Gay Kids Are the New Helms Victims (fwd)

[Payton Chung]

[found on a.p.h.]
Gay Kids are the new Helms victims

By Brent Calderwood
YO! Youth Outlook, a newspaper by and about Bay Area teens

I shouldn't be amazed, but I am.

By a margin of 63 to 36, the Senate has passed a Jesse Helms-
sponsored amendment to an education funding bill, ordering that any
school that offers education about or support for homosexuality loses
federal funding. As a gay teenager, I get the message loud and clear:
You don't exist.

In San Francisco, where gay kids from across the country come
seeking asylum, the cost of continuing to recognize our existence
could be $12 million - the amount of federal funds pumped into The
City's public schools.

It's nothing new. All my life I've been treated as if I were invisible.
But I was starting to believe things were changing.

The idea behind the Helms amendment is that there's no such thing as
a gay kid, that offering counseling and support is dangerous because it
might "turn" kids gay.

But I was a gay kid. I have *always* been gay, and I knew I was
different long before I knew the word for it. Everyone else seemed to
know it , too. by the time I was in the seventh grade, I was happy if I
made it through a day at school without being called "homo" or
"faggot." Until I learned there were other people like me, I felt isolated
and alone, But I always knew I liked boys.

My high school would have pleased Jesse Helms. There was no one
there to help me understand what I was going through, no one to teach
me about myself. All I learned was that everything I was, everything I
felt, was disgusting, sinful an dirty - or at the very least laughable.

As the harassment go worse, I began cutting school, sometimes for
weeks at a time. I went from a 4.0 average to D's and F's. No one
bothered to ask me what was wrong. I was treated like a truant, a
delinquent, and eventually I was expelled.

I transferred to a different school and tried to build a new reputation. I
started hanging out with guys on the football team, trying to act like
them. But talking about cars and girls and laughing at fag jokes didn't
turn me straight. It only turned my stomach, and made me more and
more depressed.

Finally, on the verge of killing myself, I asked for help. I went to a
counselor, who referred me to a gay and lesbian youth group. Being in
a room full of people who knew my secret was scary at first. But I
soon realized that these strangers knew me better than most people
who'd known me my whole life.

for the first time, I knew how it felt to fit in. It gave me the confidence
to open the closet door, to live in the world again. I could breath.

After I came out at my high school, I worked to make information
about gay youth groups available through the counseling office and get
gay books into the library. Since I left high school, I've designed
posters for gay and lesbian youth programs that several Area high
schools currently display. Now the U.S. Senate is saying, "Take them
down."

Why are they doing this? compared to older gays, who have gained
political power nationally, young gays and lesbians are powerless.
We're easy pawns in a battle to convince the public that homosexuality
is something people choose, not something they're born into and grow
up with. Make gay teens invisible and you prove your point, making it
that much easier to deny adult gays and lesbians civil and judicial
rights.

Even without the Helms amendment, 28 percent of gay, lesbian and
bisexual youth drop out of high school, many for the same reasons I
did. If the bill is allowed to stand, gay teens in school will have
nowhere to turn. Administrators who are already into denial about
teen sexuality will be rewarded for their indifference to gays.
Homophobic kids will have a permission slip to hate us. That will
inevitable mean more closeted teen, more dropouts, and even higher
suicide rate.

I guess that's just one more way the senators figure they can make us
disappear.




YO! Youth Outlook is produced by Pacific News Service and the
Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at SF State
University

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