As she approached Clear Lake Middle School for the first time since 1966, Julie Anne Peters felt as if she were shrinking

Article Published: Tuesday, June 24, 2003 - 12:00:00 AM MST

Editor prods Peters to reinvent herself as 'gay-lit' author
By Eric Hubler, Denver Post Education Writer

As she approached Clear Lake Middle School for the first time since 1966, Julie Anne Peters felt as if she were shrinking.

It was Fine Arts Day, an effort to turn spring fever into a learning opportunity at the Adams County school. The term "fine arts" was being interpreted liberally, and Peters faced some stiff competition for students' attention, including the News 4 chopper and a BMX stunt team.

But more than 30 kids came to the library to hear Peters, who, as the increasingly successful author of novels for children and young adults, was a local girl made good.

There was something Peters wanted to tell them: When she was their age, she was bad.

In eighth grade, a new girl came to the school, then called Clear Lake Junior High. Peters wanted to break into a popular clique, and one way to do that was to torture the new girl, Clarabell, who was tall and bony and talked funny.

"We were cruel to Clarabell. We made her cry. She didn't last very long here at Clear Lake," Peters said.

Decades later, still trying to atone, Peters turned Clarabell into Lurlene, the tall, bony, funny-talking new girl at a suburban Denver middle school in "How Do You Spell Geek?" This time, there's a happier ending: the snobby girls who initially snub Lurlene learn to accept her.

"I just hate intolerance, and I hate that I've been a part of intolerance," she said.

It's one of many variations on the theme of Peters' books, which she defines broadly as "tolerance and diversity."

"I never intend to do that, but when I look back I always see that theme recurring," she says.

Now 51 and living in Lakewood, Peters identifies with her one-time victim rather than with the popular girls because, as an "out and proud" lesbian, being different plays an ever more important role in her life and in her books.

Peters' 10th novel, "Keeping You a Secret," was released in March. All her books involve anguished kids, usually girls, but this is the first to deal overtly with young lesbians, who Peters believes are aching for their own literary genre.

It was Peters' editor in Boston who suggested she reinvent herself as a "gay lit" author, and she resisted the idea at first. Since coming out in 1974, she had learned to live comfortably but sometimes fearfully as an openly gay woman.

Peters thinks her publishing contacts, who live in New York and Boston, may have a hard time understanding how perilous it is for her and her partner of nearly 30 years, Sherri Leggett, to cohabitate in Colorado.

Peters says she and Leggett, the manager of the Cat Care Society shelter, "have both been the victims of verbal and physical incidents because of who we are."

Eventually she accepted the dare, and her publisher is marketing her accordingly. A recent book tour in Texas included standard bookstore signings, but also visits to gay youth groups.

The youth-group visits were far more interesting, Peters says. She was surprised to discover that kids are coming out as early as 13.

"I couldn't spell 'sexuality' at 13," she says.

She found that coming out to parents remains almost as difficult as it was for her back in 1974, when she sat down with her mother for a nerve-wracking chat to tell her she'd fallen in love with Leggett, a fellow student at Colorado Women's College, now part of University of Denver.

Her mother seemed to be fine with it - until Peters discussed telling her brother and sisters.

"No, this is a private matter!" her mother snapped. Even though her siblings welcomed Leggett into their lives, it was years before they talked openly about the relationship, something that still saddens Peters.

This is the theme of "Keeping You a Secret." Holland, a high school senior who assumed she was straight, falls for Cece, an openly gay transfer student. She finds herself sharing Cece's fear and anger when some male students harass Cece and wonders how she avoided noticing the gay world for so long:

"How many were there? I wondered. Four, a dozen, the whole school? When had it begun? Had Southglenn always been this way? So hostile? We had a strong policy against bullying, but how was that any different from harassment or discrimination? It was all about hate. There should be laws. Were there laws? Can you legislate against hatred? Why hadn't we discussed this in any of my government classes?"

Some parents and librarians oppose the book. Many grownups tried to get Peters' previous books pulled from schools.

One librarian even wrote to say she'd just tossed one of Peters' books into her wastebasket.

Peters' brother John, a children's librarian at the New York Public Library and an influential reviewer for trade journals, told her not to worry.

"Throwing a book in the trash is probably what would get kids to read it," he said.

It was while accepting accolades for her eighth and best-known book, "Define 'Normal,"' that Peters first publicly confronted what she calls the "global outing" that "Keeping You a Secret" would bring.

She was in Oklahoma City in March, accepting the Sequoyah Award - a readers' choice award similar to the Blue Spruce Award in Colorado - when a member of the ballroom-sized audience asked what she was working on next.

"I thought, 'Somebody save me. Somebody come up and say we don't have time for questions.' Then I thought, 'I'm not going to skirt this. It's taken me too long to come out and do these books."'

So she blurted: "The first one is a young adult lesbian love story. The second one is about a transgender teen. And the third one is about a boy with two moms who has to choose between them."

Someone broke the subsequent silence by asking: "So, is 'Define "Normal' going to be made into a movie?"

The moment had passed, and everyone had survived.

The emotional payoff for Peters came as the room was clearing out. "There was a girl hanging back and she said, 'What was the name of that new book?"'

Peters didn't say a word about sexuality or the plot of "Keeping You a Secret," while at Clear Creek, thinking it might be a shade too mature for middle-schoolers.

Peters' parents divorced when she was in 10th grade. She always wanted to help kids lighten their emotional baggage, but at first didn't know how. Her first job out of college was teaching fifth grade, and she now jokes that she can be found in the Guinness Book of World Records under "World's Worst Teacher."

She was fired at Christmas, and rightly so, she says. "I really traumatized those kids."

She worked with computers for 10 years, then got back into schools as a special-education reading aide. She was shocked by the lives some of her students led, such as the kid who was caring for his dying father in their home, a motel room.

"It wasn't right, and it wasn't normal. I guess I got to obsessing about this concept of normal and how we use it to judge people."

The writing started after she woke up at 3 one morning with a teenage girl in her head trying to tell her a story. She woke up the next morning with another girl in her head trying to join the story, and a third morning with yet another girl in there.

"I really thought I was losing it," she said at Clear Lake. "I thought, 'I have two options here. I could go into a mental institution and get some serious shock therapy, or I could write it down.' I decided to become a writer because going into an institution might go on my permanent record."