Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [99]
AFTERWORD
Gay Youth
1996
On reflecting about homosexuality, I’ve learned that: my religious tradition taught me to believe that my son was a sinner; my medical support system taught me to believe my son was sick; my educational system taught me that my son was abnormal; my legal system views my son and his partner…without legal rights; my family…provided no support for having a gay relative in its midst; my major communication sources treated homosexuality as a deviant.
Testimony of James Genasci, father of a gay son,
at public hearings of the Governor’s Commission on
Gay and Lesbian Youth, Boston, Massachusetts, 1992.
If Bobby Griffith were an adolescent of high school age struggling with his gay sexuality in 1996, he would find that not much had changed in his community; his school and his church still offer little or nothing in the way of outreach to gay young people. This picture is duplicated across America, where the isolation and estrangement of gay youth remains epidemic. Some major and encouraging strides have been made, most notably in Massachusetts, where gay youth are protected by state law making it illegal to discriminate against public school students on the basis of sexual orientation. Moreover, largely driven by one or two obsessively dedicated adults, services for gay youth are proliferating—from local drop-in clubs in unlikely small places to on-line linkups that allow youngsters to get information via the privacy of their PCs.
Such advances as these are a ripple in the sea of neglect and fear confronting gay and lesbian adolescents. The situation grew even more intense in 1996, a presidential election year, as right-wing conservatives turned many school boards and schools across the country into battlegrounds over issues of support for gay and lesbian youth.
At Las Lomas High School today Bobby Griffith would find some books on gay subjects in the library, thanks to the efforts of BANGLE and P-FLAG. There is also a part-time crisis counselor available two and a half days a week to serve those among the school’s twelve hundred students who request help. And Las Lomas’s three staff counselors are said to be sensitive professionals.
But there is no outreach to gay and lesbian youngsters, no proactive effort to signal a hospitable environment. The curriculum is void of references to the subject (although AIDS is discussed in health class). Training programs for teachers and counselors in the school district include no component dealing with problems related to gay and lesbian identity. There is nothing in the school regulations that provides penalties specifically for antigay slurs or gay baiting.
The school’s head counselor, Carolyn Procunier, says teachers and counselors are sensitive when individual issues arise. But that approach is passive rather than proactive. Someone like Bobby, highly vulnerable to peer pressure, would be loath to risk exposing his sexual nature.
Procunier finds that high schoolers are more tolerant these days, but “you have your exceptions.” The school has grown more heterogeneous in the past fifteen years as interdistricttransfer rules have been relaxed. The student body has far less of a suburban-clone look to it. Still, words like faggot and queer are used interchangeably to mean “stupid” or “nerd.” Homosexuality is, if anything, a subterranean topic on the Las Lomas campus, where sexual conformity is still largely the vogue. The rare gay youngster with a strong ego and parental support might do well in such an environment. Someone like Bobby would find little solace there despite the passage of time.
Crisis counselor Dale Russell says about fifteen to twenty students have come to him in the past four years with issues relating to homosexuality. But he acknowledges that the approach at Las Lomas is a passive one, dictated by what he calls the “politics” of this issue. “There is a bottom-line paranoia among administrators, who wonder, ‘How many angry parents would I have on my head if I got too out-front on this?’” He noted that the situation is