Jared Nayfack was 11 years old and living in the heart of conservative
Orange County, California, when he told his best friend from school
that he was gay--"and my friend then came out to me," says Jared.
When he turned 15, Jared celebrated his birthday by coming out to
his parents and closest friends. By then, he was attending a Catholic
high school, and on a school-sponsored overnight field trip, Jared
and his schoolmates decided to spend their free evening at the movies
seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show. "Some of us had decided to get
all costumed up to see it, and when the teacher who was with us saw
us she threw a fit: She forced me to get up in front of the other
twenty-one students--many of whom I didn't know--and tell them I was
gay. Most of the kids supported me, but later that evening, one of
them--a lot bigger than I was; he had a black belt in martial arts-
-came into my hotel room and beat me up. I was a bloody mess, and
he could have killed me if another student hadn't heard my screams
and stopped him." Instead of punishing Jared's assailant, the school'
s dean suspended Jared and put him on "academic and behavioral probation."
'The dean told me that even though I was forced to tell the others
that I was a gay, I was at fault because I'd 'threatened the masculinity'
of the kid who'd beat me up," Jared recalls.
In fear, Jared transferred to a public high school, the South Orange
County High School of the Arts. "I thought I'd be safe and could be
out when I came there--after all, it was an arts program. Boy, was
I wrong. Within two weeks people were yelling 'fag' at me in the halls
and in class. I was dressed a little glam, if you will--nothing really
offensive, just a little makeup. But when I went to the principal
to complain, she did nothing about the harassment and told me that
I was 'lacking in testosterone,'" Jared explains. To fight back, Jared
and some gay and straight friends formed a club called PRIDE, which
made a twenty-five-foot-long rainbow banner to put up in school decorated
with multicolored hands and the slogan, HANDS FOR EQUALITY (the banner
was banned). The club also made beaded rainbow bracelets that many
students wore--"even a lot of the football players," according to
Jared--but the club was forbidden by the administration "because it
didn't have anything to do with the curriculum." The harassment got
worse--so bad that Jared had to leave school two months before graduation.
"I had to fight to be before I could study," Jared explains, "but
I left there feeling really let down and like a failure--we hadn't
gotten anywhere."
When he enrolled as a freshman at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, Jared says, "I was embraced by a huge and loving queer community.
They told me, 'It's OK to be angry'--that's something I hadn't heard
before." Feeling a bit burned out, for his first six months at Santa
Cruz Jared avoided gay activism--until the day he attended a conference
of gay youth. "There were kids pulling together--I just knew I had
to help out." He attended a youth training institute run by the Gay,
Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN); began working
with
Gay/Straight Alliances (GSAs) at two high schools near the university;
edited and xerox-published an anthology of adolescent writings about
AIDS; created a performance piece, as part of his self-designed major
in "theatrical activism," about homophobia with a cast of seven straight
boys to the hit song "Faggot" by the rock group Korn; and now speaks
to gay youth groups around the country. Today Jared is only 18.
Jared's story is fairly typical of a whole new generation of lesbian
and gay adolescents: brave, tough and resilient, comfortable with
their sexual identity and coming out at earlier ages, inventing their
own organizations--and victimized by violence and harassment in their
schools. Says Rea Carey, executive director of the National Youth
Advocacy Coalition (NYAC), an alliance of local and national service
agencies working to empower gay youth: "Five or ten years ago, kids
would go to a youth service agency and say, 'I need help because I
think I'm gay.' Today, more and more they say, 'I'm gay and so what?
I want friends and a place to work on the issues I care about.' Being
gay is not their problem, it's their strength. These kids are coming
out at 13, 14, 15, at the same age that straight people historically
begin to experience their sexuality. But they are experiencing more
violence because of that."
Quantifying the number of assaults on lesbian and gay youth isn't
easy. In most states, gay-run Anti-Violence Projects are woefully
underfunded and understaffed (when they have any staff at all), and
students are rarely aware of them, according to Jeffrey Montgomery,
the director of Detroit's Triangle Foundation and the spokesman
for
the National Association of Anti-Violence Projects. Teachers and school
administrators most often don't report such incidents. After pressure
from state governments sympathetic to the Christian right, the Clinton/Gore
Administration's Centers for Disease Control removed all questions
regarding sexual orientation from its national Youth Risk Behavior
Survey. Now the only state to include them is Massachusetts.
There, according to its most recent questioning of nearly 4,000 high
school students by the Massachusetts Department of Education, kids
who self-identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual were seven times more
likely than other kids to have skipped school because they felt unsafe
(22.2 percent versus 3.3). A 1997 study by the Vermont Department
of Health found that gay kids were threatened or injured with a weapon
at school three times more than straight kids (24 percent versus 8).
And a five-year study released in January by Washington State's Safe
Schools Coalition--a partnership of 74 public and private agencies-
-documented 146 incidents in the state's schools, including eight
gang rapes and 39 physical assaults (on average, a single gay kid
is attacked by more than two offenders at once).
With the antigay crusades of the religious right and the verbal gay-
bashings of politicians like Trent Lott legitimizing the demonization
of homosexuals, it is hardly surprising that homophobia is alive and
well among gay kids' classmates. In November 1998, a poll of 3,000
top high schoolers by Who's Who Among American High School Students-
-its twenty-ninth annual survey--found that 48 percent admitted they
are prejudiced against gays, up 19 percent from the previous year
(and these are, as Who's Who proclaims, "America's brightest students"
).
All this means that, as Jon Lasser, an Austin, Texas, school psychologist
(and heterosexual parent) who has interviewed scads of gay kids for
his PhD thesis, puts it, "Many have a form of post-traumatic stress
syndrome that affects their schoolwork--the fear of getting hurt really
shakes them up and makes it hard to concentrate."
The mushrooming growth of Gay/Straight Alliances in middle and high
schools in just the past few years has been the gay kids' potent response.
There is strength in numbers: GSAs break the immobilizing isolation
of gay students and raise their visibility, creating a mechanism to
pressure school authorities into tackling harassment; educate teachers
as well as other students; create the kind of solidarity among straight
and gay kids that fosters resistance to bigotry and violence; provide
meaningful safe-sex education; and help gay adolescents to speak and
fight for themselves. The GLSEN national office has identified at
least 400 GSAs, but since the GSA movement has been student-initiated
and many self-starting groups are still not in touch with national
gay organizations, the figure is undoubtedly much higher. There are
eighty-five GLSEN chapters around the country, and while GLSEN began
seven years ago primarily as an organization of teachers and other
school personnel, it is making an increasing effort to include students
in its organizing.
Another strategy that has frightened reluctant school administrators
into steps to protect gay youth has been lawsuits by the kids themselves.
The first on record was brought by a 16-year-old Ashland, Wisconsin,
student, Jamie Nabozny, who in 1996 won a $900,000 judgment against
school authorities who failed to prevent Nabozny's torturous harassment
from seventh through eleventh grades, including beatings that put
him in the hospital. Currently there are nine similar suits pending,
including cases in Illinois, Washington, New Jersey, Minnesota,
Missouri
and several in California (one brought by the first-ever group of
lesbian student plaintiffs, in the San Jose area). But as David Buckel,
the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's staff attorney
specializing
in school matters, points out, "A lot of people call and say 'I can'
t afford to go to court,' or 'We live in a small town and I can't
put my family through that,' or 'If we sue and win it'll raise our
neighbors' taxes and we'll get bricks through our window.'" (And in
late December, Orange County gay students filed a lawsuit against
school officials, seeking to lift their ban on a GSA at El Modena
High School on the grounds that the interdiction violated their First
Amendment rights.)
In a civilized country, one would think, legislation to protect kids
from violence and harassment in their schools should be unexceptionable.
However, despite a loopy New York Times editorial praising the Republican
Party for a kinder-and-gentler attitude toward gays, the GOP has taken
the lead in opposing state-level safe-schools bills protecting gay
kids. In Washington last year, for the second year in a row, openly
gay State Representative Ed Murray--a progressive Seattle Democrat-
-led the fight for his bill that would have added lesbian and gay
students to a law forbidding sexual and malicious harassment in the
schools. "We had the votes to pass it this year in the House, which
is split forty-nine to forty-nine--we had all forty-nine Democrats
and picked up sixteen Republicans. But because of the tie in party
membership, all House committees are co-chaired by Democrats and Republicans,
and the GOP education committee co-chairman refused to let the
bill
out of committee. If it had been sent to the Senate, where Democrats
have a majority, it would have passed."
The way in which the GOP continues to use same-sexers as a political
football to advance its chances could be seen clearly in California,
where Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (an open lesbian who co-starred
in TV's Dobie Gillis series in the sixties) saw her Dignity for All
Students Act beaten in the Assembly by one vote. GOP front groups
"targeted only Democratic Latino legislators from swing districts
in an unprecedented campaign-style effort," says Jennifer Richard,
Kuehl's top aide. This included prayer vigils at their district
offices,
very sophisticated phone-banking that switched those called directly
into Assembly members' offices to complain, mailings in Spanish to
every Hispanic-surnamed household and full-page ads costing $8,000-
$12,000 each in local papers. The mailings and ads featured photos
of a white man embracing a Latino, a black man kissing a Latino and
a Latino kid in a Boy Scout uniform, and called on voters to "stop
the homosexual agenda," which "doesn't like the Boy Scout pledge to
be morally straight." These ads were reinforced by a $30,000 radio
ad blitz by the Rev. Lou Sheldon's Traditional Family Values Coalition
in the targeted legislators' districts.
Despite a Youth Lobby Day that brought 700 gay students to Sacramento
to support the Kuehl bill, two Latino Democrats caved in to the pressure,
insuring the bill's defeat by one vote. But in a shrewd parliamentary
maneuver, its supporters attached a condensed version as an amendment
to an unrelated bill in the senate, which passed it--then sent it
to the assembly, where it was finally approved by a six-vote margin
(making California the first state to codify protections for gender-
noncoforming students, who experience the most aggressive forms of
harassment). Similar bills died or were defeated last year in Colorado,
Delaware, Illinois and Texas (in New York, one introduced by
openly
gay State Senator Tom Duane is still bottled up in committee).
The difference such bills can make can be seen in Massachusetts, which
has had a tough and explicit law barring discrimination against and
harassment of gay students since 1993, and where its implementation
benefited from strong support by then-Governor William Weld (a Republican)
and his advisory council on gay and lesbian issues. Massachusetts
is the only state that encourages the formation of gay student support
groups as a matter of policy--which is why there are now 180 GSAs
in the Bay State alone. There, the state Safe Schools program is run
by GLSEN under a contract with the state's Education Department, and
it organizes eight regional conferences each year for students who
want to start or have just started their own GSA.
There is a skein of service agencies in large cities that operate
effective programs for gay youth, including peer counseling, drop-
in centers, teacher training, AIDS education and assistance for victims
of violence (for listings of and links to groups for gay youth, visit
The Nation's website at www.thenation.com). But these programs are
all dreadfully underfunded and in many places, like Texas, are denied
access to the schools. Also, gay youths themselves often complain
that there is a lack of support from the adult gay movement. Says
Candice Clark, a 19-year-old lesbian who graduated in 1998 from a
suburban Houston high school, "A lot of the older gay community here
is fearful of the youth as jailbait, since so many people think that
if you're gay you're a pedophile." She also notes that the failure
of Congress to pass ENDA--the Employment Non-Discrimination Act for
lesbians and gays--means that adults, expecially teachers, can be
fired if their sexual orientation is discovered.
Richard Agostinho, 22, who founded the Connecticut youth group Queer
and Active after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, and who serves
as one of the NYAC national board's youth members, says the local
adult-led groups "are not building relationships with young people-
-they need to go out and recruit them and engage in mentoring of sorts.
There are plenty of young people who could add emotion and power to
this movement. But if a 17- or 18-year-old goes to a meeting of a
local group or community center in a roomful of 30- or 40-somethings,
the adults frequently fail to create an atmosphere in which the
youth
feel comfortable contributing. It's a problem very similar to involving
people of color or anyone not traditionally represented at these tables."
The urgency of putting the problems facing gay adolescents on the
agenda of every local gay organization is underscored by a study released
last September by GLSEN. It showed that of nearly 500 gay students
surveyed, almost half said they didn't feel safe in their schools:
90 percent reported verbal harassment, 46.5 percent had experienced
sexual harassment, 27.6 percent experienced physical harassment and
13.7 percent were subjected to physical assault.
But this new generation of adolescent activists won't be ignored.
For, as Jared Nayfack says, "When you do this work you open up a whole
area of your heart and soul, and when you stop, you feel it deeply.
Activism is addictive--you don't ever want to stop unless there's
nothing left to do...and that will be a long time."
A NEW GENERATION OF GAY YOUTH WON'T TOLERATE HARASSMENT IN THEIR SCHOOLS.
Doug Ireland, who writes frequently on politics for The Nation, is
a former columnist for the Village Voice and the New York Observer.
Doug Ireland, Gay Teens Fight Back. Vol. 270, The Nation, 01-31-2000,
pp 21-23.