New York Magazine’s latest feature “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” takes a look at one of the magnet school's cliques whose members are obsessed with sex. Teenagers obsessed with sex? I never! The story focuses on a “heteroflexible” Stuyvesant student named Alair, the leader of a group who’re called the “bi-clique” in school because they all mess around with each other--or want to--in both same and opposite-sex scenarios. “To these kids, homophobia is as socially shunned as racism was to the generation before them,” Alex Morris said. Even though it has undertones of “look at how crazy kids are today,” this story gave me hope that the neo-liberal, privileged (but with a healthy dose of entitlement guilt) teens of today will someday rule our country and make it more open to variant sexualities. On second thought, when they attend Smith College in two years where everyone’s queer and have to rethink sexuality as rebellion, won’t they co-opt some other identity?

The piece is well written. It explores the particularities of a group of teens in “an environment conducive to fewer sexual inhibitions,” while illuminating that they are neither troubled nor trouble makers. But at its core, it’s a trend piece, and when LGBTQ issues are only explored in the mainstream press when there’s a trend to “discover,” the day-to-day lives of LGBTQ folk are ignored and supplanted with fluff and sensationalism. In 2002, New York did a feature “Growing Up Gay” represented a handful of New York teens and their coming out process. What made this article way more successful was that it wasn’t expressing a trend, but a common occurrence, gay teens coming out to their parents. Even if it’s not as sensational as a bunch of touchy-feely kids’ sexual exploration, it works because it’s honest.