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ore than one person has said that I was a particularly sexually precocious kid. I came out at an extremely young age, and whenever I talk about coming into my sexuality, most peo-ple—even most queer people—discount my case as “special.” I usually get a response along the lines of “Oh, you were just a particularly self-aware eleven-year-old, Gina. Most kids aren’t like you were, and they wouldn’t need the kind of information you did.”

My reaction to that line of rhetoric has always been complicated.

When I came out in 1995, even in the supposed queer mecca of San Francisco, I was certainly the only out sixth-grader I knew. I remember how scared I was when I first acknowledged my crushes on other girls, and a lot of that fear had to do with knowing that people—even other queer people—wouldn’t believe me. I began attending queer youth events and support groups at the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center (LYRIC), the organization I credit with saving my life and my sanity as a scared adolescent. LYRIC gave me a sense of community and family, a refuge from the taunts and violence I faced every day at school.

But still, my first few months going there, the most common reactions to my age were, “You’re how old?” and “You’re too young to even have a

sexual orientation!” For a long time I thought that I was the only young one, or at least one of the very few who was thinking about these things.

I now know that there’s a lot wrong with telling someone that thinking about sex and sex-tinged with “taboo” elements was not at all uncommon. As I got older, I heard stories from friends of all ages about what they’d fantasized about at twelve and younger, and what they still fantasized about. There was the friend of my first boyfriend who, starting at age seven, had rigged up a suspension bondage contraption from which she would hang herself for hours at a time. There was the bisexual-identi-fied faggot who made his own dildoes and buttplugs when he was six, and the friend from high school who started out as a foot-fetishist and soon discovered she also had strait-jacket and WAM (wet and messy) fetishes.

Clearly, I was not the only young person thinking about queer and kinky sex, and some of my friends’ stuff blew my thirteen-year-old “femme dyke as nelly fag” fantasies clear out of the water.

But the question remains: how can we support children and teenag-ers in the discovery of their sexuality, especially if it’s of a queer or kinky flavor? The best sex education I got as a young person involved my friends telling me about their sexual lives in a frank, open manner—allowing me the option of backing out or saying, “This is too much for me to handle,”

and also giving me room to ask questions and talk about my own experi-ence. It’s critical that queer role-models and mentors share information about sexuality and sexual health with queer youth.

For example: At fourteen, I wrestled with some of the kinkier ele-ments of my sexuality and tried to reconcile my submissive and masochistic sides (which I didn’t recognize as such at the time—I just thought I was

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sick) with an early childhood sexual abuse experience (which I didn’t yet classify as abuse, it was just “something bad that happened when I was younger.”) A twenty-four-year-old dyke friend of mine, without telling me how to name my experience or my sexuality, simply listened to my worries. She suggested that I get my hands on a wide variety of porn, and spend some solo time playing, exploring, and figuring out what turned me on. She reminded me to be satisfied and guiltless about my explorations, as long as they weren’t hurting me or anyone else. Finally, she reassured me that it was okay to have limits, and that in my explorations I might not like everything I saw or tried or might fantasize about stuff I’d never even attempt in real life. To this day, that’s some of the best sex advice I’ve ever received, and I wasn’t even having sex with other people yet, nor did she imply that I should be. Rather, she encouraged me to discover myself as a sexual being on my own terms and at my own pace.

Conversations with older friends also allowed me, on some level, to learn from their experiences. The same friend spoke very frankly to me about her own sex and love life—the trials and tribulations of pursuing nonmonogamy with a less-than-respectful lover; the casual sex she began having after their bad break-up, what she liked and didn’t like about the encounters; the S/M erotica book she’d read that hadn’t done anything for her but that she recommended I take a look at if that’s what I might be into. I got to hear about relationships and encounters and experiences I wasn’t having, and the knowledge that other people pursued polyamory, S/M, and casual sex made my own desires feel less bizarre. It also educated me about how to get what I wanted in a way that wouldn’t hurt other people.

The other routes through which I found support for and education around my sexuality were the safer-sex workshops held at LYRIC and queer youth conferences. These workshops took for granted that youth were interested in, and perhaps having, sex. This sounds obvious, but the contrast between “These are the kinds of barriers you use when you’re giving head” and “This is how you might protect yourself if you were ever to engage in intercourse, which you should only do if you are married and plan to have a baby” was huge. My main memory of attending safer-sex events is that, while I didn’t start having sex until I was sixteen, I always

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felt welcome and encouraged to speak—even as a twelve-year-old virgin.

So much of the rhetoric of the anti-sex-education movement is “If you teach kids about sex, they’ll do it.” First, kids having sex isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and second, if anything, going to safer sex workshops kept me from jumping into bed with the first person who expressed interest in me.

I learned how to figure out what interested me, and how to set boundaries and say no when I wanted or needed to. In these workshops, I learned that I didn’t need to have sex right away to prove to people that I was queer.

My experiences not only gave me the confidence to say, “This is what I want and how I want it” when I eventually began having sex; I also gained the confidence to say, “Yeah, I’m a virgin, but I’m still queer; so don’t use that ‘you haven’t had sex’ argument to tell me I don’t know who I am.”

I despise the way the mainstream gay movement has ignored the issues surrounding sex education in the United States. In-school activism, when spearheaded by gay adults, does not reflect the needs of queer youth, and often sidesteps the issue of sex education altogether (not to mention issues of age and ageism, dis/ability, race, class, and sexualities and genders that aren’t strictly “male” or “female” and “straight” or “gay”). Older, usu-ally more conservative gay activists talk about the state of youth today and quote statistics about queer teens without actually consulting the youth movement they claim to represent. If people want to see what is happen-ing among queer youth activists, they can go directly to the source: queer youth social, support, and activist groups; school gay-straight alliances;

and the important activist alliances formed between younger and older activists.

However, this kind of youth-driven activism is not what gets the most attention in the mainstream media, or in the mainstream gay movement.

As a young person, I want to make it clear that I do not advocate writing off older queer activists. I have learned a huge amount from the queer activists who have come before me, and I owe an enormous personal dept to the older people in my life who were there for me when I was first becoming an activist (and to the older people who are still teaching me).

However, part of why my relationships with older activist friends and colleagues have been so good is that I have been fortunate to work with adults who are committed to youth liberation, and who have the same

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cal politics I do. I referenced activist alliances between younger and older activists at an earlier point in this essay, and this is what the mainstream queer movement is missing. We need alliances between youth and adults, and safe spaces and activism exclusively for youth, instead of adults speak-ing for queer youth without their input.

School-based queer activism in the hands of adults tends to focus on rights for gay teachers and protection against discrimination for queer middle and high-school students, or students perceived to be queer. As a queer student who was frequently and violently harassed in middle school, I appreciate the work that’s been done to make schools safe for queer and gender-transgressive youth. However, creating a safe school environment also means creating curricula that are inclusive of queer issues, including but certainly not limited to sex-ed curricula. According to a fair number of adult gay activists, the heralded solution to “gay issues” is for schools to tack a “gay day” onto their sex ed programs, explain that being gay “is all about love” and that gay people “are just like straight people,” and leave the scary and personal questions about actual sex at the “none of your business” level.

As someone who spoke in schools as a teenager—often to kids who were older than me—about queer issues, I did get tired of being barraged with the obnoxious “Uh, how do you do it?” questions from the homo-phobic set. But forbidding students to ask questions about sex, pretending that their curiosity about the subject doesn’t exist, and expecting them to be satisfied with “Being gay is all about LOVE!” isn’t any better. Sex and love are subjective and based upon people’s personal definitions and expe-riences, and need to be treated as related-but-separate entities, especially when approaching sex education. By universally equating queer sex with love, and love with long-term relationships, the gay movement is selling itself short.

When students, queer or not, ask questions about queer sex, they’re searching for answers about their sexuality and sexual behavior. For

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kids who are insecure about their own budding sexuality, it’s very easy to mask fear and curiosity with rude comments about cocksuckers and lesbos. I don’t think that only talking about romance and commitment can tackle those comments or answer people’s questions about sex. In fact, straight, vanilla, mono-amorous kids could just as easily benefit from the kind of explicit, nonjudgmental sex education that I got as a decidedly queer, pervy, slutty kid. What the queer movement needs is to reform the whole system of teaching kids about sex and sexuality, not just insinuate ourselves into already sorely lacking sex-ed programs. It’s my hope that someday every person, regardless of their eventual sexual path in life, will get the kind of sex education I got from my friends and mentors. In the meantime, I’m doing my part as an older youth to continue that education and activism with my friends.

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e never even considered going to Pride and not protesting. We gossiped for days about what we were going to wear, carefully planning our mutual displays of dissent. Vile, my charming co-conspirator, was handcuffed to a briefcase and shackled to a plastic medieval-inspired ball-and-chain... and dressed in nothing more than the quaint little chain mail codpiece she stuffed herself in. With the words

“CHAINED MALE” scribbled across her chest, Vile was an exemplary flaming faggot.

It was my cock’s public debut, pinned against my hips by the inner-tube harness over my tinytight shorts. On my back was written with a large marker, billboard-style: “THE DOLLAR MAKES ME DRY BUT ANARCHY GETS ME WET”—a line I lifted off a friend from Seattle who used it similarly two years before (none of this is original, darling).

Electrical tape across my bare chest spelled out the words “PRIDE SELLS;

QUEERS BUY.” Simple and to the point, no?

Good queers? Bad Queers? Who decides? In that moment it felt good to claim the “bad queer” title for myself. A few years later I was forced to reckon with the sour taste of this question in another intimate context.

It was spring 2002 and I was at a counter demonstration to the “Salute to Israel Day” parade in New York. I will never forget a brief moment I witnessed in which a fellow from the Neturei Karta handed a non-Jewish protester a flier expressing the Neturei Karta’s criticism of Israel.

She looked at him, his peyes and overcoat—a man who obviously takes his covenant with g-d very seriously—and then at the flier. The leaflet explicitly describes israel as out of compliance with g-d’s orders, and how it should not be supported in its atrocities against our brethren, the

Palestinians. She looked back at him then, and said with the utmost Palestinian—demonstrators from numerous ethnicities. How ironic that this liberal was also surrounded by Jews, “bad” Jews and “good” ones, queer and trans, and observant and secular—all of us. Now I look at this picture, at the Neturei Karta member who is just as likely to protest a queer march as an israeli one, at the israel supporter who was telling my friend she was only on the pro-Palestine side of the fence because she is too ugly to find a husband, and I’m sure there is a wonderful yiddish joke to sum it all up—I just don’t know the punch line.

Not an hour later an israel supporter looked me up and down in a split-second eternity, taking in all my tattoos and the meaning behind the sign on my chest that read “ANOTHER JEW AGAINST ZIONISM.” Her response to my existence, indignant for my sake and full of self-conviction for hers: “You’re not really Jewish.”

To hell I’m not. Feh.

I am a Jew, a queer, a freaky pervert, a brawler. In no specific order.

My white skin and class privileges allow me to operate in numerous subcultures and “pass,” but nevertheless it is blaringly obvious to me that I am an outsider.

In our private struggles between privilege and oppression, sometimes privilege wins. That is to say, capitalism in the u.s. rewards assimilation.

Out gays can now operate in the professional world with the Human Rights Campaign at their side. Some Jews have resources that enable them to change their last name and even anglicize their features, in order to escape anti-semitism. Transpeople who pass in the gender-binary system

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can choose not to be out in order to maintain relative security. Caucasian queers can easily slip into the comforts of the lgbt “community,” ignorant of the white supremacy that dictates who belongs.

In this treacherous world, everyone “deserves” to be safe, and the idea of it is seductive. For those who have been swishing since they first stood, there’s no way to run and hide. For many, the question is: How to win the fight? Unlike many of my peers, I get to choose who knows I’m Jewish;

no one has ever thrown pennies at me while I walked down the street, no stranger has called me a “dirty Jew”—only the people I thought were my allies have done that. Through talking with friends about the violence they have faced in their lives, I am just now realizing how often I exploit my ability to blend in, and how I must intentionally blow my own cover.

Once a Nazi attempted to befriend me, not realizing until I told him: I AM THE ENEMY.

Living in fear of the very real threat of anti-Jewish violence turns some of us into cheerleaders for the bully on the playground or the bully’s side-kick. The heckler who not just picks on but terrorizes those who have little power or means to defend themselves. Aligning ourselves with the aggres-sor doesn’t abate the grotesque stereotypes they give us: money pinchers in control of the world’s resources who are in cahoots with the devil. Neither conversos nor those from the pale escaped these accusations, because it doesn’t matter your monetary or social capital—which is why no amount of assimilation today will erase the foreboding pendulum we hear creaking above us.

I used to speak to various audiences about my brief experience in Palestine, and why I am a Jew in candid support of the Palestinian inde-pendence struggle. In my spiel I would identify zionism as a racist political ideology, having little to do with Judaism—religiously, culturally, or eth-nically. Once, while speaking at a university, I engaged in an argument with a professor. He declared that my view, of Jews needing to take a stand against anti-semitism by challenging the imperialist motives of the u.s. and israel, was “like blaming the victim of a rape.”

Unlike him, I refuse to be a victim.

Israel is expelling and attempting to eradicate an entire people with a violent occupation in the name of Jews everywhere. To embrace an

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identity of victimhood that accepts an uncomplicated history of Jews is yet another form of assimilation. It is buying into an ideal of security that is militarily enforced and selling out a rich legacy of anti-capitalist and anti-fascist resistance.

I don’t look to the tyrant to dismantle tyranny. We’ll do it our fuck-ing selves, thank you. When we make connections between marginalized groups and struggle together across identity lines, when we live in accor-dance with our own truths, we are living in defiance.

When I think on assimilation, I think of the kapo. Have you ever heard this word? It might ring familiar to many of you Jews out there. A kapo is the person who polices their own, the snitch, the sell-out. There were many kapos in the camps and ghettos of the shoah, some were Jews, some were Poles or Czechs, they were all prisoners. They were the ones who would crack the whip for the gestapo, monitor the movements of their peers, kill another on SS orders for an extra piece of bread or another day of pathetic existence. Today I use the word more loosely, but I derive

When I think on assimilation, I think of the kapo. Have you ever heard this word? It might ring familiar to many of you Jews out there. A kapo is the person who polices their own, the snitch, the sell-out. There were many kapos in the camps and ghettos of the shoah, some were Jews, some were Poles or Czechs, they were all prisoners. They were the ones who would crack the whip for the gestapo, monitor the movements of their peers, kill another on SS orders for an extra piece of bread or another day of pathetic existence. Today I use the word more loosely, but I derive

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