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My fellow millennials, we're already a relic of the past. Gone are our days of defining the zeitgeist. Pack it up. Show's over. Nothing to see here. Because the upcoming legendary children, as so gingerly puts it, are queer as fuck.

A new study by trend forecasting agency J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group found that only 48 percent of 13-20-year-olds identify as "exclusively heterosexual," compared to 65 percent of millennials aged 21 to 34.

Vice reports:

On a scale of zero to six, where zero signified "completely straight" and six meant "completely homosexual," more than a third of the young demographic chose a number between one and five, indicating that they were bisexual to some degree. Only 24 percent of their older counterparts identified this way.

When it comes to gender, over a third of Generation Z (as I guess we have to call them now) strongly agreed that gender did not define a person as much as it used to-only 28 percent of millennials felt similarly. Over half, 56 percent, of Gen Z said that they knew someone who went by gender neutral pronouns such as "they," "them," or "ze," compared to 43 percent of people 28 to 34.

Gen Z's perspectives on gender also extends to their wardrobe. Whereas 54 percent of millennials always bought clothes designed for their own gender, that number drops to 44 percent when it comes to teens. They also overwhelmingly support gender neutral bathrooms, with 70 percent in favor, versus 57 percent of millennials.

But for kids these days, embracing a queer identity while rejecting the gender binary is less a trend and more a reflection of growing up in a world with unprecedented access to information and communities, at a time when the concept of identity is open to interpretation.

And how great is that? While I often question the taste level of today's teens-back in my day, we had faces-I take comfort in knowing that they're much less hung up about gender and sexual orientation than my generation, and the generation before, and before that. It's called progress. And try as they might, no one can stop the inexorable march of progress.

Read more about the study at .

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Less Than 50% of Teens Identify as Straight, Says New Study

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My fellow millennials, we're already a relic of the past. Gone are our days of defining the zeitgeist. Pack it up. Show's over. Nothing to see here. Because the upcoming legendary children, as so gingerly puts it, are queer as fuck. A new study by trend forecasting agency J.

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'Love, Simon' Is a Groundbreaking Gay Movie. But Do Today's Teens Actually Need It?

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Love, Simon is a milestone mainstream movie as it foregrounds a gay character, but it might have been outpaced by real life.

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American movies and television shows are not very diverse. The overrepresentation of white men in American entertainment remains remarkably high, as previous reports have noted. Now, the latest report card on representation in Hollywood finds it's not just race; the industry does poorly at showing LGBT folks too.

Among more than 11,000 speaking characters who showed up in 414 movies, TV shows, and online series that aired between 2014 and 2015 and whose orientations could be ascertained:

Two percent were lesbian, gay, or bisexual. As a comparison, 3.5 percent of America identifies as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, according to a recent survey. Plus, things would be a lot worse without just two movies, Pride and Love Is Strange, which accounted for more than half of the LGBT characters shown in film in 2014 and 2015.

Seven characters-not seven percent, but seven individuals-were transgender. Four of those characters appeared in one show.

Seventy-two percent were male. Seventy-nine percent were white.

The majority were shown to be in committed relationships, but fewer than one in five were shown as parents or caregivers.

Among the LGBT characters of 2014 and 2015:

"These findings tell the story of a group still fighting for inclusion in media," write the study's authors, a team from the Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California. Their conclusion jibes with GLAAD's well-known annual report on queer representation on TV, and expands GLAAD's findings to include movies.

Why should we care if TV and movies look like the real America? There are a number of reasons to root for entertainment that better reflects the diversity of the United States:

1. Think of the children: Kids prefer role models who share their race and gender, and earn better grades and have higher self-esteem when they have such role models available to them, research shows. Perhaps these positive effects would be reinforced with characters that share the kids' orientations too. Indeed, bisexual, gay, and lesbian teens who are exposed to more gay- and lesbian-oriented media report a stronger sense of well-being, a national survey found.

2. Think of the money: Movies with diverse casts tend to earn more. America wants diverse media, but it seems Hollywood executives just haven't gotten the message yet.

3. Think of yourself: Seeing characters that are reflective of American diversity can be healthy and grounding for Americans of all kinds. As one team of researchers explained in a 2007 study of lesbian, gay, and bisexual TV characters:

Cultivation theory suggests that watching television influences viewers' attitudes and beliefs through a process whereby the world as portrayed by the media comes to be perceived by viewers-particularly high-volume viewers-as an accurate reflection of reality. Regular television watching is proposed to create a shared set of conceptions and expectations about social reality among otherwise diverse viewers. Based on cultivation theory, some researchers have suggested that the lack of portrayals of homosexuality on television may influence the beliefs among heavy viewers that homosexuality is abnormal or extremely rare.

In other words, the more authentic your media programming, the more authentic your inner conception of the world. That gives the entertainment industry pretty great potential. Let's make the most of it.

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How Are Queer Americans Represented in Media?

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American movies and television shows are not very diverse. The overrepresentation of white men in American entertainment remains remarkably high, as previous reports have noted. Now, the latest report card on representation in Hollywood finds it's not just race; the industry does poorly at showing LGBT folks too.

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Last year, the US Centers for Disease Control released its national survey of high school students, called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, as they've done every other year for decades. But this time, there were two new questions.

One asked students about their sexual orientation; the second asked the gender of their partners. States could choose which CDC questions to ask their teens; 27 states agreed, enough, researchers believe, to offer data that can be extrapolated to the rest of the country. That made it the first-ever national survey to parse high schoolers by sexuality.

For the first time, we know that some 1.3 million kids, or roughly 8% of all high school students in America, report being lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

Digging into the data, though, as Laura Kann, the lead author on the survey put it, is "truly heartbreaking." Kann has been working with CDC data from high schoolers for 30 years.

8% of all high school students in America, report being lesbian, gay, or bisexual

Nearly 18% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual students reported having been raped at some point in their lives-more than three times the rate of straight students. They were twice as likely to be bullied, both online and on school property, and more than twice as likely to stay home from school to avoid violence they felt might befall them on the way there, or on school grounds. Almost 30% had attempted suicide, more than four times the rate for straight students, and 60% reported feeling "sad or hopeless," twice the rate of their straight peers. They also used hard drugs far more often: 6% reported using heroin at least once, and 5% reported injecting a drug intravenously, which was four and five times the rate among straight kids, respectively.

The numbers made very clear what activists have been saying for decades: The public health of queer youth must be documented, recognized, and protected.

The struggle to get LGBT health taken seriously as a distinct category of risk goes back several generations. For decades, while homosexuality was on the books as a mental disorder, the US turned a blind eye to the actual mental and physical health needs of LGBT people, while continuing to pathologize them-homophobia was basically enshrined in the medical literature.

In the 1970s, "gay people were considered to be mentally ill, so no one was thinking about physical health," says Caitlyn Ryan, a clinical social worker who has been working on LGBT health issues for nearly 40 years in California. "There were very few young people who were out. Gay bashing was routine. The level of antipathy, of anger, of prejudice, was higher. There just wasn't access. Health providers would provide painful care-they would inflict pain on a gay patient, if they knew they were gay. People were dying alone, because their partners would not be allowed to be with them."

The American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973, but the effects of years of pathologizing being gay rippled on for decades.

When Ryan began researching the US LGBT community in the early 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, homosexuality was so taboo that scientists were resorting to euphemisms in their work. "There was a time when program officers at the NIH [National Institutes of Health, a key funder of research] were telling proposers not to put words like 'gay' in their proposals because they would not get funded. Friends of mine were affected," Ryan says. The field, as a whole, was stunted, with no major research investment since Alfred Kinsey's famous "Kinsey Reports" in the 1940s. "Part of the reason we had no good science on sexuality since Kinsey is that when they tried to do follow up studies they were blocked."

In the 1990s, gay characters began to appear in mainstream culture, but at the same time Ryan watched the rise of religious conservatism in the US sideline efforts to include questions about sexuality on national surveys. The American Teenage Survey, for example, which was meant to be the first major longitudinal study on US adolescents, was scuttled completely in 1993 after Congress got wind that the NIH was funding research on teen sex.

Any explicit references to sexual attraction were replaced with euphemisms like "romantic attraction"

Eventually, another study took its place, but any explicit references to sexual attraction were replaced with euphemisms like "romantic attraction." Researchers could glean little-to-no information about sexual behavior from that wording. "On a human level, it impacted people's lives," Ryan says. Without clear data showing the health risks faced by LGBT people, especially young ones, states had little reason to invest in reducing them.

There was some progress at the state level in the 1990s. In 1995, Massachusetts became the first state to ask high schoolers in its state-level health survey. Thanks to Massachusetts' efforts, we know the state's population of teens identifying as LGBT is growing: In the mid-1990s, about 6% of girls and 7% of boys in Massachusetts high schools reported being sexual minorities. By 2015, the most recent year of data, that had grown to 18% of girls and almost 9% of boys.

The data also tell us about how all these LGBT teens in Massachusetts are doing: in 2015, 25% of LGBT youth reported attempting suicide (versus 5% of straight kids), compared to 35% in 1995 (versus 9% of straight kids), when sexual orientation questions first appeared. In 2015, 13% of LGBT kids said they didn't go to school for a day or more because they felt unsafe, compared to 25% of LGBT kids who said the same in 1995.

That's some improvement, says Sean Cahill, the director of health policy research at the Fenway Institute, a research and LGBT health advocacy center in Boston, but it's not nearly enough. "We've had all this pro-gay advancement in Massachusetts; we had marriage equality in 2003. You'd think that having legal equality you'd have improvement in health, but we don't see that," Cahill says.

That said, Massachusetts' state-level data has given local policymakers essential insights into how to improve the health and lives of the state's LGBT teens. For example, thanks to the survey, Massachusetts now knows that gay and lesbian high schoolers who reported being able to talk to "a teacher or other adult in this school if you have a problem" had fewer suicide attempts, lower rates of being threatened in school, and less injected drug use. Going to a high school that had a Gay-Straight Alliance correlated to less bullying and fewer suicide attempts, too. Schools that included HIV/AIDS education in their sex ed classes were associated with less injected drug use and lower rates of STIs, and including queer-specific information in the sex-ed curriculum also reduced several risk factors. Suddenly, it becomes very obvious what concrete steps a concerned superintendent can take to protect their queer students.

Data on Montana's high school population prompted that state to enact a rule requiring schools to report bullying

Once the CDC collects a few more years of its national data, the numbers could prompt a real push for protections in other states and cities, too. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey has a legacy of that sort of thing; data on Montana's high school population prompted that state to enact a rule requiring schools to report bullying, and Los Angeles, alarmed by skyrocketing rates of "vaping" the survey uncovered in its high schools, banned e-cigarettes from public spaces outright.

"You can't get health policy without numbers," says Cahill "We have a motto: 'If they don't count us, we don't count.'"

The next group to be counted will be transgender teens. In 2017, for the first time, the CDC sent out its annual survey with a new, pilot question on gender identity and expression. Getting the wording right took "several years," Kann says. "Questionnaire development is both an art and a science." The CDC won't know until October how many states and cities decided to include the pilot question in their surveys, but if enough do, and the question graduates from the "pilot" phase, the US will be able to count, for the first time, of how many trans kids are in its high schools. And then just maybe a more tailored landscape of health and community care for these kids will begin to take shape.

That's essential, considering what Cahill sees as a "disturbing trend" in some states to target gay health care. There are the state bills barring transgender people from using bathrooms consistent with their gender, and a White House administration that is openly hostile towards protecting trans youth. There are the laws like the one passed in Tennessee last spring authorizing mental health providers to refuse serve people if they feel providing assistance would go against their religious belief system.

Data on older members of the LGBT community are also essential for crafting the right sorts of public health policies. There's some good news on that front: the Bureau of Primary Health Care, an arm of the federal Health Resources and Services Administration which funds health centers in underserved communities, began requiring their centers to report on the sexual and gender identities of their patients last year; the 2016 data is due this year. And as of 2015, the US Department of Health and Human Services began requiring electronic health record systems used in hospitals that take Medicare and Medicaid to include fields for collecting patient sexual orientation and gender identity information.

That, Cahill says, represents a major shift in the way the federal government thinks about patients; up until this point, asking patients questions about their race and age were assumed to be critical for understanding health needs of a patient, but gender and sexuality? That was taboo. (The New York Times reports that for many doctors it still is.) But as more and more data rolls in, showing obvious health disparities, the more reason the healthcare system has for making it medically routine.

The point is to make LGBT patients visible to a healthcare system that's largely ignored them. Or, as Cahill puts it, to provide the system with "a wakeup call."

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A teen health survey crucial to US public policy is finally asking about sexual orientation

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Last year, the US Centers for Disease Control released its national survey of high school students, called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, as they've done every other year for decades. But this time, there were two new questions. One asked students about their sexual orientation; the second asked the gender of their partners.

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Contests

One of our 2017 editorial winners wrote about China's unofficial ban on Korean cultural exports, such as the boy band Exo. Credit... Starnews, via Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

The challenge is fairly straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside The Times and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your view.

Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort or by yourself. When you're done, submit it using the contest form below by Thursday, April 5, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. Be sure to read the rules, also below, before posting.

Our judges will then use this rubric (PDF) for selecting winners to publish on The Learning Network.

As teachers know, the persuasive essay has long been a staple of high school education, but the Common Core standards seem to have put evidence-based argumentative writing on everybody's agenda. You couldn't ask for a more real-world example of the genre than the classic newspaper editorial - and The Times publishes, on average, two of them a day.

And at a time when breaking out of one's "filter bubble" is more important than ever, we hope this contest also encourages students to broaden their news diets by using multiple sources, ideally ones that offer a range of perspectives on their chosen issue.

So what issue do you care about? Gun violence? Sexual harassment? Social media? You decide.

Good luck, and please post any questions you might have in the comments. We'll answer you there.

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Note: The submission form has been removed from this page. The contest is closed.
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Video

The New York Times's editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal provides seven tips for writing an effective editorial.

To help with this challenge, Andrew Rosenthal, in his previous role as Editorial Page editor of The Times, detailed seven pointers in the video above. And we have published related lesson plans, including " For the Sake of Argument: Writing Persuasively to Craft Short, Evidence-Based Editorials," " I Don't Think So: Writing Effective Counterarguments" and " 10 Ways to Teach Argument-Writing With The New York Times," that offer additional teaching ideas.

We have also culled a list of 401 prompts for argumentative writing organized by category, to help inspire you - although, of course, you are not limited to those topics.

We encourage you to look at both our comments on last year's winners and the winning essays themselves. They can serve as excellent models, and they cover topics from active-shooter school lockdowns to Korean television shows in China.

In addition, you can watch our free, archived webinar, featuring the Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and Kabby Hong, a high school English teacher.

1. Use at least one Times source. You can write your editorial about any topic, as long as you use at least one source from The Times. That should pretty much open the whole world to you, as you may be surprised how much you can find in The Times.

Be advised that nytimes.com has a digital subscription system in which readers have access to five free articles each month, but after that you will be asked to become a digital subscriber. The Times also offers K-12 digital subscription plans for schools. But all Learning Network activities for students, including our daily writing prompts, as well as Times articles linked from them, are free, so you can access them without exceeding the five-article limit.

2. Use at least one non-Times source. But make sure that the source you use is a reliable one. We encourage you to find sources that offer different perspectives on an issue.

3. Always cite your sources. Our submission form contains a required field for entering your citations. We include an example as well, though you can use M.L.A. or A.P.A. styles, or just list the website URLs. Even if you use a print source or an expert interview, you must provide a citation. Readers (and judges) should always know where you got your evidence.

4. Be concise. The editorial must not exceed 450 words. Your title and list of sources are separate, however, and do not count as part of your 450-word limit.

5. Have an opinion. Editorials are different from news articles because they try to persuade readers to share your point of view. Don't be afraid to take a stand.

6. Write your editorial by yourself or with a group. If you are working as a team, just remember to submit all of your names when you post your entry. But please submit only one editorial per student. If you're submitting as part of a team, you should not also submit as an individual.

7. Be original and use appropriate language. Write for a well-informed audience, but include enough background information to give context. Be careful not to plagiarize: Use quotation marks around lines you take verbatim from another source, or rephrase and cite your source.

8. Submissions must be from students who are 13 to 19 years old, and they may come from anywhere in the world. Unlike in previous years, students can now use their entire name if they want.

9. All entries must be submitted by April 5 at 11:59 p.m. Easternusing the contest form above. If you have questions about the contest, feel free to post them in the comments section, and we'll respond to you there.

10. Follow these instructions if you need proof that you entered this contest. Within an hour of submitting your editorial, you should receive an email from "The New York Times" with the subject heading "Thank you for your submission to our Student Editorial Contest." If you don't receive the email within an hour, even after checking your spam folder, then you can resubmit your entry. Be sure your settings allow emails from nytimes.com.

After two attempts and waiting over one full day, if you still have not received a confirmation email, you can contact us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com with the email address you used in the contest form. Use the subject heading "Please send me an email confirmation for my editorial contest submission." Be sure to include your name and editorial title (or subject) in your email. You may have to wait up to a week for a reply.

11. We will use this rubric (PDF) to judge entries, and the winning editorials will be featured on The Learning Network.

" Writing an Editorial" Unit Plan, by Lindsay Thompson

" Reader Idea | He Said, She Said, I Say: A Researched Argument Essay," by Danielle Harms

" Reader Idea | Using an Op-Doc Video to Teach Argumentative Writing," by Allison Marchetti

" Reader Idea | Using Room for Debate to Teach Argumentative Writing and Discussion Skills," by Gerard Dawson and Justin Rex

" Reader Idea | An Argument-Writing Unit: Crafting Student Editorials," by Kayleen Everitt

Good luck and have fun. We welcome your questions and comments if we have omitted details that might be useful. Let us know how we can help.

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The Learning Network runs contests for teenagers all year long. See our full calendar.

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Our Fifth Annual Student Editorial Contest: Write About an Issue That Matters to You (Published 2018)

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Contests The challenge is fairly straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from sources both within and outside The Times and write a concise editorial (450 words or less) to convince readers of your view. Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort or by yourself.

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Google Docs - create and edit documents online, for free.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.