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Where Was the Judy Blume for Queer Kids?
Being able to identify queer characters in literature is a lifeline for an isolated gay teenager
I read Ree Jackson’s story, ‘Judy Blume was my sex education teacher’ with interest. I loved Judy Blume when I was growing up.
Like Ree, I learnt more about periods in ‘Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret’ than my Mum ever told me. I found that masturbation was normal in ‘Deenie’. ‘Forever’ was passed around my whole class because they actually ‘did it’ in that book. But for me, there was still something missing, another piece that I was searching for.
As a teenager in the late 1980s, I could never find the story I wanted, the one I could relate to. I was searching for the story different to all the ‘boy meets girl’ teenage tales. The one where the girl fancies her best friend, who is also a girl, and is in agonies about these strange new feelings. Just like I was. Nobody in the books aimed for the teenage market in the 1980s ever felt like I did.
In the UK in the late 1980s and 1990s we had that lovely law, section 28. It was passed in 1988 by a Conservative government and stopped councils and schools "promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family…
