As a teenager, I wrote dozens of poems recording my angst about broken hearts, trying to fit in, and searching for my own identity. I remember using the words “bloody” and “broken” a lot.

Although I thought I was brilliant at the time—and even managed to get a couple of poems published—looking back on that juvenilia now is a little discomforting. I was so needy, so desperate, filled with so much yearning; I viewed the world and everyone in it with such naiveté and wide-eyed wonder.

Reading the poems, essays, and stories in Becoming: Young Ideas About Gender, Identity, and Sexuality, invokes a similar bag of mixed feelings. The teens and young adults featured in this anthology write with a raw innocence that brings you back—viscerally—to your own young adulthood. Their writing is sometimes clumsy; you can see some of them enthusiastically discovering the English language and wielding words recklessly, throwing adjectives about with melodramatic flair.

But this youthful abandon is also what makes Becoming such a charming and fascinating book. Editors Diane Anderson-Minshall and Gina de Vries have approached the pieces with a light hand, leaving intact the young writers’ sometimes awkward turns of phrase. This results in a collection that feels truly authentic. Anderson-Minshall and de Vries, thankfully, have decided to keep it real.

Some of the pieces in this anthology are particularly wonderful, showcasing young writers who are sure to have a future in print. In the poem “The First (Culture Fuck),” Wendy M. Thompson explores the complex feelings of a Chinese/African American butch girl, writing with a disarming straightforwardness that delivers a deep, unexpected impact. In R. L. Baldwin’s “Faggot,” a young African American teen confronts his gay twin brother. Written in street lingo that brings out this young man’s voice with impressive clarity, the piece is honest and rough, dealing with a straight man’s eventual acceptance of his brother’s sexuality. Ellen Freytag’s “Last Lesson” ends with a triplet of sentences that reveals the complexity of heartache at any age: “My eyes still water. Your eyes are / still water. Her eyes still the waters.”

Becoming also includes several essays about coming out and dealing with the aftermath, providing a fascinating look at what being queer means to young adults today. In “The Day Chooses Me,” Nadine Gartner writes about coming out to her mother, relating all of that anxiety and fear in the midst of a finely drawn vignette of mother and daughter at the grocery store. In “How Many Genders Fit in a Women’s College?” Tucker Lieberman examines the relatively new phenomenon of FTMs at women’s colleges, and exposes both the positive and negative reactions that some young transfolk have experienced.

Gender and its fluidity is a subject that is often addressed in Becoming. Many pieces explore what it means to be butch or femme, sometimes evoking a 1950s-era spirit of gender roles that is both surprising and intriguing, particularly in a world in which butch/femme is not always acceptable (note The L Word). In “I Call My Girl a Boy Sometimes,” Theresa E. Molter shares a sense of gender fluidity that reminds us that many young queer folks ascribe to a much more mutable definition of gender than does the Webster’s tucked into your bookshelf.

Becoming also includes pieces on bisexuality, violence, sex, depression, and politics; the topics covered by its authors range widely over the young queer experience, and there’s likely to be something in there for everyone interested in what it means to be young and queer today. The book is supplemented by several interviews with young queer folks about their lives; a nationwide list of local resources for queer youth; suggested reading; information about relevant websites and conferences; and a useful glossary of queer terms. Although the resource listings may be quickly rendered obsolete by the speed of change and the internet, Becoming is more about providing an outlet for young queer voices than providing teens with hotline phone numbers.

In the brief but spirited foreword, Zoe Trope (author of Please Don’t Kill the Freshman) writes, “What I’m trying to say is: This isn’t permanent. This is so temporary.”

She’s right. Becoming records only a moment in time for these young queer writers—a moment that, even now, is continually receding further into the past. But this snapshot in time reveals an abundance of experience. I’m amazed that young people are coming out so early these days. I’m amazed that they are not afraid to put those experiences down on paper for the world to see.

As a teenager struggling with my own sexual orientation, I didn’t share those experiences with anyone. Perhaps if I’d had a copy of Becoming at the time, I wouldn’t have kept those poems to myself. That’s the true beauty of a book like Becoming; it’s able to show young queer folks that they aren’t alone, that all their anguish and fear and desire makes them just like thousands of other teens out there: perfectly normal.

Get Becoming from Amazon.com or directly from the publisher