It originally appeared in Rolling Stone. i just read it at Reader Supported News. The title is simple, One Town's War on Gay Teens. It is about the Anoka-Hennepin School District near Minneapolis. It is in the 6th Congressional District, and the Congresswoman Michele Bachmann graduated from Anoka High School, although she no longer lives in the district.
As a teacher and as a human being I am shocked and enraged by what I read. As a teacher I need to be able to support ALL of my students, while modeling for them respect for others. In this district that is impossible. For 14 years it had a "No Homo Promo" policy that prevented faculty and staff from in any way discussing homosexuality in a way that might be perceived as promoting homosexuality. After suicides and law suits the district apparently moved towards a "neutrality" policy that is no better. Consider:
English teachers worried they'd get in trouble for teaching books by gay authors, or books with gay characters. Social-studies teachers wondered what to do if a student wrote a term paper on gay rights, or how to address current events like "don't ask, don't tell." Health teachers were faced with the impossible task of teaching about AIDS awareness and safe sex without mentioning homosexuality. Many teachers decided once again to keep gay issues from the curriculum altogether, rather than chance saying something that could be interpreted as anything other than neutral.
"There has been widespread confusion," says Anoka-Hennepin teachers' union president Julie Blaha. "You ask five people how to interpret the policy and you get five different answers." Silenced by fear, gay teachers became more vigilant than ever to avoid mention of their personal lives, and in closeting themselves, they inadvertently ensured that many students had no real-life gay role models. "I was told by teachers, 'You have to be careful, it's really not safe for you to come out,'" says the psychologist Cashen, who is a lesbian. "I felt like I couldn't have a picture of my family on my desk." When teacher Jefferson Fietek was outed in the community paper, which referred to him as an "open homosexual," he didn't feel he could address the situation with his students even as they passed the newspaper around, tittering. When one finally asked, "Are you gay?" he panicked. "I was terrified to answer that question," Fietek says. "I thought, 'If I violate the policy, what's going to happen to me?'"
Please keep reading.
I do not want to go paragraph by paragraph through the entire piece. I want you to read it, either as I did at RSN, or the Original Rolling Stone article.
There are too many in this country who are willing to demonize others. We have seen this in anti-Muslim rhetoric - it was shocking to think that General Boykin was going to be allowed to address a prayer breakfast at West Point until there was such concerted pushback that the event was canceled, whether because he decided or because the invitation was withdrawn being immaterial. People who were not themselves Muslims spoke out against his intolerance and bigotry and the implied sanctioning thereof by his speaking at the proposed event.
But far too often policies like those of the Anoka-Hennepin school district get established and continue because people do not speak out.
I am white. I was raised in a non-observant Reform Jewish family in a comfortable middle class suburb of New York City. One third of my high school class was Jewish. Yet we had to hold our senior prom at a Jewish club, because the better known clubs did not welcome Jews, even in the 1960s.
When shortly after graduation I became active in the Civil Rights Movement I was an exception among my peers. We had black classmates - I ran cross-country with Sammie Shelton, our captain; played intramural basketball with George Brown; played in the orchestra with Nancy Goode. We didn't think we were like those horrid people in the South we saw on TV. Many of us rooted for black baseball players, in my case Hank Aaron (whose birthday is today), for others Willie Mays or Jackie Robinson (and he had visited our junior high school). We noticed but did nothing when Mays was not allowed to buy a house in one New Rochelle neighborhood despite his wealth and fame because he was black.
As I look back, we had little understanding of gays. Those we thought were often were not, and when later in life some came out many were shocked. But how could they, even in liberal Mamaroneck High School, with no visible role models? We had several gay teachers, but not openly so. Nor did we ever discuss the sexuality of major figures we studied, such as Tchaikovsky or Leonardo - it was as if a major portion of their lives was irrelevant to who they were as people and artists.
I lived in NYC at the time of Stonewall. Purely by happenstance, two of the neighborhoods in which I lived during my years in NY were the Village and Brooklyn Heights, both places where gays felt comfortable because of their numbers, where they had places they could gather. I acknowledge that despite all this, despite my own activity in Civil Rights when I was younger, I was in many ways too oblivious to what my gay neighbors and acquaintances had to endure.
As I read the Rolling Stone piece, I went from anger to sadness to rage to increasing despair to a determination to speak out.
Anyone seeking or holding political offic ewho tolerates bigotry of any kind should be directly challenged. I do not remember that the Constitution nor its amendments say that gays or bisexuals or transgendered people are any less entitled to the full protection of their rights as are straight, white, male Christians. There is no religious test for any office or benefit under the Constitution. That should mean that insofar as a religious group has as part of its beliefs they should not be imposed upon the rest of us.
There are parts of this that are tricky. Yes, there are parts of the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that are worrisome, but so long as Mitt Romney can without reservation take his oath of office those beliefs should be no more disqualifying than was the Catholicism of John F. Kennedy. I note that my former Governer Tim Kaine is a devout Catholic who served as a missionary in Honduras. His gubernatorial opponent tried to use his Catholicism against Tim, because Tim personally follows the teaching of the Catholic Church against the death penalty. Tim made a forthright statement that having taken his oath of office as governor he would despite his personal beliefs carry out any capital sentence duly imposed under Virginia law. There was a backlash against his opponent for trying to use religion politically. So should there be in the current cycle - that applies to those who might attack others besides Romney, and/or who would seek to impose their religious beliefs upon the rest of us.
My focus is, however, what we do to our children. Schools should be a place that is safe, where no harrassment or bullying of any kind is tolerated. No adult should ever stand by silent when a child is taunted - for race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, language difficulties, physical handicap, appearance, clothing, academic performance, or anything else. If we allow this to happen in our schools, we are teaching our children that hatred and intolerance and bigotry and discrimination and worse are acceptable - in that case we should not be surprised to see it as an increasing part of American life, as destructive of what this nation should be as are the deleterious effects we are encountering from Citizens United, the actions of ALEC, and so on.
One focus of the article is a young lady who was named Samantha. Was named. She committed suicide. Keep that in mind.
Also keep in mind that the middle grades, when students are very much sorting out identities, including sexual identities, are difficult enough. I taught 8th grade for 3 years, 7th grade for one. There are normal tendencies, including bullying, that are part of that age, to which adults need to pay close attention, so that students neither become arrogant thinking themselves superior nor damaged by being the targe of attacks. As the article notes,
there's one group of kids who can't afford to live in denial, a group for whom the usual raw teenage struggles over identity, peer acceptance and controlling one's own impulsivity are matters of extreme urgency – quite possibly matters of life or death.
Keeping that in mind as well, allow me to simply quote the final three paragraphs of the Rolling Stone piece, without further comment, so you will see why I want you to read it, how important this subject is. Then perhaps if people are inclined we can discuss in the comment threat.
Here are those paragraphs:
Which brings us to Anoka Middle School for the Arts' first Gay Straight Alliance meeting of the school year, where 19 kids seated on the linoleum floor try to explain to me what the GSA has meant to them. "It's a place of freedom, where I can just be myself," a preppy boy in basketball shorts says. This GSA, Sam Johnson's legacy, held its first meeting shortly after her death under the tutelage of teacher Fietek, and has been a crucial place for LGBT kids and their friends to find support and learn coping skills. Though still a source of local controversy, there is now a student-initiated GSA in every Anoka-Hennepin middle and high school. As three advisers look on, the kids gush about how affirming the club is – and how necessary, in light of how unsafe they continue to feel at school. "I'll still get bullied to the point where–" begins a skinny eighth-grade girl, then takes a breath. "I actually had to go to the hospital for suicide," she continues, looking at the floor. "I just recently stopped cutting because of bullying."
I ask for a show of hands: How many of you feel safe at school? Of the 19 kids assembled, two raise their hands. The feeling of insecurity continues to reverberate particularly through the Anoka-Hennepin middle schools these days, in the wake of the district's ninth suicide. In May, Northdale Middle School's Jordan Yenor, a 14-year-old with no evident LGBT connection, took his life. Psychologist Cashen says that at Northdale Middle alone this school year, several students have been hospitalized for mental-health issues, and at least 14 more assessed for suicidal ideation; for a quarter of them, she says, "Sexual orientation was in the mix."
A slight boy with an asymmetrical haircut speaks in a soft voice. "What this GSA means to me, is: In sixth grade my, my only friend here, committed suicide." The room goes still. He's talking about Samantha. The boy starts to cry. "She was the one who reached out to me." He doubles over in tears, and everyone collapses on top of him in a group hug. From somewhere in the pile, he continues to speak in a trembling voice: "I joined the GSA 'cause I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to be nice and – loved."