self-acceptance

At a Minneapolis high school, a cross-country runner tries to deny his sexual feelings for a male teammate.

Laura, a Miami high school student, gets caught kissing her lesbian lover which marks the start of big changes in her life, including getting kicked out of her Catholic school, thrown out of her home by her mother, and forced to build a new kind of family with the help of friends and supporters.

Sixteen-year-old learning-disabled Nick struggles to endure a life in which the other kids make fun of him, he has to take special classes, his date for the prom makes an excuse not to go with him, and he is haunted by the memory of his older sister who drowned while he was watching.

As he enters high school, fourteen-year-old Elvin continues to deal with his weight problem as he tries to find his place among his peers.

Unhappy in a home seemingly devoid of love, a fourteen-year-old albino boy who thinks of himself as Harold the Ghost runs away to join the circus, where he works with the elephants and searches for a sense of who he is.

A troubled youth with cerebral palsy struggles toward self-acceptance with the help of a drug-addicted young woman.

When sixteen-year-old Meghan loses her leg to cancer and her brother to Vietnam, she expresses intense anger in postcards which she writes to her idol, Abraham Lincoln.

Because he doesn't listen carefully to what the Great Spirit tells him about each of the animals he is supposed to lead to their desert homes, Jackrabbit causes much unhappiness with his careless answers to the animals' questions.

When Georgia, an eight-year-old girl, cuts her hair very short and plays baseball the children in her new school ask her if she's a boy.

Maria introduces herself as a member of a specific family and as having a definite address and place in the universe.