[GN] WHEN DO WE FINALLY ACT LIKE A COMMUNITY?
Marc Stauffer
I have just two simple questions. The below article covers three states,
WV, MD, VA. The MD school referred to is part of what is considered one of
the best and wealthiest school districts in the US.
When are we going to get off our comfortable asses and truly massively
resist harassment of our youth? IMHO they ARE our children in that we pay
taxes for their education to prepare them to be contributing member of
society - your and my tax dollars are wasted when any gay child can't
concentrate on their education because of the distraction of harassment.
God bless these teens who are taking action for themselves.
Second, it has been stated by some of the major gay media what great
strides we have made. Again IMHO - BULLSHIT! If we are indeed a
"Community" we also have responsibility to the old and wise. When are we
going to quit networking, being happy with just DP benefits, and having
pictures of our lovers on our desk and DEMAND that retirement and Social
Security, and other programs for the seniors be inclusive for gay couples
and individuals?
Just a couple of questions....and statements.
Marc
You have been sent this message from Stau...@washpost.com as a courtesy
of the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com).
To view the entire article, go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15840-2001Jun18.html
A Lesson in Cruelty: Anti-Gay Slurs Common at School
By Laura Sessions Stepp
Emmett English, a cheerful, easygoing boy, started third grade last year at
a new school, Chevy Chase Elementary in Bethesda. On his first day he
proudly wore a new red Gap sweat shirt and almost immediately wished he had
chosen something else.
"A girl called me 'gay,' " he remembered. "I didn't know what that meant
but I knew it was something bad." His mother, Christina Files, confirmed
this. "He came home quite upset," she said.
"That's soooo gay." "Faggot." Or "lesbo." For all the outcry over
harassment of gays following the murder of college student Matthew Shepard
two years ago, anti-gay insults are still the slang of choice among
children and teenagers, according to teachers, counselors and youths
themselves. Some say the insults are increasing in school classrooms and
hallways -- among children as young as 8 or 9 -- partly because gay youths
and their supporters have become more visible and more active.
"Schools are seen as a safe place to say things and get away with it," said
Jerry Newberry, director of health information for the National Education
Association, a teachers' union. A recent survey of students in seven states
backs up his impression. Human Rights Watch, an international research and
advocacy group, reported last month that 2 million U.S. teenagers were
having serious problems in school because they were taunted with anti-gay
slurs.
Young people use these slurs in two different ways, one generally
derogatory and one referring insultingly to sexual orientation. Schools
have a hard time policing either use.
Taunts and slurs, particularly the words "fag" and "faggot," were cited in
more than half of the publicized schoolyard shootings of the last three
years, according to Newberry. Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold were called fags. So was Andy Williams, who sprayed a San Diego
high school with gunfire last March, killing two people.
Anti-gay language first appears on elementary school playgrounds. "Kids at
our school say, 'That kid is sooo gay,' " said Julia Pernick, a classmate
of Emmett's in fourth grade at Chevy Chase Elementary. "They think it means
stupid or unusual or strange."
The insults multiply in the emotionally precarious years of early
adolescence. "If you're too short, too tall, too fat, too skinny, you get
targeted in middle school," said David Mumaugh, now a junior at Walter
Johnson High School in Bethesda. "Kids sign their yearbooks, 'See you next
year, fag.' "
Sarah Rothe, an eighth-grader at Lake Braddock Middle School in Burke, said
such words "are as common as the word 'like' " at her school. Classmate
Christina Jagodnick said "there's a big difference" between anti-gay slurs
and other derogatory terms. "If we were to say other words which we all
know are wrong," she said, "someone would stop us."
At Lake Braddock this year, according to students, a boy was targeted by
classmates who glued his locker shut, writing the word "gay" on the
outside. No one knew the boy's sexual orientation, but the bullies called
him names until, recently, he transferred to another school. The school
would not comment on the situation.
Gay teens are reluctant to discuss personal harassment on the record for
fear of attracting more. But when they're offered anonymity, they won't
stop talking.
A junior at Magruder High School in Rockville said: "I have a lot of
friends who say, 'Oh, that's so gay.' They don't associate it with
homosexuality. You could plant that word in the dictionary for 'stupid.' Do
I face a whole life of this?"
At Herndon High School in Herndon, a junior said, "I was walking with a
friend down the hall and this kid yells, 'Faggot.' How am I supposed to
defend who I am?"
When straight students are bullied, they usually can count on an adult
coming to their aid, counselors say. Gays don't have that assurance.
According to several surveys, four out of five gay and lesbian students say
they don't know one supportive adult at school.
"Teachers are aware they may offend someone if they speak about
homosexuality in anything other than negative terms," said Deborah Roffman,
who teaches sex education in the Baltimore and Washington areas. "They
don't know how to cross that street safely, so they don't even step off the
curb."
A Lonely Campaign
Jerry Newberry and other educators suggest that anti-gay insults are
increasing partly because gay youths and their supporters have become more
assertive in trying to stop them. Justen Deal, 16, has fought such a
campaign alone.
A cherubic-looking blond kid from south of Charleston, W.Va., Justen heard
anti-gay words from the time he could talk, even used them himself on
occasion. But by the age of 12, when he first suspected he was gay, "they
made my skin crawl," he said.
Unlike children in other minority groups, he had no natural support group
to comfort him. His parents had relinquished custody of him to his paternal
grandmother, Patty Deal, when he was born, and her only knowledge of
homosexuals was what she had seen on the TV comedy "Ellen."
She did her best once she found out in his eighth-grade year that he was
gay. He had written a letter to his school counselor that Patty Deal read.
She immediately sought psychiatric help for him, took him to a hospital on
the night he overdosed on antidepressants, enrolled him in a new middle
school in Boone County.
Neither she nor Justen knows how, but rumors started flying at Sherman
Junior High. "I was asked eight times a day if I was gay," Justen
remembered. "I'd say no, or not say anything. That year is when I learned
for sure that the things you hear about words not hurting is a fairy tale."
Justen thought he'd be safe from gay-bashing once he reached Sherman Senior
High. He knew principal Theresa Lonker, a tough-looking administrator who
sends students to detention for cursing. When she told Justen, "We'll look
out for you," she seemed to mean it.
But she couldn't be everywhere. Name-calling started slowly in his freshman
year and picked up this year, according to Justen's friend Lindsey Light.
Fed up this past spring, Justen tried to do something about language in a
very visible way.
He drafted a new harassment policy for Sherman High to include sexual
orientation and left it on Lonker's desk. He lobbied the county school
superintendent, Steve Pauley, to rewrite the county's harassment policy.
He visited West Virginia Gov. Robert Wise's office asking the governor to
convene a task force to investigate harassment. He testified before the
legislature on an amendment to the state's hate crime bill that would have
included protection based on sexual orientation. His comments made both
Charleston newspapers, including the front page of the Daily Mail.
Some of his classmates were not exactly thrilled with the attention. They
threw coins and paper wads at him on a school bus during a field trip and
also one afternoon in a science class. "Everyone [in the class] heard me
tell them to stop, but the teacher was in his own little world," Justen
said.
The science teacher, Robert Britton, said he didn't realize at the time
there was any harassment going on. "I heard [Justen] say something about
stuff being thrown at him but I thought he was just talking about words,"
Britton said.
Justen's one-person language crusade was rebuffed at every turn. Principal
Lonker said she never saw the recommendation for changing the school's
harassment policy. Superintendent Pauley said he was reluctant to single
out gay students for special mention. Gov. Wise's office declined to
appoint a task force on the needs of gay students. The legislature voted
against adding sexual orientation to its anti-harassment statute. By
mid-April, Justen, feeling defeated, decided to change what he could: his
school.
He transferred to Huntington High, about 90 miles north. The school has a
sizable population of openly gay students, and friends found a gay couple
with whom he could live.
On his last day at Sherman High, his grandmother waited for him in her blue
Chevy Impala. She appeared both nervous and sad.
"I've always taught Justen to tell the truth," she said. "I reckon he just
listened too good. I knew he'd leave one day -- I just didn't know it would
be so soon."
Justen didn't want to leave his grandma. But despite Lonker's efforts to
keep him safe at school, he said, he didn't <em>feel </em>safe and thus had
a hard time keeping his mind on equations and Civil War battles. His pals
had told him to shrug off the verbal digs, but he could not.
"My friends don't understand that every time I hear the word 'fag' it
really hurts," he said. "It reminds me that I'm so far away from what kids
see as normal."
Walking out of Sherman on that soggy Tuesday, buoyed by the hugs of several
students and his principal, he said, "It was a good day. I only heard the
word 'faggot' four times."
Debate Over the Debate
School counselors say insensitive comments about gays could be reduced
through in-service training for teachers and age-appropriate discussions
among students. The NEA recently distributed a video with such a goal.
Titled "Can't We All Just Get Along?," it shows the measures some school
districts are taking to discourage verbal assaults against gays and other
students.
Religious conservatives, viewing homosexuality as a sin, jumped all over
the video. "The NEA is working diligently to bring gay activism to schools
. . . using an appeal to 'safety for kids' as the vehicle," said one online
publication from Focus on the Family.
Dick Carpenter, education policy analyst for Focus, said that "if students
are being harassed in any way, principals and teachers should stop it,
right there and then. But that doesn't mean you go into class and define
homosexuality to 6-year-olds."
Carpenter complained that classroom discussions frequently do not include
the essence of the conservative opposition: its belief that young people
can choose not to adopt homosexuality just as they would choose not to use
drugs or drink alcohol. He gives little credence to studies showing that
genetics play a role in homosexuality.
Newberry of the NEA denies that his organization is promoting a homosexual
agenda. "We welcome free and open debate. . . . In fact, we encourage it,"
he said. But debate must be accompanied by education, he added. Otherwise,
students remain ignorant of the facts about homosexuality. "Ignorance
breeds fear, fear breeds hate, and hate breeds violence, including violent
words."
Phyllis Taylor, principal at Chevy Chase Elementary, the school that Julia
and Emmett attend, wants no discussion of gays or gay language in her
classrooms. The children are too young, she said. If she heard a gay
epithet from a student, "I would treat it as an f-word and call the
parents."
High school teachers, with a more mature student body, can treat the issue
more openly. Centreville High School English teacher Susan Tracy agreed
reluctantly this year when senior Robert Browning asked to survey his
classmates on their attitudes about gays and then present the results.
She gave Robert 10 minutes to summarize his findings, then allowed him to
continue for 35 more minutes because she and the class were so absorbed in
what he was saying.
"I was especially moved when Robert said the word 'gay,' meaning something
annoying or stupid, was as hurtful for him as the N-word was to a black
student," she remembers. "I had never thought of it that way. I told him I
would need to be more careful myself."
Later, Robert heard his teacher chastise a student for saying something was
"so gay" and he knew he had made a difference.
**********
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Chief Thracian
<stau...@washpost.com> wrote (quoting a news article):
<<
Taunts and slurs, particularly the words "fag" and "faggot," were
cited in more than half of the publicized schoolyard shootings of the
last three years, according to Newberry. Columbine shooters Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold were called fags. So was Andy Williams, who
sprayed a San Diego high school with gunfire last March, killing two
people.
>>
Typically, when these communities decide that they need to educate
their children about tolerance, they instruct them to treat with
respect: African Americans, Asians, the disabled, frail boys, and so
on, with one exception. And I'm sure I don't need to tell you which
group this is. So in silence when it comes to gay-hatred, they wind up
perpetrating the vicious cycle of violence, fear, and condemnation.
This is the law of karma: when you continue ignoring the abuse of a
people over and over again, it will eventually blow up in your face.
BANG!
I weep not for these Christian-dogmatic and hetero-arrogant
communities and schools. But my tears and outrage are copious for
*every gay student in Amerika. Let the heteros blow each other off,
and not keep using us gays as their sacrifice and blame...let us find
a way to extricate ourselves from these hetero wars, and carve out our
own, truly gay supportive society. (Even the most gay-accepting nation
on the planet, Holland, is nonetheless heterocentered, and thus a
haven only as the least of all evils.)
Let us find a way to reach out to all our brothers and sisters
entangled in the homophobic network that is the Amerikan public school
system, and provide them with real measures of defense, and sanctuary.
---
Lavender-Velvet Revolution
http://surf.to/gaybible