Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America | 
 enlarge | Authors: Mitchell Gold, Mindy Drucker
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group, LLC
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 15801
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 1929774109
Dewey Decimal Number: 305
EAN: 9781929774104
ASIN: 1929774109
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
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Product Description
A mental health crisis faces American teens right now--and it is one we can solve. Hundreds of thousands of gay teens face traumatic depression, fear, rejection, persecution, and isolation--usually alone. Studies show they are 190 percent more likely to used drugs or alcohol and four times more likely to attempt suicide. Homophobia and discrimination are at the heart of their pain. Love, support, and acceptance--all within our power to give--can save them. This book is for: clergy, parents, educators, and politicians who cause harm with their words and actions; parents of gay teens; teens navigating this difficult time; and fair-minded people who want to help end the harm. Here are revealing stories by forty diverse Americans, some well known and some not, plus insights from straight clergy and parents explaining their support of gay people as whole human beings guaranteed equal rights by our Constitution.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
Crisis December 20, 2008
When my son was very young, I sensed that he was most likely gay and did my own research to find understanding and acceptance. However, this book helped me to understand that having a supportive parent and siblings is not enough. Hopefully, other family members and friends who read this book will gain insight into the hurtfulness and self loathing that results from bigotry outside the home. If I had read a book such as this twenty years ago, I would have had deeper understanding of his "world at school" and been more proactive.
Pain inflicted on some youth by some churches and families December 16, 2008
It's sad to think how many gay youth are made to feel so ugly and unworthy for something they cannot control. By distorted intrepretation of the Bible some churches (thankfully not all) hammer in the idea that homosexuality is an abomination. When a child knows he/she is diffent and can't change, will family be supportive? Many will, others will not. For me, after reading the painful stories, the best part of the book was the light of newer intrepretations of the scriptures that have caused so much hurt. Now, if only Biblical literalists would read the book!
CRISIS expressed in easily understood statements December 7, 2008
This book ought to be read by every teacher, educational administrator, preacher, doctor, counselor, politician, judge, lawyer, policeman, sheriff, voter, businessman, human being in the world. It is an indictment of the status quo where sexual orientation is concerned. The commonality of repressive experiences is damning of the current social situation and repressive civil rights policies.
Hearing the Stories, Seeing the Faces: A Review of Crisis November 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an extremely valuable book, particularly for communities of faith struggling with the request of gay believers for full inclusion, full communion,a and equal rights within churches. The book documents well the tragically deformative role that religion often plays in the lives of LGBT persons, by fueling condemnation and often outright rejection or hatred.
In doing so, it provides a valuable reminder that religion can, and often does, play a different role in human life and human communities--a liberating rather than oppressing role. This study suggests that, in order for communities of faith to move from oppression to liberation of gay human beings, they must begin to know actual gay human beings--as human beings and not as stereotyped threats to Christian morality. The book's most important contribution is its first-hand accounts that permit people of faith to hear the stories of gay brothers and sisters and to see the faces of gay brothers and sisters.
Through all of the stories in Crisis there runs a common thread: the thread of shame, depression, isolation, overcompensation, and fear of rejection and failure that gay persons all too often encounter as we claim our identities in a culture (and in religious communities) that reinforce these negative self-images. The stories in Crisis document well the hard work required to sustain self-worth in a culture so unrelentingly negative, a culture in which the the name of God is too often used to create obstacles to gay human beings claiming their identities.
As a number of the book's autobiographies suggest, in the uniquely religion-imbued culture of the United States, culture is often informed by religious assumptions and biblical citations, even when those making the assumptions and using the citations have little familiarity with religion. In this regard, there are strong parallels between the struggle of gay persons for liberation today and similar struggles in the past. As with the struggle to overcome slavery, racial segregation, or the subordination of women, gay persons have to deal today with oppressive norms that have been inculturated as religious norms, even when those norms have detached themselves from actual communities of faith.
In dealing with this social inculturation of quasi-religious norms demeaning gay human beings, communities of faith need to remember (by looking back on their response to slavery, segregation, and the subordination of women, for instance) that religion can sometimes be spectacularly wrong. It can end up on the wrong side of history, and of the liberating impulses of history.
Religion has the potential to be salvific, but it also carries the power to be demonic. Look at the Holocaust, burning of witches, Crusades, pogroms, slavery and how can one doubt this? This historical perspective ought to give churches that are certain today of their scriptural warrant for oppressing gay persons and for supporting that oppression in culture pause to think.
I found the Crisis chapters on the risks of being openly gay at work particularly important. Those risks clearly vary from profession to profession. As a theologian who has taught and done administrative work in church-sponsored colleges, I have learned that the churches may well be the last places in the nation to welcome openly gay employees.
There is, sad to say, a unique lack of shelter and welcome for openly gay persons within many churches and church-related institutions. It seems to me that, before communities of faith can call on society to treat gay human beings with respect and justice, they must set their own houses in order by dealing with their history of disrespect and injustice towards gay brothers and sisters--disrespect and injustice still apparent in the personnel policies of many churches and church-owned institutions.
In the final analysis, gay people may bring to the churches gifts that the churches refuse to accept at their own risk. As Crisis demonstrates, in a world in which children are often abused despite our culture's and churches' professed concern for the welfare of children, the gay community demonstrates an extraordinary concern for the well-being of bullied children. Despite the claim by many in both church and society that gay persons are anti-family and non-generative, gay persons can do an admirable job of sustaining families, and, in particular, of reaching out to assist children enduring abuse from peers.
This is a valuable and often unacknowledged contribution of the gay community to church and society. The book documents it well.
Great book! Make sure your copy is not defective. November 11, 2008
This is a great book, an important book! Make sure you have all the pages. My copy arrived with the first 15 pages from "Normandy to Victory." "Crisis" begins on page 5 so I lack the intro by Navratilova. This is a rich book of intense experiences which you will want to share with friends, family, co-workers. No library should be without it!
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