Straightlaced is a film that shows how societal notions of gender and sexuality are confining to American teenagers no matter what their socioeconomic, racial, or ethnic backgrounds. Fifty high school teenagers from diverse backgrounds talk candidly about the pressures they experience from societal notions of what it means to be male or female. In their unscripted dialogues they discuss how they navigate through adolescent peer pressure, homophobia, rigid gender roles, and sexual expectations. This documentary film offers child and adolescent psychiatrists the opportunity to understand better the significant and all-pervasive pressures to conform to gender and sexual identity stereotypes experienced by their teenaged patients.

Unrated