Revolutionary Voices

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Stepping Out book reviews)

Book Review: Amy Sonnie’s Revolutionary Voices

Jeremy Patrick jhaeman@hotmail.com

Stepping Out v. 1, n. 7 October, 2000

An interesting concomitant of the GLBT rights movement is the increasingly early ages that adolescents are self-identifying as queer. Hundreds of high schools across the country now have gay-straight alliances and same-sex couples at the prom are not quite the shock they used to be. Frequently, however, the voices of queer youth are silenced and co-opted by older queer activists. A recent attempt to let queer youth speak for themselves is Revolutionary Voices (edited by Amy Sonnie, Alyson Publications, $11.95 paperback, 259 pages).

Revolutionary Voices is a collection of poems, short essays, and interviews written by queer youth between the ages of 14 and 26. The anthology "was created as a forum for today’s queer youth movement to address the issues that shape [their] lives," and includes a diverse array of writers: it seems almost every race, sexual orientation, and gender identity is represented.
The anthology covers a nice mix of topics—not the standard collection of coming-out stories. One youth tells about his struggle as an intersexed (born with multiple sex organs) individual. Another tells about how her acceptance of a queer sexuality helped to end her eating disorders. Two of the selections deserve special praise: "Private Anniversary With Mom Or, On Coming Home With Short Hair" by Alix Lindsey Olson and Jessica Arndt made me laugh more than any poem in quite a while. "Manifesto," a sad but inspirational poem by Margo Kelley Rodriguez should be copied and pinned to bulletin boards everywhere.

Revolutionary Voices is a noble attempt to open a dialogue with queer youth but it ultimately disappoints. Only a handful of the writings are really quality work; the rest seems the sort of thing one could read in a freshman creative writing class. Each of the 56 authors has his or her own biography page, and the flip of each biography page is a reproduction of the cover. Since almost 112 pages of the book is introductory material and 22 more is for the glossary and list of resources, only half of the book is really original material.

However, with the current paucity of queer youth anthologies, Revolutionary Voices is currently the best way we have of getting insight into the views of a much-neglected portion of our society. In this respect, at least, it’s worth reading.

(c) 2000 Jeremy Patrick