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to MSS PageAnti-gay slurs common at school
Some say insults increase as gays visibility rises
By Laura Sessions Stepp THE WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON, June 19 — Emmett English, a cheerful, easygoing boy, started third grade last year at a new school, Chevy Chase Elementary in Bethesda. On his first day he proudly wore a new red Gap sweat shirt and almost immediately wished he had chosen something else. “A girl called me ‘gay,’ ” he remembered. “I didn’t know what that meant but I knew it was something bad.”
HIS
MOTHER, Christina Files, confirmed this. “He came home quite upset,” she
said.
“That’s soooo gay.” “Faggot.” Or
“lesbo.” For all the outcry over harassment of gays following the murder of
college student Matthew Shepard two years ago, anti-gay insults are still the
slang of choice among children and teenagers, according to teachers, counselors
and youths themselves. Some say the insults are increasing in school classrooms
and hallways — among children as young as 8 or 9 — partly because gay youths
and their supporters have become more visible and more active.
“Schools are seen as a safe place to say
things and get away with it,” said Jerry Newberry, director of health
information for the National Education Association, a teachers’ union.
2 MILLION TEENS TAUNTED
A recent survey of students in seven states
backs up his impression. Human Rights Watch, an international research and
advocacy group, reported last month that 2 million U.S. teenagers were having
serious problems in school because they were taunted with anti-gay slurs.
Young people use these slurs in two
different ways, one generally derogatory and one referring insultingly to sexual
orientation. Schools have a hard time policing either use.
Taunts and slurs, particularly the words
“fag” and “faggot,” were cited in more than half of the publicized
schoolyard shootings of the last three years, according to Newberry. Columbine
shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were called fags. So was Andy Williams,
who sprayed a San Diego high school with gunfire last March, killing two people.
Anti-gay language first appears on
elementary school playgrounds. “Kids at our school say, ‘That kid is sooo
gay,’ ” said Julia Pernick, a classmate of Emmett’s in fourth grade at
Chevy Chase Elementary. “They think it means stupid or unusual or strange.”
WORSE IN MIDDLE SCHOOL
The insults multiply in the emotionally
precarious years of early adolescence. “If you’re too short, too tall, too
fat, too skinny, you get targeted in middle school,” said David Mumaugh, now a
junior at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda. “Kids sign their yearbooks,
‘See you next year, fag.’ ”
Sarah Rothe,
an eighth-grader at Lake Braddock Middle School in Burke, said such words “are
as common as the word ‘like’ ” at her school. Classmate Christina
Jagodnick said “there’s a big difference” between anti-gay slurs and other
derogatory terms. “If we were to say other words which we all know are
wrong,” she said, “someone would stop us.”
At Lake Braddock this year, according to
students, a boy was targeted by classmates who glued his locker shut, writing
the word “gay” on the outside. No one knew the boy’s sexual orientation,
but the bullies called him names until, recently, he transferred to another
school. The school would not comment on the situation.
GAY TEENS TALK ANONYMOUSLY
Gay teens are reluctant to discuss personal
harassment on the record for fear of attracting more. But when they’re offered
anonymity, they won’t stop talking.
A junior at Magruder High School in
Rockville said: “I have a lot of friends who say, ‘Oh, that’s so gay.’
They don’t associate it with homosexuality. You could plant that word in the
dictionary for ‘stupid.’ Do I face a whole life of this?”
At Herndon
High School in Herndon, a junior said, “I was walking with a friend down the
hall and this kid yells, ‘Faggot.’ How am I supposed to defend who I am?”
When straight students are bullied, they
usually can count on an adult coming to their aid, counselors say. Gays don’t
have that assurance. According to several surveys, four out of five gay and
lesbian students say they don’t know one supportive adult at school.
“Teachers are aware they may offend
someone if they speak about homosexuality in anything other than negative
terms,” said Deborah Roffman, who teaches sex education in the Baltimore and
Washington areas. “They don’t know how to cross that street safely, so they
don’t even step off the curb.”
A LONELY CAMPAIGN
Jerry Newberry and other educators suggest
that anti-gay insults are increasing partly because gay youths and their
supporters have become more assertive in trying to stop them. Justen Deal, 16,
has fought such a campaign alone.
A cherubic-looking blond kid from south of
Charleston, W.Va., Justen heard anti-gay words from the time he could talk, even
used them himself on occasion. But by the age of 12, when he first suspected he
was gay, “they made my skin crawl,” he said.
Unlike children in other minority groups,
he had no natural support group to comfort him. His parents had relinquished
custody of him to his paternal grandmother, Patty Deal, when he was born, and
her only knowledge of homosexuals was what she had seen on the TV comedy
“Ellen.”
She did her best once she found out in his
eighth-grade year that he was gay. He had written a letter to his school
counselor that Patty Deal read. She immediately sought psychiatric help for him,
took him to a hospital on the night he overdosed on antidepressants, enrolled
him in a new middle school in Boone County.
Neither she nor Justen knows how, but
rumors started flying at Sherman Junior High. “I was asked eight times a day
if I was gay,” Justen remembered. “I’d say no, or not say anything. That
year is when I learned for sure that the things you hear about words not hurting
is a fairy tale.”
TEEN INTENSIFIES LOBBYING
Justen thought he’d be safe from
gay-bashing once he reached Sherman Senior High. He knew principal Theresa
Lonker, a tough-looking administrator who sends students to detention for
cursing. When she told Justen, “We’ll look out for you,” she seemed to
mean it.
But she couldn’t be everywhere.
Name-calling started slowly in his freshman year and picked up this year,
according to Justen’s friend Lindsey Light. Fed up this past spring, Justen
tried to do something about language in a very visible way.
He drafted a new harassment policy for
Sherman High to include sexual orientation and left it on Lonker’s desk. He
lobbied the county school superintendent, Steve Pauley, to rewrite the
county’s harassment policy.
He visited West Virginia Gov. Robert
Wise’s office asking the governor to convene a task force to investigate
harassment. He testified before the legislature on an amendment to the state’s
hate crime bill that would have included protection based on sexual orientation.
His comments made both Charleston newspapers, including the front page of the
Daily Mail.
Some of his classmates were not exactly
thrilled with the attention. They threw coins and paper wads at him on a school
bus during a field trip and also one afternoon in a science class. “Everyone
[in the class] heard me tell them to stop, but the teacher was in his own little
world,” Justen said.
The science teacher, Robert Britton, said
he didn’t realize at the time there was any harassment going on. “I heard [Justen]
say something about stuff being thrown at him but I thought he was just talking
about words,” Britton said.
Justen’s one-person language crusade was
rebuffed at every turn. Principal Lonker said she never saw the recommendation
for changing the school’s harassment policy. Superintendent Pauley said he was
reluctant to single out gay students for special mention. Gov. Wise’s office
declined to appoint a task force on the needs of gay students. The legislature
voted against adding sexual orientation to its anti-harassment statute. By
mid-April, Justen, feeling defeated, decided to change what he could: his
school.
He transferred to Huntington High, about 90
miles north. The school has a sizable population of openly gay students, and
friends found a gay couple with whom he could live.
IN SEARCH OF A BETTER SCHOOL
On his last day at Sherman High, his
grandmother waited for him in her blue Chevy Impala. She appeared both nervous
and sad.
“I’ve always taught Justen to tell the
truth,” she said. “I reckon he just listened too good. I knew he’d leave
one day — I just didn’t know it would be so soon.”
Justen didn’t want to leave his grandma.
But despite Lonker’s efforts to keep him safe at school, he said, he didn’t
feel safe and thus had a hard time keeping his mind on equations and Civil War
battles. His pals had told him to shrug off the verbal digs, but he could not.
“My friends don’t understand that every
time I hear the word ‘fag’ it really hurts,” he said. “It reminds me
that I’m so far away from what kids see as normal.”
Walking out of Sherman on that soggy
Tuesday, buoyed by the hugs of several students and his principal, he said,
“It was a good day. I only heard the word ‘faggot’ four times.”
DEBATE OVER THE DEBATE
School counselors say insensitive comments
about gays could be reduced through in-service training for teachers and
age-appropriate discussions among students. The NEA recently distributed a video
with such a goal. Titled “Can’t We All Just Get Along?,” it shows the
measures some school districts are taking to discourage verbal assaults against
gays and other students.
Religious
conservatives, viewing homosexuality as a sin, jumped all over the video. “The
NEA is working diligently to bring gay activism to schools . . . using an appeal
to ‘safety for kids’ as the vehicle,” said one online publication from
Focus on the Family.
Dick Carpenter, education policy analyst
for Focus, said that “if students are being harassed in any way, principals
and teachers should stop it, right there and then. But that doesn’t mean you
go into class and define homosexuality to 6-year-olds.”
Carpenter complained that classroom
discussions frequently do not include the essence of the conservative
opposition: its belief that young people can choose not to adopt homosexuality
just as they would choose not to use drugs or drink alcohol. He gives little
credence to studies showing that genetics play a role in homosexuality.
Newberry of the NEA denies that his
organization is promoting a homosexual agenda. “We welcome free and open
debate. . . . In fact, we encourage it,” he said. But debate must be
accompanied by education, he added. Otherwise, students remain ignorant of the
facts about homosexuality. “Ignorance breeds fear, fear breeds hate, and hate
breeds violence, including violent words.”
Phyllis Taylor, principal at Chevy Chase
Elementary, the school that Julia and Emmett attend, wants no discussion of gays
or gay language in her classrooms. The children are too young, she said. If she
heard a gay epithet from a student, “I would treat it as an f-word and call
the parents.”
SENSITIVITY TRAINING
High school teachers, with a more mature
student body, can treat the issue more openly. Centreville High School English
teacher Susan Tracy agreed reluctantly this year when senior Robert Browning
asked to survey his classmates on their attitudes about gays and then present
the results.
She gave Robert 10 minutes to summarize his
findings, then allowed him to continue for 35 more minutes because she and the
class were so absorbed in what he was saying.
“I was especially moved when Robert said
the word ‘gay,’ meaning something annoying or stupid, was as hurtful for him
as the N-word was to a black student,” she remembers. “I had never thought
of it that way. I told him I would need to be more careful myself.”
Later, Robert heard his teacher chastise a
student for saying something was “so gay” and he knew he had made a
difference.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company