Growing Up Gay: The Sorrows and Joys of Gay and Lesbian Adolescence.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie

So thank goodness for Growing Up Gay: The Sorrows and Joys of Gay and Lesbian Adolescence, by Rita Reed (W.W. Norton). It tells the stories of two gay youth in their own words, and with seven years of pictures. As the owner of our local feminist bookstore put it when she recommended the book, "These are photographs you don't see." And these are words that many of us don't hear. Rita Reed spent hundreds of hours with her subjects, photographing them at school, at home with their parents and in their first apartments, with their girlfriends and boyfriends. Reed serves primarily as a conduit for two lives and two stories. She stays out of the way.

We meet Amy Grahn at age fifteen when she is just starting to grapple with her sexuality: "I was different from what they think is normal. I mean, look at me, it's quite evident that I'm not the picture-perfect woman from Minnetonka. . . . You know, have your makeup on and big hair. It's so unnatural. . . . That's the way society makes women feel. It's all just a big game."

Amy drops out of high school and moves to Minneapolis, where she falls in love for the first time: "One weekend when she came to see me that summer, we made love and I cried. It was the first time that ever happened. It was an incredible feeling. I didn't know what to do with it. It was kind of overwhelming, but it was wonderful."

Jamie Nabozny, Reed's other subject, recognized his gay identity at an early age. "When I was seven, my uncle...