Not So Fast Times at Queermont High

HMS’s program comprises predominantly at-risk kids. Some of the students have been kicked out of home for being gay and many have been placed in foster homes. Racially, the school’s composition is 75 percent African American and Latino and nearly all the students have been physically brutalized in their original high schools. That makes its success rate, which is far better than most of the city’s public schools, all the more impressive: 95 percent of HMS seniors graduate and 60 percent are accepted to colleges. HMS is also nondiscriminatory; created as a “hate-free space” for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) students, the school accepts applications for admission from anyone. So what’s the problem? 

Sponsoring and accrediting a program basically run by a community organization committed to at-risk youth already walks a fine line. But segregating GLBT kids in their own high school represents an open admission that public schools are unable to perform one of their most basic tasks—securing the safety of their students. It’s true that attacks on queer kids—as well as on kids who are perceived to be queer because of their gender affect, cultural interests, or social attitudes—are epidemic in public schools. But the larger culture hasn’t yet decided how to deal with such assaults. The media response ranges from shrugging off homophobic ridicule as standard schoolyard bullying to sharing an attitude common among school administrators that “someone is always getting picked on” to praising the more modern, if ineffectual, approach of instituting sensitivity training. 

This rather phlegmatic response opens up a vacuum eagerly filled by more passionate conservative voices, such as New York State Conservative Party chairperson Mike Long, who spoke out strongly against relaunching and expanding the HMS. Long argued that, with this move, the city put itself in the business of “social engineering” and handing special opportunities to GLBT students. “What next?” he asked at a June 29 press conference. “Maybe we should have schools for chubby kids who get picked on. Maybe all kids who wear glasses should have special schools. It’s ridiculous.” 

Aside from the fact that many GLBT students face physical violence daily—quite apart from name-calling, which is harmful enough—the public discourse that harassment of queer kids is no different from picking on “geeky” or “fat” students misses the point. Several recent studies show that homophobic attacks on queer kids are less about maintaining the social pecking order or expressing “hate” toward outsider groups and far more about reflecting social and religious prejudice and moral judgment. A growing body of clinical and historical research demonstrates that what is commonly conceived as run-of-the-mill antisocial behavior is understood quite differently by its perpetrators. 

Karen Franklin, in a 1998 paper delivered at the American Psychological Association titled “Psychological Motivations of Hate Crime Perpetrators: Implications for Educational Interventions,” discovered that the self-admitted male gay- bashers she interviewed saw themselves not as troublemakers, but as enforcers of moral values. Similar findings, this time about race, were recorded by historian Kathleen M. Blee in her essay “Reading Racism: Women in the Modern Hate Movement,” which appeared in her 1998 edited collection No Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest (New York University Press). These women told Blee that their activities were not about hate, but about upholding traditional values. It is important to understand that the unremitting, often violent attacks on queer kids in and outside of schools are not simply teasing or bullying, but rather a pervasive, and mostly unchecked, manifestation of queer hating that has as its— unarticulated—goal the banishment of visible queerness. 

Given this moralistic orientation, it is not surprising that opposition to expanding the HMS came quickly from the usual suspects. The most prominent elected official to speak out against the school is State Senator Ruben Diaz (D-Bronx), president of the New York Hispanic Clergy Association. Along with Reverend Lemuel Rodriguez, president of the Promise International Christian Ministry in Corona, Diaz is leading a coalition of 80 Christian groups who are threatening a lawsuit to close the HMS on the grounds that the program illegally segregates students. (Both the city’s general counsel and the New York ACLU argue that if the HMS accepts applications from all students regardless of sexual orientation, it complies with the law.) 

While Diaz’s complaint targets discrimination, it is clear that he has a long history of moral objections to homosexuality. In 1991, Diaz was one of the major opponents who fought to dismantle then- mayor David Dinkins’s implementation of the Children of the Rainbow curriculum in New York City public schools. His major complaint was that 3 of the 500 pages in the Board of Education’s report recommending curriculum changes focused on gay and lesbian families and suggested that grade school teachers be familiar with (but not necessarily read to their classes) Lesléa Newman’s children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies. Diaz, working with conservative Christian and Jewish religious groups, finally scuttled the entire curriculum proposal. In 1993, the city council did not reappoint him to the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, after he made a series of homophobic and AIDS-phobic remarks. While he has refrained from making anti-gay remarks about the HMS, his group is working closely with Michael Long, who has gone on record saying, “The issue is whether taxpayers’ money should go toward…promoting the gay lifestyle.” 

The problem for Diaz and Long—as well as for many other critics of the HMS—is the visibility of queerness and homosexuality in the world. In a sense, they’re right: giving the HMS full high school status normalizes queerness. But segregating these students for their own protection also patronizes them and that’s why the HMS gambit, while helpful for a few queer kids, is not really a solution. 

The Harvey Milk School made sense in the 1980s when the prevailing politics on GLBT youth favored carving out private spaces to protect them. But the gay rights movement has grown since then and the politics of privacy have given way to a more forceful politics of public intervention. The bottom line is that this is not a gay or a queer problem, it is a violence problem. The violence is promoted and justified by social, often religion-based, prejudice and moral opposition. 

Interestingly, everyone, from the Harvey Milk school administrators to Ruben Diaz, agrees that all kids should be safe in public schools. But what would this mean? How do we actually do this? Anti-gay violence in schools is not new, but until now most efforts to deal with it have not been very successful. It is clearly not enough to send teachers to “sensitivity training” or to hold “diversity days”—which may or may not include queer issues—to sensitize students. Some people have suggested the implementation of a zero tolerance, or close-to-zero tolerance, policy on homophobic violence in schools. This is generally called the “kick the bullies out” solution. But does this really work? How many kids do you have to kick out of public schools to make them safe for everyone else? Aside from the fact that zero tolerance has not worked very well for anti-drug or other anti-violence enforcement programs, there are serious civil liberties questions involved. Public education for all children has been a basic right, but who makes decisions about who doesn’t get to partake in this? 

Queer activists also talk about enforcing “hate speech” codes in school—so you can’t call anybody a “fag”—but will this actually work? Aren’t there also free speech issues involved here as well. What about religious students who feel it is their duty to speak about the “abomination” of homosexuality? Sure, you can’t preach a sermon in class, but there will be times when the free exercise of religious freedom and speech will come into conflict with queer kids feeling safe. There have been many attempts to change primary and secondary curricula to both reflect the needs of the student body and sensitize students around issues of sexual orientation and alternative families. This seems like a great idea except that it has almost always been met with harsh resistance from political and social conservatives.  

Most sex education classes in this country now focus on abstinence—zero tolerance for sex, essentially—and school boards and teachers are already wary of introducing controversial materials in the classroom. Many religious parents do not want their children to receive sex education or HIV prevention classes. They claim that the information would violate their right to oversee their children’s religious and moral education so many schools require parental permission for such curricula. It is not hard to imagine that classroom information promoting the idea that homosexuality is just another way to live your life, that gay people are just like everyone else, and that everyone deserves respect for their lives and consensual sexual activities is going to run into serious trouble. 

Even with these problems there are some positive things to be done. Sensitivity training for teachers is always useful. The fight to make school curricula more open to teaching tolerance has to continue.  Gay people and their allies— whether or not they have kids in school—should get involved in local school committees and the everyday business of running public schools. The broader, politically active queer community (most of whom probably do not have children) has positioned itself outside this debate. It is time to become more involved on a grass-roots level. Public education is everyone’s concern, not just students and parents. 

Challenging and substantively altering education and learning culture in the U.S. is obviously an enormous job. It will take patience, empathy, understanding, and lots of money. It will also take a new level of commitment by administrators, parents, and students, as well as by communities whose members often feel that they have little investment in schools their own children do not attend. But, of course, queer-bashing and homophobic violence in schools reflects the wider world, a world compelled to enforce its values through violence. As long as Ruben Diaz, Michael Long, and their political allies promote their homophobic agendas, schools will never be safe for queer kids.