Should a 12-Year-Old Come Out?

Sex researchers say that middle schoolers are increasingly coming out to friends or family, according to this week’s New York Times Magazine cover story. And not just in progressive enclaves either: Benoit Denizet-Lewis reported from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a community of gay tweens has developed. While bullying and worse continues, one professor said the lives of gay middle-schoolers would be “nearly incomprehensible to earlier generations of gay youth.” The result is the first generation of adolescents in a demographic that has often been seen as exclusively adult.