Lesbian high schoolers

This Tegan and Sara Lofty School review contains super mild spoilers.

Not too drawn-out ago, I was at a WNBA game on Pride Night, seated right next to a lofty school basketball team. It was the New York Liberty vs. the Chicago Sky, gay players everywhere — Candace Parker, Courtney Vandersloot, Allie Quigley, Stefanie Dolson, Natasha Howard — as rainbows shimmied and shook in the stands. The teenage girl directly next to me clocked my seafoam green Equality cap, my wedding sound, my wife beside me. She told me, excitedly, that she’d come out to her teammates and that’s why they’d brought her here, on this night especially. And then Tegan and Sara‘s “Everything Is Awesome” started blasting and she stood up and screamed, “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE.”

I couldn’t end thinking about that game as I was watching High School, Clea DuVall and Laura Kittrell’s TV adaptation of Tegan and Sara’s memoir of the same name, a vulnerable, sincere, highly relatable teen drama about growing up gay in the ’90s. It’s not just about growing up gay, of course, but that’s the main undercurrent for both Tegan and Sar

I came out as a lesbian in high college, was told to destroy myself. I would undertake it all over again.

'I was afraid of someone hating me or condemning me to a lifetime of unhappiness just based on one small truth about myself.'

Ruby Green | Notion contributor

Graduating from high institution last month was thrilling, of course. But my real moment of transformation happened junior year, in my politics class.

It was a moment that transformed some other people, too.

I live in a tiny, conservative town in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas — Hatfield, population 402. We have a grocery store, two gas stations and six churches in our quiet little town. For someone who identifies as a lesbian, this can be a difficult situation to deal with.

Rumors about my sexuality began swirling in eighth grade. When my peers found out, they reacted in the only way they were taught to: with confusion and disgust. There were many who tried to "save me" and many more who told me to kill myself because I would end up in hell anyway. Thirteen-year-old me was rightfully terrified, so I denied the rumors to the best of my ability.

More: Trump fears come true for LGBTQ: Column

Mor

Inside:Is my teen daughter a lesbian? Maybe or maybe not, but here’s how to handle this sensitive teenage sexuality topic

This post was contributed by Jill Whitney, LMFT

So much about teen sexuality is different from what it was a couple decades ago.

Where once it was awkward, if not risky, to be anything other than straight, we now talk openly about a spectrum of orientations and genders. Sexual diversity has broken out of the closet—to the point where being LGBTQ is caring of cool.

So don’t be surprised if your teen or even tween daughter announces at some indicate that she’s a dyke. It’s more common than you might think these days.

But you may wonder whether your teen daughter is a lesbian for real, or whether it’s just a phase. Maybe she’s just experimenting; maybe she’ll develop out of it. Or maybe not.

How do you know?

Acceptance Needs to Be Unconditional

Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell. Some girls who experiment with same-sex partners terminate up happily straight. Other young women find they’re attracted only or primarily to women and characterize as lesbian for their whole lives.

I was recently asked my opinion on a parenting quandary. A friend wanted to know: do you think it’s OK for my gay teenage daughter to have sleepovers with her girlfriend at my house? Would you grant it at yours?

My first response is, “Hell no, I’d be driving that girl home just fond I would a boyfriend/girlfriend, and no hanging out in bedrooms either, even with the door clear, and if they’re hanging out in our basement TV room, I own a moral obligation to walk through at least three times while they’re entwined on the sofa, to make sure the clothes stay on.”

Draconian, eh? Experienced, maybe. Though, by the time I brought a girl home and had sex with her in my mom’s residence I was 19 (and in my third year at college), and had been having sex in boys’ bedrooms for three years.

Not coincidentally, most of the boys were living in the basements of their divorced dads. They tended to throw currency at their sons to keep them out from under foot, and didn’t care how many girls traipsed up and down the stairs at all hours.

OK, so that was my first response, and the same one our own teenagers got during discussions of dating.

But my second resp