Mason Crest, an educational publishing company headquartered in Broomall, will this fall launch a pioneering series of books that seeks to empower LGBT students — and educate other young adults on the LGBT community.
The series, “The Gallup’s Modern Guide to Gay, Lesbian & Transgender Life” will be available in September, and the company is eager for local schools to jump on board.
“We think there’s certainly been enough progress in the past few decades where people aren’t looking at this topic as something unusual or inappropriate,” said Mason Crest principal Louis Cohen. “Our mission is to get these to a wider audience than just gay and lesbian teens, because these young adults, who are very impressionable, are at an age where they’re able to open their minds. This isn’t an issue of people thinking something is right or wrong, but rather an issue of making sure that young people can understand other people and accept their differences.”
The 15-book series, which brings together a host of authors who geared their writing toward the “tween” population, includes such titles as “Coming Out: Telling Family and Friends,” “Homophobia: From Social Stigmas to Hate Crimes” and “Smashing the Stereotypes: What Does it Mean to be Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender?”
“We try to publish things that are underpublished but that still require and deserve attention and deserve to be put into the educational marketplace,” Cohen said. “Kids need to be getting educated on this subject, amongst many other things, because this isn’t something they get to see in their regular curriculum.”
Mason Crest operated as Chelsea House Publishing for 20 years but relaunched under the current moniker in 2002. Cohen noted that in the early 1980s, the company published “Gays and Lesbians of Achievement,” the predecessor to similarly titled works focusing on such communities as African Americans and women. Although the original LGBT work wasn’t very successful, Cohen has higher hopes for this latest endeavor.
“We think this series is going to be much better received this time around given the shift in American thinking,” he said. “The need for these materials is crucial, and we felt like the timing for this was finally right.”
LGBT researcher Dr. James T. Sears, a former professor at Harvard University and Penn State who penned “Growing Up Gay in the South” among more than a dozen other books, served as the senior consultant for the series.
Sears said the series signifies longstanding issues faced by the LGBT community, but also highlights the progress of the LGBT community in recent decades, which he noted should be particularly encouraging to the young LGBT community.
“Some of these are recurring topics that people growing up queer in the 1940s or the new millennium would be able to understand. For instance, the issue of homosexuality and religion is something that has been around throughout that entire time,” he said. “But on the other hand, there’s one book about gay characters in theater and movies, which is something that people even one generation ago wouldn’t have been able to see a title about.”
While he anticipates the series could create some controversy because of its content, Sears said the current dearth of in-school resources for LGBT students should supercede any opposition.
“You can certainly find quite a bit of information on the Internet and from other resources, but I think it’s ironic that the single institution responsible for educating young people has been so out of touch with young people’s needs with respect to this kind of information,” he said. “These books provide a lot of information in one place on a lot of different topics.”
Sears noted that in addition to the benefits for LGBT youth, the series also seeks to curb the tide of homophobia among other students, which he surmised is often perpetuated by inaction on the part of school administrators.
“Kids understand that you can’t harass someone because of one’s race, but you can still go into many schoolyards and hear taunts about ‘fag’ or ‘lesbian,’ and what allows that to happen is the environment within schools of silence. Kids who bully are encouraged by their schools’ silence on these issues,” he said. “With this information being available in school, it not only provides greater access to young people questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity, but it also sends the important message that you can’t cut out information from a curriculum because you don’t like it or because it’s controversial. Those days are over.”
For more information about the series, visit www.lgbt-books.com.
Jen Colletta can be reached at [email protected].