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Does It Get Better in Small Schools?
My high school was a small oasis in a largely Republican borough in a largely Democrat city in a mixed state that typically comes up blue. When I say small, I mean that my graduating class consisted of 117 students (after 3 girls became pregnant and either transferred or dropped out). In total, the school consisted of around 500 students. We did not even have our own building, and instead shared it with three other schools, each relegated to their own wing and sharing areas such as the gym, auditorium, and lunch room. Because of this, getting high involvement rates for any after school event was always difficult. During my…
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Queer Book List Origin Story
It was during my years as an undergrad that I first began to take interest in literature about queer adolescence. At the time, I was only interested in adult literature and focused on coming out narratives and coming of age narratives in particular. During my first semester of graduate school, I took a class on children’s and young adult literature. It was during this class that I first thought to look at young adult literature in an academic and theoretical way. As I began to work on a paper on queer young adult literature for that course, I realized how limited the resources were. Very few records exist tracking queer…
