Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [106]
“Central to our victory was publicizing the problems in the mainstream media, and using the media to educate parents and teachers,” said LaFontaine. “We reached the public first with our message and haven’t let ourselves be put on the defensive. The right wing was in the awkward position of opposing safety initiatives and suicide-prevention programs. People in cities and towns rallied around us. It became a human issue.”
Interestingly, active response to the Safe Schools Program has been concentrated in rural and suburban districts. Urban centers like Boston, Brockton, Lowell, Fall River, and Worcester have hung back. In those cities school boards are highly politicized, and battles over race and other sensitive issues can be public and ugly. But LaFontaine is confident that, with the strength of the new law behind them, school boards in those areas will implement changes as well.
Massachusetts is unique in its aggressive commitment to gay youth. But there are other significant efforts across the country worthy of note; space here limits discussion to only a representative sample.
Project 10, Los Angeles
Established in 1984 as a series of rap sessions for gay youth at Fairfax High School, Project 10 has proliferated to a multifunction support system, with outlets in three-fifths of Los Angeles’s fifty high schools. It was founded by Virginia Uribe, a Fairfax High teacher whose intention was to develop a model counseling program that would include education, school safety measures, human-rights advocacy, and dropout-prevention strategies.
In addition to offering rap and personal counseling sessions that now reach several hundred students a year, Project 10 runs training workshops for teachers, counselors, and other school staff and does outreach to parents of gay teenagers. It also operates a continuation high school for a small number of gay students with adjustment problems.
Although the target of intense opposition from the Christian right, Project 10 has retained support of the Los Angeles School Board, although funding is minimal. It has inspired similar programs in California and elsewhere around the country.
Uribe, a dynamic woman who describes herself as a lesbian, warns that despite such efforts as Project 10, the problem requires much more aggressive and immediate intervention: “The pain and hardship suffered by adolescent gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth is no longer invisible, and our lack of action is no longer professionally or ethically acceptable.”
Hetrick-Martin Institute, New York City
Founded in 1983 by a college professor and his psychiatrist life partner, the Hetrick-Martin Institute has evolved into a complex, multifunction institution with a staff of fifty-two. This includes the two teachers and two aides provided by the New York City Board of Education, which cosponsors, with the institute, the Harvey Milk School for outcast gay and lesbian students.
Hetrick-Martin originally focused exclusively on administering to the runaway, abused, and rejected gay and lesbian youth of New York City, and that continues as the heart of its mission. In addition, Hetrick-Martin’s services span on-the-street outreach to homeless gays (said to make up 30 to 50 percent of New York City’s fifteen thousand homeless youth), HIV and AIDs counseling, a drop-in center, individual clinical counseling, and training of young people and youth-serving professionals. Its clientele of about fifteen hundred youngsters a year is 85 percent nonwhite. As noted earlier, the institute, housed in handsome, newly refurbished headquarters in lower Manhattan,has expanded its vision to the national stage with the creation of the National Advocacy Coalition on Youth and Sexual Orientation.
In addition, Hetrick-Martin has begun to train professionals from other agencies such as