I spoke with Newman recently about the 1970s, the suburbs and sexuality.

AfterEllen.com: Your new young adult novel Jailbait is set in the early 1970s. Why did you choose 1971, and not, say, 1981, for the setting of the book?
Lesléa Newman: When I wrote the story, the first several drafts, I really didn’t have a time frame in mind; I just assumed it was contemporary. And then my very wise editor at Random House said to me. “This doesn’t read like a contemporary novel. It reads like the seventies. So, you need to either bring it into the present or set it back in the past. When she said that, I immediately got very excited about the idea of setting it back in the past and I think that’s what was happening all along. It’s the time when I was a teenager so I think it was easiest for me to get in the head of a teenager by putting her in the time period when I was her age. That’s kind of the reason, and then it became so much fun. Her brother Mike really epitomizes that time period; a really fun character to develop. I sent away for TV guides from that era, I looked up slang, I looked up the Top Forty hits during that time, and I really got into it.

AE: Jailbait also examines parent/child relationships. Do you think they have changed much in thirty odd years?
LN: One would like to think so. I’m not a parent so I can’t really speak from direct experience, but from the teenagers I have met, when I go to talk at schools, etcetera, it seems like it really depends on the family. There are some kids who feel like their parents don’t have a clue as to what’s going on in their life, and that’s probably true, and there’s some parents who are very active and maybe even over involved in their kids’ lives. I do know that teenagers have been and will always be very smart, and very capable of leading a double life if they choose to.

AE: Additionally, Jailbait depicts the cruelty of teens to one another, for instance, classmate Donald Caruso’s relentless teasing of Andrea, especially when he calls her a lesbian and a dyke in a derogatory fashion. Can you say something about the cruelty of teens, in both the pre- and post-Columbine culture, and why you chose to depict that in the book?
LN: I think Columbine is a perfect example. I think teenagers are incredibly cruel and I think it all comes from their own insecurity. If somebody else is being picked on, then I won’t be the one getting picked on. I, in fact, was the second fattest kid in my high school and junior high, and I’m so ashamed to say that I participated in the teasing of the first fattest child because it wasn’t me. Of course any child who is perceived as different whether in fact he or she is or not, is a target. I mean there was a kid in my school who had four gray hairs. That kid was teased mercilessly for that, and of course any kid who was perceived to be gay or lesbian, that was just it.

In fact, in 1999, I was invited back to my own high school, Jericho High School on Long Island, (where) I was inducted into their Hall of Fame. They did not tell the students that I was a gay writer, they just said I was a writer, and they didn’t tell them anything about what I had written, so I wound up coming out to 300 high school students during an assembly. Because it’s pretty impossible to talk about my work and not come out, not that I want to be closeted anyway. They were asking me all these questions and I asked them, “What’s it like for a gay or lesbian student here at Jericho High School in 1999?” There was this dead silence, and then one kid piped up from the back and said, “We don’t have any gay or lesbian students here,” which of course wasn’t true.

A year later, I got an email from a young woman who said that she was now in college, and she was at that assembly, and she knew she was a lesbian all through high school but wouldn’t dare come out because she knew how much she would have been tormented for that. She was so happy that I was at that assembly.

AE: That’s amazing, because you would have thought, even six years ago, that there were GSA’s (Gay/Straight Alliances) in schools.
LN: Right, and that just showed me how little has changed. Even here in Northampton (Massachusetts), a.k.a. Lesbianville, U.S.A., I had spoken at the high school, and after I spoke--this was very moving to me--a guy stood up, who seemed like your basic football player type, and he said, “After hearing you speak I’m going to stop using the word fag the way I use it because it’s not right,” and that floored me.

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