; it seems more of a process than an event, perhaps reflecting the amorphous nature of sexual orientation itself. Accord­ingly, homosexuality may be present be­fore the ability to reflect and label sexual feelings and attractions emerges. This sequence was particularly true in the past, before the concept of homosexuality was widely presented in media accessible to young people, and when youngsters could be very active sexually with others of their sex without ever considering their behav­ior "homosexual" or themselves "gay" or "lesbian." Even today, one of the charac­teristic features of homosexual involve­ment on the part of teenagers is the lack of information accompanying these activi­ties. Thus, a boy may be experienced with oral sex and never suspect the existence of anal sex, think that only transvestites are homosexuals, that he is the only person in his town who has erotic attraction to other males, that all boys engage in sex with each other, that "faggots" are de­spised but are not connected to anything sexual, and so forth.
In retrospect, many gay and les­bian youths report that they have always felt different and isolated from others without understanding why, but they knew that somehow the difference was impor­tant. One gay youth replied, "I always felt different, like I didn't fit in. I thought it was because I read and cared about art."
There is little agreement among investigators as to discrete variables that accurately predict a young person's ulti­mate sexual orientation or why he or she may feel different from other youths, though the existence of many such vari­ables has been a source of speculation with varying degrees of supporting research evidence. Professionals, parents, and peers often make inferences about an adolescent's sexuality based on certain "suspicious" gender-atypical behaviors, dress, and mannerisms. The prevalence of childhood and adolescent gender-atypical behavior has been documented by a num­ber of investigators; some posit gender nonconformity as a causative agent in the development of homosexuality, though this may beg the question: what causes the gender nonconformity? Researchers have suggested that at some level, the child and family know from an early point that the child is sexually "different." This knowl­edge ultimately affects the child and the family. By incorporating external values, the child learns that homosexuality is wrong, sick, and certainly, undesirable.
By adolescence, the youth with a homosexual identity has learned that she or he is among the most despised members of society and is thus faced with a number of decisions at a time when one may be least able to make the right choices. Should he play it safe and pass as hetero­sexual, aware of his own deception and of living a he? Should she compartmentalize her life, separating her sexual self from all other activities and relationships? The answers have usually been provided, theo­retically, in various coming out models that trace the step-by-step process, usually beginning in adolescence.
Young teens often escape con­demnation and criticism for homosexual behavior (although not gender-atypical behavior) because the supposed psychodynamics of their sexuality, according to many psychologists, "allows" a phase of homosexual behavior in early adolescence. Teenagers are expected to have these developmental detours and to outgrow them with a move to heterosexuality. To some, homosexual adolescents simply do not exist because adulthood must first be attained before a sexual orientation is set.
Explanations for Extent of Homo­sexual Behavior. Great effort, primarily anecdotal and clinical in nature, has been targeted at explaining the relatively high frequency of homosexual activity among teenagers. Some argue that sexual experi­mentation and exploration with same-sex peers occur because their bodies and reac­tions are more familiar and therefore less threatening than those of their other-sex counterparts; others postulate that reas­surance is gained from mutual compari­son of size, shape, and sensations associ­ated with changing bodies and sex organs; still others view these "transient homo­sexual activities" as the product of typical adolescent crushes, hero-worshipping, and intimate same-sex friendships (which does not explain why these crushes and so forth arise). More to the point may be the diffi­culties attendant upon heterosexual ac­tivity in the early teens, which range from surveillance/chaperoning through lack of privacy to the dangers of pregnancy and the fear (for a girl) of "ruining her reputa­tion." One can even speak of an atmos­phere of anti-sexuality (in a heterosexual context) enveloping the early teenager, who has just become aware of his or her sexuality and is experiencing a strong sexual drive for the first time. Even in North America, where the sexes are less segregated during the teen years than in most of the world, it is difficult for a young teenage boy to initiate heterosexual in­tercourse successfully, whereas opportu­nities for homosexual experimentation are common, if not as frequently exploited. In more restricted societies, where hetero­sexual intercourse is virtually impossible for an unmarried teenager (with the ex­ception of recourse to prostitutes, which few can afford), homosexuality provides his or her only sexual outlet.
Because only some of the teen­agers who have homoerotic impulses ever become gay or lesbian adults, scholarly writers consistently refer to homosexual activities during this period as an aspect of a normal phase leading to adult heterosex­ual development; there need be no anxiety that they are the harbingers of lifelong homosexuality. Although soothing to concerned and frightened parents, this view may be potentially a source of self-denial if not great anxiety to the youth who is developing a homosexual identity which does not fit these expectations and which is not experienced as a temporary "phase" but rather as a comprehensive and stable sexual orientation tied to the sense of self. Historically and geographically, of course, any sense of self-identity as "homo­sexual" is culturally conditioned, raising serious questions which relate to but go far beyond this discussion.
Definition and Self-Definition. An additional difficulty is in defining the gay or lesbian youth to himself or herself. This is not an easy issue because at no other time in the course of life is an indi­vidual more likely to experience cross-orientation sexual contact or bisexuality and less likely to define the self as a homosexual individual. The problem is one of distinguishing homosexual iden­tity, orientation, and homosexual behav­ior. Sexual behavior and sexual orienta­tion may be independent for a given youth as she or he engages in many forms of sexual activity, with partners varying in age, sex, and other personal variables, regardless of self-labeled or self-professed sexual identity. Although it is likely that the three will be correlated, this may be more of a future than a present reality.
Some lesbian and gay youths live as homosexual virgins and, (as first docu­mented in America by Alfred Kinsey) some "straight" youths have engaged in extensive and prolonged homosexual behavior. Youths who will later define themselves as "gay" are more likely than others to engage in homosexual behavior as teens and to do so for a longer period of time, but they are also frequent partakers of heterosexual behavior as well.
Awareness of same-sex attraction and arousal for youth usually begins dur­ing early adolescence, shortly after puber­tal onset, with homosexual experiences delayed anywhere from moments to dec­ades later. Labeling oneself as "homosex­ual," however, occurs later, during young adulthood in most studies of males and some several years later in studies of lesbi­ans. The delay is usually attributed to antihomosexual discrimination and its effects on the developing adolescent, but it might also relate to the adolescent's lack of involvement in the gay subculture with its emphasis on self-definition along orientational lines.
The Question of Prevalence. Given the complexity of whether one defines homosexuality by reference to behavior or self-label and the fact that many youths experience a diversity of sexual behaviors and an emerging sexual identity over a period of several years, a process which may not be completed until young adulthood, it is difficult to assess the prevalence of homosexual ori­entation among youth. Some studies are promising in their attempts to describe the incidence and prevalence of both homo­sexual activity and identity during adoles­cence, as well as the relationship between the two, but they are limited by their retrospective nature. Only a few empirical studies have been conducted with gay and lesbian youths as the research participants.
The paucity of research on gay and lesbian youth is both prevalent and appalling. Among the contributing factors are the hesitancy of social scientists to confront the stigmatic, legal, and moral issues involved with studying gay and lesbian minors; the invisibility of gay and lesbian youths to themselves, thus com­pounding the difficulty of finding them as research participants; and the view of those who define homosexually behaving adolescents as individuals temporarily de­tained from their destination as hetero­sexual adults. Given these problems, so­cial scientists either ignore gay and lesbian youth or they rely on adult retrospective data-gathering techniques that make par­ticular and often debatable assumptions concerning the accuracy of recall data. Many studies are limited to gay and les­bian adults,- these ignore homosexually active teenagers who do not grow up to become gay-defined adults.
Similarities and Differences with the General Youth Population. In very important ways gay and lesbian youth are similar to other youth, despite the fre­quently cited and belabored differences that have been the primary mainstay of social scientists bent on gay-versus-straight dichotomies. If indeed it proves to be the case that sexual orientation pro­duces minimal differences in developmen­tal processes, then there is a need for stud­ies of the homosexual population that focus on generic patterns within a homosexual context to see how these patterns are af­fected by that context. With this effort social scientists would increase the likeli­hood of learning about normal develop­merit in all its manifestations among gay and lesbian youth.
Coming Out. For those who come to consider their homosexuality inevi­table and true to their sense of self and who decide to contradict their previous social and assumed sexual identity, there aré few "sources of assistance. Cay and lesbian organizations have shied away from dealing with them, perhaps because they fear the issue is too controversial (capable of being perceived as a disguised attempt to "recruit" young people) and complex (the social, legal, and economic status of dependent youth), or because they lack the personnel, knowledge, and funds to offer support.
Personnel in youth service agen­cies, schools, youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and reli­gious youth groups have also been notably reluctant to provide support for self-iden­tified lesbian and gay youth. In New York City the Board of Education has provided an alternative school environment where identified gay and lesbian teenagers can escape harassment (the Harvey Milk School), but this is a notable exception to a general refusal to address these ques­tions. If anything, adult gay men and lesbians, who might be able to provide constructive role models and sympathetic counseling, are systematically excluded from positions that would make them accessible to minors.
Lesbian and gay youths often consider the restrictions which society places on adults' sexual interactions with minors, such as statutory rape (age of con­sent) and child molestation laws, to be infringements on their own rights and a denial of their own sexuality. They com­plain that adults are inhibited from show­ing any affection to youths or from sup­porting them in their struggles against oppression.
Ritch C. Savin-Williams
The London Survey. The most difficult area for "coming out" youths is parents. A survey of over 400 gay and lesbian teenage Londoners conducted in 1983 by the London Gay Teenage Group found that, of the 250 teens who had come out to parents, in just over half the cases, parents' initial reaction was either "good," "reasonable," or "indifferent." Over a third of the youths reported nega­tive reactions, with the remainder mixed.
Most (61 percent) of the young lesbians, but a quarter of the gay boys in the survey reported that their first sexual experience was heterosexual. The girls reported their first homosexual experi­ence came on the average at age 16 or 17 (with 32 percent at 15 or under), while 62 percent of the boys reported their first homosexual experience at 15 or under. For the boys, their first homosexual experi­ence was very likely with someone older: half of the boys' first partners were 20 or older; for girls it was 43 percent.
At school, youths found that sex education materials rarely provided any useful information about homosexuality. The London survey indicated that homo­sexuality was four times more likely to be brought up in Religion class than in Sex Education. Only 5 percent of the London youths said they had found any helpful information on homosexuality in their school library.
Somewhat more than half the survey respondents were known to some­one in secondary (high) school as homo­sexual, and almost all of these reported problems as a result. Boys in particular experienced verbal abuse (25 percent) and beatings (16 percent), girls pressure to conform (15 percent) and ostracism (10 percent); both sexes reported isolation (25 percent) and teasing (13 percent). A little over half of these youths reported they knew someone else in school who was gay.
Youths were more likely to be known as homosexual while in college, with 68 percent reporting such knowl­edge; two-thirds of these knew another gay student. Female college students re­ported more of a sense of isolation (34 percent) than males did (20 percent).
The first person told about the teen's sexuality was usually (55 percent) a friend, followed by siblings (8 percent), mothers (7.5 percent), and lovers (6 per­cent). The next step in breaking out of the isolation is often to make contact with another homosexual; only 16 percent found this among their friends, with a quarter going to a gay pub or club and 18 percent through a telephone switchboard or the London Gay Teenage Group itself.
Asked to comment on the gay social scene, the London teens tended to criticize the gay pubs and clubs for being too expensive, with too much pressure to drink, and keeping hours too late for them (especially for those still living with par­ents). In London it is legal for an unaccom­panied 16 year old to enter a pub, and the drinking age is 18.
Well over half of the London re­spondents reported having or having had "a long term homosexual lover"; two-thirds said they were happy with their sex lives, while a third of the unhappy respon­dents wanted a lover and another third of the unhappiest wanted more of it. Just under 40 percent of the boys reported having had homosexual sex with strangers in public toilets or outdoor cruising areas, often the only means known or accessible to them for meeting sexual partners.
Depression is often a problem for young homosexuals: 19 percent of the London respondents said they had attempted suicide because they were les­bian or gay. Trouble with police over homosexuality was reported by 21 percent of the boys and 9 percent of the girls, usually in the form of general harassment.
Runaways, Castaways, and Pros­titutes. Self-identified gay and lesbian teen­agers may undergo considerable harass­ment without being able to make use of adult defensive strategies such as finding a more hospitable work environment, moving to a large city or a heavily gay neighborhood, finding emotional support in gay social environments (often bars which do not admit minors), having gay roommates or lovers, and the like. For this reason, some gay and lesbian youth run away from home in hopes of finding a less hostile environment in the big city. Still others (11 percent of the London survey) are driven out of their homes by family members unable to deal with homosexu­ality or cross-gender behavior. While many of these youths eventually return home, having solidified their sense of sexual ori­entation in the meantime, others become drifters in the big cities. Some of these are able to find jobs or lovers to take them in, but many become involved in prostitu­tion, a trade where youth is much in demand by ephebophiles (those interested in the older teens) and "puberphiles" (men interested in boys emerging from puberty) and constitutes nearly all of the supply.
For some gay-identified boys, street hustling seems an attractive en­deavor, offering both sexual satisfaction and ready cash as well as entree to many new social worlds. For others, it is simply an occupation for which they are qualified and from which they are not barred by their youth. The lesbian-identified girl, on the other hand, may view prostitution as a distasteful if unavoidable means of earn­ing a living.
Prostitution is also a home town scene of homosexual involvement for many teenage boys. For some, it is the only means they know or trust for making contact with sexual partners, gay bars being unknown or off-limits owing to age restrictions, and peers ruled out because of fear of exposure.
Many male prostitutes are boys who do not identify themselves as gay, and this activity is justified and rational­ized, especially among the sons of the working- and under-class, as an economic rather than an erotic endeavor. This also makes it attractive to boys who are unsure of their sexual orientation but would like to experience sex with other males, and therefore sometimes becomes a route that eventually leads to a homosexual or bisex­ual identification.
Organizational Responses. At the 1969 annual convention of the North American Conference of Homophile Or­ganizations (NACHO), the NACHO Youth Committee, under Stephen Donaldson's chairmanship, issued a report denouncing the coalition's member organizations for discriminating against youth, maintain­ing high minimum age limits for member­ship, and ignoring issues of strong concern to youth such as age-of-consent laws and prostitution. At that time, only a few of the member groups in the homophile movement would have anything to do with minors: the Student Homophile League, Vanguard (a San Francisco organi­zation of young male street prostitutes), and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual; the convention majority rejected the report.
With the explosion of gay libera­tion in the 1970s, gay and lesbian groups became somewhat more open to youths, student groups proliferated, and increas­ing numbers of cities developed independ­ent youth groups. Groups primarily for youth below college age are still, however, comparatively few; only a few high schools are known to have recognized gay groups. Organizations of this sort have often suffered from lack of support by the adult gay and lesbian communities.
Stephen Donaldson
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Peggie Autin, et al., eds., Growing Up Gay, Ann Arbor, MI: Youth Liberation Press, 1976; Mervin Glasser, "Homosexuality in Adolescence," British Journal of Medical Psychology, 50 ¡1977), 217-25; Gilbert Herdt, ed., Gay and Lesbian Youth, Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 1989; A. Damien Martin, "Learning to Hide: The Socialization of the Gay Adolescent," Adolescent Psychiatry, 10 (1982), 52-65; Edward Paolella, "Re­sources for and about Lesbian and Gay Youth: An Annotated Survey," Reference Services Review, 12:2 (1984), 72-94; Thomas Roesler and Robert W. Deisher, "Youthful Male Homosexuality: Homosexual Experience and the Process of Developing Homosexual Identity in Males Aged 16 to 22 Years," Journal of the American Medical Association, 219 (1972), 1018-23; Ritch C. Savin-Williams, Gay and Lesbian Youth: Expressions of Identity, Washington, DC: Hemisphere, 1990; Lorraine Trenchard and Hugh Warren, Something to Tell You . . . The Experiences and Needs of Young Lesbians and Gay Men in London, London: London Gay Teenagers Group, 1984; R. R. Troiden, "Becoming Homosexual: A Model of Gay Identity Acquisition," Psychiatry, 42 (1979), 362-73.