Hello, Groin - by Beth Goobie

The writing of the book...

Part of the process of writing Hello, Groin involved interviews with approximately fifty Saskatoon high school students whom I met randomly at malls or while riding the bus. The question I asked each of them was: What is it like at your school for students who are lesbian or gay? Of the fifty students, three voluntarily identified themselves as bisexual, and one as lesbian. With only two exceptions (neither of whom identified themselves as lesbian or bisexual), the students told me that lesbian and gay students faced minimal harassment, if any, at their school, and this harassment was restricted to verbal comments. The social group most frequently identified as perpetrating this verbal harassment was the “jock” crowd, followed by the “preps” and the “popular kids.” The two students who stated that lesbian or gay students “might get jumped” at their school attended what are commonly known as the two “rougher” schools in the city. Saskatoon has a total of fourteen high schools (seven public, seven Catholic); I spoke to students attending twelve of these.

What surprised me was that the students who were the most emphatic about the lack of harassment lesbian and gay students faced were the four students who identified themselves as lesbian or bisexual (all four were female). They stressed that they found their families, peer group and school administration to be supportive. In fact when I pushed the point, asking if they had faced any harassment personally, they looked startled, even a little stunned. Basically, almost every student I interviewed conveyed the impression that sexual orientation is a non-issue for teenagers. In fact, I was flatly informed by one sixteen-year-old woman that many teenagers no longer think in terms of straight versus gay, but simply bisexual.

Along with absorbing this information, I also learned that several Saskatoon high schools are proactive in providing a supportive environment for lesbian/gay students–so much so, that two of them have simultaneously become known by the city’s student population as “the gay school.” One of these schools has a lesbian/gay club whose members are invited into classrooms to speak to fellow students about the experience of being homosexual. At the other “gay school,” students have staged gay pride parades in the hallways with the support of the administration. At one Catholic high school, heterosexual students have initiated voluntary-attendance assemblies that dealt with the theme of homophobia. And on a wider scale, it is worthwhile noting that the Canadian government passed same-sex marriage legislation in 2005; this was preceded by a majority of the provinces legalizing same-sex marriage. Canada can even boast of an officially-married male couple who both work as Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers.

Several reviewers of Hello, Groin have criticized the book as being “fairytalish” and “surrealistically” positive. I expected this. At the same time, it is my sense that today’s lesbian and gay teenagers are collectively encountering a vastly diverse range of experiences. The situation facing a sixteen-year-old lesbian growing up in small town Texas will, understandably, be very different from that facing a sixteen-year-old lesbian growing up in Soho. No one novel can claim to cover all the angles; no one protagonist is universal. As such, it is important to allow YA literature to explore a full range of possible experiences, so that adolescent readers can learn about the “otherness” the world has to offer. While it is certainly true that many lesbian/gay teenagers continue to face enormous and reprehensible harassment, this is no longer true for all of them. Society is changing, there are stories that are arising directly out of these changes, and some of them are very heartening. Obviously not every lesbian/gay student in Saskatoon is surrounded by love and support, but from the responses of the teenagers I interviewed, it would appear that a growing number of them are. I, for one, am proud of that.