Matt Bernstein Sycamore in Bitch Magazine
Also, check out Bitch’s book review of Becoming: Young Ideas On Gender, Identity, And Sexuality under archives/search in “Bitch Reads, Spring 2005.”
Excerpt:
“We grew older, stronger, weaker apart, in love, love, love,†writes Lauren Eve in “Cherie,†one of the more than 60 essays, poems, and interviews in Diane Anderson-Minshall and Gina de Vries’s brash new anthology of writings by queer youth. In under three pages, “Cherie†quickly captures the adrenaline-fueled intensity of being a young adult—the craving for adventure, the rapid cycling between elation and despair, the pleasure and pain of being love-struck—with striking self-awareness: “Money, grades, parents, friends; it all flew out the window…. Underage, underloved. We were clichés and above it all and flying with wings spread so far it was easy to lose control and easy to soar and easy to nose-dive.†The writers in Becoming aren’t the teen set you see in mainstream media: They struggle with family, addiction, abuse, and school, but all with the added complication of being queer. Anderson-Minshall and de Vries have assembled a remarkable collection of new queer voices that soar, like the speaker in Eve’s poem, precariously high.
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