This summer, I did the scariest thing possible for someone working in education policy: I went back into the classroom to work as a teacher. In between lesson plans, data analysis, and parent-teacher conferences, the entire school took a group picture to commemorate the students’ hard work. Scrunched together, several of the older boys began to lie on one another, each resting his head on the lower waist of the boy behind him. There was nothing sexual about their head placement, until one of the male teachers reminded the boys that they were “acting gay” and that this type of behavior would be punished if it continued.
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Tag Archives: gay bullying
Gay Foster Kids’ Discrimination Battle Heats Up In States
Sixto Cancel says his ultra-religious foster family frequently talked about their disdain for his homosexuality at the dinner table, trashed his room and called him homophobic slurs. While he was still a teenager, he says, they kicked him out of their Connecticut home after he had lived there for nearly a decade.
“I’ve had foster homes who completely said you can’t live here if you’re gay,” said Cancel, a 21-year-old student at Virginia Commonwealth University who bounced between half a dozen foster homes while in care. “For a long time I had that self-hatred and uncomfortableness with who I am.”
Discrimination against gay and lesbian youths in foster care is prevalent enough around the country that federal health officials sent a letter in 2011 encouraging states to develop training for caseworkers and foster parents on the issue. Advocates in a handful of states including Florida, California, Connecticut, Illinois and Massachusetts have increased efforts to train caseworkers, recruit foster parents and assign mentors. Officials don’t want to force youths to disclose their sexuality, but must try to create environments where they feel safe to come out when ready. Without such support, the federal government memo says, gay and lesbian youths who leave the foster care system can wind up homeless
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Is Being Straight a ‘Lifestyle Choice’?
If you are straight and oppose equality for gay and lesbian people, I’d like you to reflect on two specific questions. Firstly, when did you “choose” to be straight? Secondly, do you think being straight is a “lifestyle choice”?
Based on knowledge of your own sexuality, you may think these questions are totally ridiculous, or you may not even understand what they are referring to. Straight people are rarely asked such questions, and it explains, in part, why a video exploring the topic recently went viral online, garnering millions of views.
Frustratingly, gay and lesbian people are repeatedly subjected to this bizarre line of questioning (about our sexuality), both in our day-to-day lives and in our quest for equality at a political and societal level. Not only is this notion that people choose to be gay or lesbian totally absurd, but it demonstrates a lack of understanding of two different components of human sexuality: sexual orientation and sexual behavior.
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LGBT Youth And Suicide Study
Each year, one out of every three gay, lesbian or bisexual students in the San Francisco Unified School District reportedly attempts suicide. For transgender students, that number jumps to nearly one in two.
These statistics were captured in a 2011 survey of nearly 5,000 SFUSD middle and high school students developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and have inspired an aggressive anti-suicide campaign in San Francisco schools.
“The numbers about suicides are the final statistics in a series of statistics that start with lack of safety,” said Jodi Schwartz, executive director of the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center, an organization that supports LGBTQ youth.
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LGBT Americans Feel Growing Acceptance
The vast majority of LGBT Americans feel that society has become more accepting of them in the last decade, yet many still feel stigmatized, according to a survey released Thursday from the non-partisan Pew Research Center.
In the survey, conducted online among 1,197 self-identified gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender adults, 92 percent of respondents said they feel society has become more accepting in the past decade, and the same percent said society will be more accepting in another 10 years.
But only 19 percent of LGBT adults said they experience “a lot” of social acceptance, and 53 percent said there continues to be “a lot” of discrimination against LGBT people. About 39 percent said that at some point in their lives, they were rejected by a family member or close friend because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Thirty percent said they have been physically attacked or threatened and 21 percent said they have been treated unfairly by an employer.
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“The Out List” from Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
On Thursday, June 27, HBO is premiering The OUT List, a film of intimate docu-portraits from photographer and director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders that follows in the vein of his well known projects About Face: Supermodels Then and Now, The Latino List and The Black List.
The film is a storytelling project in which Greenfield-Sanders’s subjects, a diverse swath of well-known and lesser-known figures in the LGBT community, speak directly into the camera and divulge intimate tales of their careers, activism, and pride, as well as details of personal discrimination they’ve experienced and overcome.
The film was produced by out filmmaker Sam McConnell, who also served as the interviewer on the project.
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Rainbow Summits Project: Raising Awareness About LGBT Youth In Distress
I stood up and looked into the darkness. Somewhere beyond the small circle of light illuminated by my headlamp was my destination, the summit of Mount Everest, my sixth ascent of the “Seven Summits” — the highest mountain on each continent. It meant I was now very close, just one mountain away, from becoming the first openly gay person to accomplish this feat as part of my Rainbow Summits Project. It was close, but still out of sight. I was at 28,707 feet — just 296 vertical feet below the highest point on Earth — behind me a snake of over 75 people climbing up towards the summit. It was time to move on and finish my cold and windy quest…
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Education Policy Overhaul Aims to Protect Gay Students
A bill to alter America’s education system was introduced in the Senate Tuesday, and it includes ways to protect LGBT students from harassment, bullying, and discrimination.
A proposal to overhaul current education policy was introduced Tuesday, and the 1,150-page document includes language to bar schools and administrators from discriminating against LGBT students.
The Strengthening America’s Schools Act of 2013 is a sweeping bill aimed at improving schools, and reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as “No Child Left Behind.” It also includes language from two previously introduced bills intended to protect LGBT students: the Safe Schools Improvement Act, which would establish antibullying and antiharassment policies, and the Student Non-Discrimination Act, which would ban discrimination in public schools against LGBT students and those who are perceived to be LGBT.
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11 Year-Old Marcel Neergaard: Taking a Stand Against Anti-Gay Bullying (with video)
I am Marcel Neergaard, and I am 11 years old. This year I was homeschooled for sixth grade because of severe bullying. If I had gone back to public school, there is a great possibility that I would have taken my own life. That possibility would have grown if a certain bill introduced in my home state of Tennessee had passed into law. This bill was known as the “don’t say gay” bill. Though that bill never became a law, Oak Ridge’s own representative, John Ragan, introduced a new version of the Classroom Protection Act. It is the “don’t say gay” bill, just more homophobic. While he crafted this horrifying bill, he received an award. I wrote a petition to take a stand against this.
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