Queer 13, Clifford Chase's uneven collection of essays, reveals junior high, the nadir of most young Americans' lives, as a "gauntlet of shame and discovery," one inevitably leading to the other. Chase's introduction notes that although junior high is rough for any adolescent, it is "weirder for gay and lesbian kids," a truth that sounds self-evident enough. In his book, Chase hopes to show from his and others' writings that the cringing and harassed gay 13-year-old is also "a wily subversive, and intrepid traveler." But despite his collection's strengths, it does not make compelling claims for the specifically gay adolescent experience. Junior high, after all, is a time in which every kid starts to learn about identity, and, with the rarest exceptions, identity inevitably betrays you to be an utter misfit one way or another. These narratives do reveal junior high as a battleground, but one in which words like "faggot" and "queer" are simply potent weapons that can mark anyone as unforgivably "different." A few of the narrators are clearly aware of their sexual identities, but most of them are more preoccupied with other aspects of their identity that suddenly define them as they are shoved into adulthood: an immigrant who can't express herself well in English, an intelligent but legally blind girl forced into special-education classes, several children with abusive, neurotic, or dying parents. The bad news is that this devalues the weaker contributions as sociological documents; the good news is that the best pieces have a more universally poignant appeal than Chase might have even intended. The memoirs of such contributors as Mariana Romo-Carmona, Regina Gillis, Doug Jones, and Chase himself are so elegant that if they were not true, another writer would have to invent them as short stories.