Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [108]
The driving force of OutYouth/Austin is Lisa Rogers, a forty-three-year-old social-work graduate who in a previous incarnation obtained a seminary degree and worked as a chaplain. In social-work school at the University of Texas, she became interested in gay youth issues and discovered there were support groups sprouting around the country, but none in Austin. With a classmate, she began holding informal meetings for youngsters, at first in her home, then in the library. In 1991 the University YMCA became a mentor, arranging for OutYouth to obtain a room the size of a small gymnasium to accommodate all its resources and activities, with space enough for a library, a pool table, and its annual alternative prom.
In the next three years, OutYouth grew, obtaining city money for HIV education and funds from private sources. Soon, fifty to sixty young people were using the facility each month. On its toll-free help line it received more calls than it could handle, from remote areas of Texas and other states—not unlike the Indiana Youth Group.
The organization gained legitimacy in the mainstream youth community. It was asked to participate in youth conferences, to do in-service training, and to take part in coalitions. In related advances, two of Austin’s high schools have fostered support groups for gay kids, and a third has a gay-straight student alliance.
Increased visibility, however, also made Out Youth a target for Bible Belt backlash.
“We’ve had incredible struggles,” said Rogers. “The religious right has taken over the school board. We used to be able to get ads in high school newspapers. Some principals are now so scared they won’t run them.
“For every gain,” she added, “a thousand preachers are condemning gay people and hundreds of thousands are sitting in the pews listening. It’s like the sixties. Blacks got uppity in Selma and there was a backlash. It’s two steps forward and one step back.”
One of those backward steps occurred more than a year ago when a nineteen-year-old involved in the center hanged himself. The young man was estranged from his fundamentalist religious family. Out Youth held a memorial service for him at the Bobby Griffith Center and established a scholarship fund in his honor.
Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Teachers Network
Again, by virtue of the vision of a dynamic single individual—in this case, Boston-area prep school teacher Kevin Jennings—the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Teachers Network (GLSTN) has grown into a nationwide body of thirty-five chapters with three thousand members in just a few years. Jennings was a teacher at posh Concord Academy. He began GLSTN when he discovered that most gay and lesbian teachers lived in frightened invisibility. His goals are to embolden teachers to come out, serve as role models for gay youth, and get involved in creating support systems for these youth in school environments. Jennings believes in the concept of gay-straight coalitions as key to winning political battles at both teacher and student levels. To him, the problem is not homosexuality but homophobia, which he defines as “child abuse” in schools. “Teaching a kid to hate himself so much that he or she wants to die is abuse,” he says.
In describing these five organizations I have merely skimmed the surface of the movement on behalf of gay youth. (For information about other organizations, see the listing in the appendix.) The level of dedication and vitality in so many of these grassroots efforts warrants that the movement will continue to persist in spite of ferocious opposition. There is a growing recognition in the education establishment that tolerance of homophobia is a social problem that also affects heterosexual youngsters negatively.
But the outcome remains unpredictable. Will gay and lesbian leaders elevate the