ABSTRACT
When we wrote Sexuality in Adolescence (Moore & Rosenthal 1993), including a chapter on gay and lesbian adolescence, was a novel and brave venture. Very few texts recognized the existence of homosexual young people let alone attempted to deal with the issues that gay and lesbian adolescents confront in their daily lives. At a time when the sexuality of young people has remained a cause for concern, the focus has almost exclusively been on what makes for an acceptable, desirable heterosexual sexual life. Indeed, the normative nature of heterosexuality is constantly reinforced in the media, in popular culture, in societal institutions as well as in academic research (Wilton 2000). In recent years, however, there has been a burgeoning interest in young people’s same-sex desire, mostly framed as a health issue and largely driven by concerns about the potential impact of an AIDS epidemic. Academics, public health professionals and those working with young people now recognize the need to understand homosexuality as well as heterosexuality among adolescents in order to provide a positive and safe environment in which young people can live their lives. As Hillier and Rosenthal (2001) wrote in their introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Adolescence dedicated to gay and lesbian youth, it is important to promote research that is devoted to this group because we ‘need to better understand and theorize young people’s sexuality in all its diversity’ (p. 1).
