(Maclean's)
When Christian Hernandez was 14 and a Grade 9 student at Notre Dame
College High School in Niagara Falls, Ont., he screwed up his courage
and told his best friend that he was gay. That was his first mistake.
"He told me he couldn't accept it," recalls Hernandez. "And he began
to spread it around." Over the next two years, Hernandez was teased
and harassed almost daily. One day, a group of boys waited for him
after school. Their leader had a knife, and, says Hernandez, "He told
me he didn't accept faggots, that we brought AIDS into the world."
The boy then cut Hernandez on the neck, putting him in the hospital
for a week. When Hernandez told his parents the reason for the attack,
his father, who has since moved back to his native El Salvador, said
he would "rather have a dead son than a queer son."
His mother became spooked by the cars that started driving by the
family home, their occupants hurling mud, eggs and obscenities. She
suggested that her son move out. After two months of living on the
streets of Toronto, Hernandez heard about the Triangle Program. Run
by the Toronto board of education from a church basement in the city'
s east end, it provides up to 25 gay and lesbian teenagers with a
safe place to learn, and the life skills needed to return to the regular
school system. "Being gay and being a teenager can be horrible," says
Hernandez, who spent a year and a half in the program before moving
to a mainstream high school last January. "When I thought I couldn'
t take it any more, when I was told I was a piece of garbage, Triangle
helped me get back on track."
According to many gay adults, there may never have been a better time
to be gay. Last year, Parliament outlawed discrimination based on
sexual orientation. Many employers now offer same-sex spousal benefits.
Celebrities such as singer k.d. lang and TV's Ellen DeGeneres are
providing high-profile, proud role models. But gay teenagers are likely
to offer a starkly different appraisal. Stepping out of the closet,
they find themselves stumbling into classrooms where being gay can
be a dangerous proposition. "I call it child abuse-the harassment,
ridicule, name-calling and violence that gay students face on a daily
basis," says Matthew Martin, youth services co-ordinator of the Gay
and Lesbian Community Centre in Vancouver. "Society may be making
huge strides. But in schools today, gay kids continue to be the scum
of the earth."
Over the past decade, the fight against sexism and racism has moved
to the top of the public school agenda. But as recent clashes have
made clear, tackling homophobia is another matter entirely. At one
end of the spectrum is Toronto's Human Sexuality Program. It was developed
in the wake of the 1985 fatal beating of Kenneth Zeller in Toronto'
s High Park by five male high-school students, who had been heard
to say hours before that they were going "to beat up a faggot." The
program organizes counselling sessions for gay students, as well as
classroom presentations on gay-related issues in schools across the
city. Its Triangle Program, meanwhile, offers gays who have been harassed
at school an alternative place to study for up to 18 months, and a
curriculum that emphasizes the contribution of gays and lesbians in
various fields.
But in other parts of the country, more recent initiatives have been
meeting with fierce resistance. In British Columbia, the debate has
reached fever pitch. The catalyst: a decision in March by the B.C.
Teachers' Federation to develop resources aimed at helping teachers
address homophobia. Incensed by that move, the Surrey school board
voted in late April to ban a set of materials that has been available
in high-school guidance offices since 1995, including a pamphlet called
I Think I Might Be Gay or Lesbian, as well as three storybooks, aimed
at primary students, that feature gay parents.
Days after that vote, the annual meeting of the B.C. Confederation
of Parent Advisory Councils narrowly passed two motions demanding
that Education Minister Paul Ramsey outlaw any discussion of homosexuality
in classrooms. "It's a question of parental authority," says Surrey
school board chairman Robert Pickering. "If you are telling a captive
audience of students what to think, you may be teaching them attitudes
that are antithetical to what is taught at home." But Ramsey responded
last week by putting the board on notice. "My goal is to ensure that
our schools are inclusive, respectful and accepting of all our children,
" Ramsey told Maclean's, "and that includes all our students-gay and
lesbian included. We have to ensure a welcoming environment where
students are able to learn, free
from discrimination and harassment."
Meanwhile, in February, the Calgary board of education approved an
"Action Plan on Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual Youth and Staff Safety." It requires
guidance counsellors to provide "comprehensive information to students"
when discussing sexual orientation, and to "encourage students to
discuss this issue with their parents." Now, vowing to take on what
it calls "the gay agenda," a 250-member group called Parents Rights
in Education is considering preparing a legal challenge to the plan.
"There are more fat people than gay people in our schools," says spokesman
Tom Crites. "And there are all kinds of people who other kids don'
t like, and who they beat up. So why all this special treatment for
gay kids?"
According to many teachers, it is their duty to challenge such views.
And to back up their case, they point to a 1994 survey conducted by
Vancouver's McCreary Centre Society, a nonprofit agency that examines
health issues among young people. It found that a disproportionate
number of street youths in the city identified themselves as either
gay or bisexual. "We are facing a huge dropout problem," says Murray
Warren, a teacher in Coquitlam, B.C., and a member of the Gay and
Lesbian Educators of British Columbia. "The fallout is really quite
immense."
Even more disturbing, say others, are the findings of a study released
last December by researchers in the faculty of social work at the
University of Calgary. Surveying 750 young men aged 18 to 27, Christopher
Bagley and Pierre Tremblay found that gays were 14 times more likely
than heterosexuals to have made a serious attempt at suicide sometime
in their lives. "This is the fallout of living for years with no guidance
and no support," says Tremblay. "It's a problem every teacher knows
about, but too often the attitude is, `We would like to help, but
we don't want to promote homosexuality.'
It is a total abdication."
Finding ways to break the silence is what the B.C. Teachers' Federation
hopes to accomplish. "As a longtime teacher, I certainly know I need
advice on how to make gay and lesbian students feel comfortable,"
says federation president Alice McQuade. "Teachers will tell you that
calling someone a fag is a normal thing they hear in the hallways,
that these ideas rule our schools. We are saying, `Enough is enough.'
It is time to start turning things around."
It was as part of a larger effort to turn the tide that Toronto launched
the Triangle Program in 1995. Among its current class of students
is 18-year-old Christine Max. After years of living "completely in
the closet" in suburban Brampton, Max rented an apartment in Toronto
last fall and started her final year of classes at a nearby high school.
But only days after the school year began, Max was "warned off," as
she puts it, after some students saw her holding hands with her girlfriend
down the street from the school. "One girl came up to me and said
people were getting upset," recalls Max. "She said they were planning
to teach me a lesson I wouldn't forget."
Frightened, Max dropped out of school for about six weeks before enrolling
in the Triangle Program. Preparing to graduate next month, she says
that meeting other gay students has given her a better handle on her
own negative experiences. And the curriculum, she says, has provided
her with a new appreciation of what it means to be a lesbian. A history
unit on the Second World War, for instance, might examine the Nazi
incarceration of homosexuals in the death camps; an English course
included a field trip to a production of Angels in America by gay
playwright Tony Kushner. "I've learned that gays have been there throughout
history and had a positive influence in many fields," says Max. "In
mainstream schools, all you get is `Gays are wrong, they're bad, they'
re awful, and they're sick.' "
The fight against those ideas is almost certain to remain an uphill
battle in Canadian schools. From its headquarters in Langley, B.C.,
the conservative Citizens Research Institute has begun to distribute
8,000 copies of what it calls a "Declaration of Family Rights" to
parents across the country. To be signed and forwarded to school principals,
the document demands that children not "be exposed to and/or involved
in any activity or program which: discusses or portrays the lifestyle
of gays, lesbians, bisexual and/or transgendered individuals as one
which is normal, acceptable or must be tolerated." And it forbids
teachers from exposing children to "any adverse consequences, including
questions, ridicule or hostility for views which arise out of our
family's cultural traditions, religious and/or moral beliefs." Says
Ramsey, "It's a scary little document.
As parents, teachers and trustees plot their next move in a tense
battle, students like Max and Hernandez are quietly mapping out their
own plans for the future. Both hope to attend Pride Prom '97 in June,
the first gay and lesbian graduation dance to be officially sanctioned
by a Canadian school board. Both are also hoping to continue their
education at Toronto's George Brown College. And while Hernandez credits
the Triangle Program for helping him get this far, he says he looks
forward to a time when the need for such a program will have disappeared
entirely. "Wouldn't it be great if we just had regular high schools
where kids who aren't gay get along with kids who are?" he asks. "
You know, that would be my dream."
Victor Dwyer with Sandra Farran,
Education: CLASS ACTION: Fighting homophobia at school. , Maclean's, 05-19-1997,
pp 52.