I am new to Oasis and just bopping around to see what it is like. I am the assistant director of Outlet, a queer youth program in Mountain View, CA. We have services such as in-person discussion groups, movie nights, counseling and HIV/AIDs education available for free for youth 13-20. So I thought it was important to have a face on this site. I am also excited just to see it here!!

So recently I've been noticing the extreme criticism that gay and bisexual life style gets in my school. People aren't using gay as a general insult, rather actually referring to sexuality. I don't react- I'm too shy. I wish I could though. It hurts.
It's hard trying to fit in when you're 11 and gay D:
Advice please?

DesuCake

I'm a big fan of podcasts. I listen to them as I walk around San Francisco, during gym workouts, you name it...

With the emphasis on relaunching Oasis, I started looking around for gay youth podcasts and didn't find all that much. To be honest, I don't like many gay podcasts in general, because they all tend to be a bunch of friends sitting around gossiping and being mean and, honestly, I don't have time for that negative energy.

So, I was really happy to find Jian's "That's So Gay" podcast the other day (it *just* launched, he's only done two episodes so far). He's just a soft-spoken, obviously intelligent guy and I just like the whole vibe he puts out on his podcast. It's sort of like an audio version of some of our writers on Oasis.

The following is an excerpt from the book "Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers" by Cris Beam, Published by Harcourt, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

School

Here’s what you see when you drive down Los Angeles’s Santa Monica Boulevard just east of La Brea: a 7-Eleven, a Shakey’s Pizza, a low concrete building with fish painted on the side, and a taco stand. There’s a Chinese takeout place and a triple-X video rental shop, a filling station, and four lanes of traffic, two in each direction. Old people waiting for the bus. Young mothers dragging children in flip-flops. A discount dollar store, a Laundromat, and a bunch of teenagers standing around and smoking. If you stare for more than a minute, you may note that most of these teenagers are girls, and that they’re more ethnically varied than other cliques in this segregated town. But that’s it. Santa Monica Boulevard’s got the sun-bleached, chain-store feeling of most of L.A.

If you’re a transgender girl (meaning you were born male but live as a female), you might notice something extra along this stretch of Santa Monica. It’s here that you’ll find girls trading secrets about how to shoot up the black-market hormones purchased from the swap meets in East L.A. If the hormones don’t work fast enough to manifest your inner vision of wider hips and C cups, you can find out about “pumping parties” out in the Valley, where a former veterinarian or a “surgeon’s wife” from Florida will shoot free-floating industrial-grade silicone into hips, butts, breasts, knees -- even cheeks and foreheads. Of course, this is dangerous when the oils shift and form hard lumps in the armpits and thighs, but you’ll look good for a while.

I'm a 16 year old female who feels trapped in my own body. I feel like there was a mistake with me being born female, I'm supposed to be a man. I am a man, just not physically. And I'm struggling. I've recently come out to my therapist, to my mom and to some of my friends. There is no question in my mind how I am supposed to have been, I have felt this way all my life, for as long as I can remember. In the privacy of my room I would be a boy, and around others I was a girl because they would never believe I was a boy. It got worse once I hit puberty. I would look in the mirror and wonder why I was made this way, that it was all a big mistake.