Hear Me Out: True Stories of Teens Educating and Confronting Homophobia

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Hear Me Out is a collection of stories by 19 young contributors who are
connected with TEACH (Toronto’s Teens Educating and Confronting
Homophobia), a peer-based program founded in 1993 and run by Planned
Parenthood of Toronto since 1997. These are personal stories that the
authors have shared in school classrooms in an effort to educate and
change negative attitudes about gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual,
transsexual, and transgender people. The stories vary in length from two
to 22 pages; the writers are in their late teens or early 20s.

The narratives go well beyond the content of “typical” coming-out
stories, especially in how they explore the complexities of homophobia.
Many of the stories are provided by members of visible minorities who
have found themselves having to deal with both racial prejudice and
homophobia, the latter being expressed by both the majority culture and
their own cultural group, sometimes with an additional religious twist.
A number of the transgender writers also speak to the transphobia that
can exist even within the gay community.

The only stories that fail to work well (both are titled “Trials of
Education”) are “visual” stories. The first too briefly introduces
a video and then fails to indicate its availability, while the second
consists of five pages of black-and-white pictures that require more
context. The book concludes with a glossary of terms and brief
contributor biographies.

All adolescents can identify with the pain of, and the pride in,
discovering who you really are, but Hear Me Out’s personal narratives
speak powerfully to the additional, often dangerous challenges faced by
LGBTT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, and
two-spirited) youth in achieving this core developmental task. Highly
recommended.