Gay Teens

More gay teens. It's WaPo's turn to normalize it and encourage it with a feature story called "Everybody Loves Andy." It's about all those high school kids who say they have a gay friend (Andy is the gay guy, in case you're wondering). Link. Excerpt:

Across from [Ali] is her longtime friend and fellow senior Andy Tonken, his expression a mixture of shared indignation and fond amusement.

"It bothers me. It means, like, Andy or any gay guy is not being treated like a human being. He's being treated like a 'gay guy.'" Ali says. "It's really obnoxious that there are these people who think it's, like, trendy" to have a gay friend.

Trendy is one way to describe it. Another way: just plain common. Nearly nine in 10 local 11th- or 12th-grade girls polled in the Post-Kaiser-Harvard survey reported having a friend who is openly gay or lesbian, the highest percentage of any group in the survey. This is a big, big difference from their parents. Only two in 10 mothers or fathers knew someone who was out when they were in high school.

That's toward the beginning of the story. Buried in the middle of this "All the kids like homosexuals" gush-fest, I found this:

"This past year in high school I was the only out gay student at Mason," Andy says of his junior year at George Mason in Falls Church, a relatively small public school with a strong academic reputation and a student body that would have given last year's election to John Kerry over George Bush by a ratio of 2 to 1. . .

[T]here's this one hallway in my school, it's the only way to the cafeteria," he says. "There was a period of time where I would avoid walking to the cafeteria alone because of things that senior boys would say to me."

"Just kind of, like, the jock types," Ali interrupts. . .

"It got to a point where it was just so much easier to walk down the hallway with someone else, talking to them, because I wouldn't hear what they said."

"It's the looks, the little looks," she says.

"Like: Euww, you're the scum of the planet," he says.

Do these bouts of bad high school mojo rub off on Ali's social status?

"I have to admit that sometimes someone will be like, 'You're friends with Andy Tonken?' And I'll be like, 'Yeah, I am.' And I don't say, 'Why are you saying that?' I don't get all [worked up] about it. Sometimes I will . . . if they are saying it in a really rude way. But generally I'm, like, 'Yeah, I am.'"

Is teenage homosexuality normal and accepted or isn't it?