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School's out!
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"Richard Burnett is a faggot." Those words were scrawled on my high school locker door in big block letters by some bully with a black marker. And I was terrified because I was a faggot. Back then, in 1982, McDonald Cartier Memorial High School (MCMHS) on Montreal's South Shore was a sprawling huge complex packed with over 4,000 students and just 263 staff and faculty.
There were rumbles, drug dealers and loan sharks. Students actually smoked in the cafeteria. And one student, I remember, showed up with a chainsaw at the MCMHS riot of 1980 that made national news.
"Teachers and staff operated in survival mode back then," MCMHS pastoral animator Jack Adams told me years later.
Worse, there were a whopping three books on homosexuality in my 12,000-title high school library, including the 1965 classic Deviant Behaviour and Public Policy: Abortion, Homosexuality and Drug Addiction by the inimitable Edwin M. Schur.
So I didn't dare ask if I could bring a boyfriend to my high school prom.
Over 25 years later, the song remains the same: Last month, Itawamba County School District officials in Fulton, Mississippi, cancelled the Itawamba Agricultural High School's 2010 prom rather than allow 18-year-old Constance McMillen to bring her girlfriend to the prom. The community - shamed by the scathing international headlines - raised funds for a private alternative prom at the Fulton Country Club on April 2. But that turned out to be a decoy prom.
"They had two proms and I was only
invited to one of them," McMillen, 18, told The Advocate last week. "The one that I went to had seven people there, and everyone went to the other one I wasn't invited to."
Meanwhile, many of McMillen's classmates started a Facebook page called "Constance quit yer cryin" which, when I last checked, had 2,791 fans. The first post reportedly read, "Seriously, you've pretty much eff'd up your fellow classmate's best memory of High School."
Another prom open to all students gay and straight is now being held on May 8 in Tupelo by the Mississippi Safe Schools Coalition, a prom that's being paid for by Green Day, former N'Sync member Lance Bass and others. The ACLU is now suing the Itawamba County School District, McMillen will be the Grand Marshall at this June's NYC Gay Pride parade and The Ellen DeGeneres Show has given McMillen a $30,000 scholarship for standing up against her school district's anti-gay prom policy.
"I never dreamed so many people would support my fight to take my girlfriend to the prom," McMillan said.
But for other kids, the dream is still something of a nightmare.
A 2006 four-year study by clinical social worker Caitlin Ryan of San Francisco State University reports the average coming out age of a North American teen is now 13.
A 2008 Egale Canada national survey on homophobia in Canadian schools reports two-thirds of gay students still feel unsafe at school based on their sexuality, as opposed to one in five straight students.
And a just-released 2010 study of 1,900 teens aged 14-18, co-authored by Dr. Richard Montoro of the McGill University Health Centre and published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, reports gay youth are twice as likely to think about killing themselves or attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.
Which is why this week I was thrilled to discover Vanier College's Open Door Network (ODN) is celebrating five years of supporting their CEGEP's gay and lesbian students.
"We founded the [teachers'] group because many students here were typically homophobic," says Vanier teacher Jacky Vallee, 37. "Our teachers didn't have the tools to deal with these issues. So we organized sensitization workshops on LGBT topics for Vanier staff as well as panels and film screenings. [Our colleagues] needed to be empowered."
Subsequently, ODN has also helped empower gay teens at Vanier, so much so this school year students founded Vanier's first-ever gay student resource centre and support group, U.M.B.R.E.L.L.A., which stands for United Members Bringing Respect, Engaging, Learning and Loving All.
"[Homophobia among students] is a mixed bag," Vallee says. "Female students are generally more open to talking about these issues, whereas male students still have that look on their face. They don't want their friends to think they're queer."
Still, it's a huge improvement over the days when gay students - afraid of coming out, with no one to talk to and black-marker, anti-gay graffiti scrawled all over their locker doors - could only find books like Edwin M. Schur's Deviant Behaviour and Public Policy: Abortion, Homosexuality and Drug Addiction in their school library.
Richard Burnett
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