by Sylvia Woodham

Created on: April 08, 2009

Allan Gurganus stated that the next frontier in literature will be to see how issues of sexual identity will be treated in the future, much as the frontier of ethnic discrimination has been treated in the past.

In former generations, the issues of segregation, discrimination, and coping with ethnic diversity were the charged topics that caused debate, scandal, and outrage. My cousin's South Carolinian Presbyterian mother would not attend her wedding to a Jewish man. If her sister, my grandmother, would role over in her grave if I dated, let alone married, a black man, how would this generation even begin to cope with the more pre-eminent questions of what GENDER, not race, a young person might chose as a life partner.

These were certainly questions on the margins of society during their life-times, but not topics that were discussed or debated. My parents' friend had divorced his wife to be open about his sexual preference for men, but he was "the eccentric gay friend." It was no surprise that there were rumors circulating about the female gym teacher because she fit a stereotype. What do we do when these topics are no longer on the fringe, but becoming a mainstream question, and the definitions of your sexual identity are no longer defined for you? How will both the mainstream, and the fringe, communities, handle an honest treatment of the topic?

Attending college, the quip was that "one in four... (maybe more)" of the student population were or would be homosexual by graduation. The pressure seems daunting. At 20, you are not supposed to determine a career, but a sexual identity, and decide which camp will be your future home. Instead of deciding at 20 whether to be sexual active or not, that pressure is placed on us in middle school, and in college we must face the greater pressure to decide which gender you prefer. Or as one classmate put it "sometimes you feel like a nut..."

Much like the endless menu we now have of religions, and freedom to practice them, in this country, we have the same never-ending list of sexualities to choose from, and if you do not find the one you want, you can make your own sect. You do not even have to chose just whether to date one sex or the other. You can change your sex, and then date either the same or different sex, or both. You can date both sexes, either separately or at the same time, or all three (or five) of you can date each other. I think the better question to ask is: "Has it in fact become a new religion?" As a result,

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