Show 4:

Generation Q

Produced and directed by Robert Byrd

You're a human being. You're the same as everybody.

			--  Gabe Torres

The Independent Television Service presents GENERATION Q, the final chapter of the four-part series THE QUESTION OF EQUALITY, focusing on the future of the gay and lesbian movement: young people. This program documents alternative schools and support groups that have been created to help youths who have been rejected or ostracized for their homosexuality. Often, these students were on the verge of dropping out or succumbing to the temptations of alcohol and drugs. GENERATION Q explores the complex relationship between these teenagers and their parents, friends, schools, and the culture at large.

GENERATION Q opens with Los Angeles EAGLE Center, a school for gay and lesbian youth. At EAGLE Center, students enjoy an atmosphere free from criticism and personal attack, as well as a curriculum designed to keep them interested and on track. In lively interviews, these teenagers share a variety of experiences that include harassment, rejection by their parents, and homelessness. The students movingly describe their eagerness to contribute to society despite its unwillingness to accept them with open arms.

We next visit Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Under 21, a lesbian and gay youth group, offers a safe place for a racially and ethnically diverse array of teenagers. With the freshness, honesty, and passion common to all teenagers, the kids at Under 21 discuss a variety of issues including coming out, suicide, family, love and sex, relationships, and AIDS.

GENERATION Q concludes in Massachusetts, where gay, lesbian, and straight youth actually wrote, filed, testified, and lobbied for the successful passage of legislation that outlaws discrimination against lesbian and gay students. At great personal risk, student activists appeared publicly to support the bill, often facing ostracism from friends and family. Their goal, as described by young activist Sarah Lonberg-Lew, is to see a world where gay and lesbian students could just go through high school, just being students, and not having to worry about their identity as gays or lesbians all the time and not having to explain themselves.

Intercut with poetry and performances by a group of young gay and lesbian artists, GENERATION Q opens a window on the future of the movement. It also provides tremendous insight into the lives of young people growing up in a world shadowed by AIDS and homophobia light years away from the sixties and seventies, when sexual freedom and social revolution offered youth the optimistic promise of a bright new world. These young people, heirs to a 26-year-old movement, are better equipped to deliver on the promise of Gay Liberation. As William Johnson says, "Kids have to realize that this is where things should be, and they''ll go on to fight to make it more equal in the outside world, outside of school. I think its like lighting the flame, to start the really big fire. Which is hopefully going to hit the rest of society."