When plans for a gay club at Kennedy High School on the city’s Southwest Side surfaced last week, some community members denounced the proposal, saying it was not only immoral but would target gay students for harassment and disrupt education.
Teens involved in such clubs, however, say the groups actually create a bulwark against abuse.
“I would be physically or verbally attacked almost every day,” said Tom Wartell, a recent graduate of Naperville Central who played a key role in creating a group for gay and straight students there last year. “Its very presence made life tolerable.”
Wartell was one of about 800 teens and adults at the national convention of the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national organization dedicated to fighting homophobia in schools. The conference opened Friday in Arlington Heights and continues through Sunday.
The issue of gay-straight student alliances dominated the agenda Friday, with one workshop suggesting how to “Turn your GSA into a highly-efficient, outspoken homophobia-fighting machine.”
Such groups were introduced about a decade ago and are becoming almost as familiar on the high school scene as debate club or yearbook, with some 800 groups nationwide.
In Chicago-area high schools, there are about 25 such clubs, from Marshall and Whitney Young in the city to New Trier, Glenbard West and Wheaton-Warrenville South in the suburbs. While a few have started without so much as a raised eyebrow, the community uproar witnessed at Kennedy is far more typical.
“I’m not against them, but I’m against having a club in school,” said Richard Zilka, president of the Garfield Ridge Civic League in the conservative, working-class neighborhood where Kennedy students live. “We don’t want sex in our schools.”
Zilka’s sentiments were echoed by other board members who viewed the group as a distraction and a safety risk.
Inside the school, though, the response has been more supportive, said Ron Cozzalino, head of the school’s guidance department. He said he hopes straight students will join the group in support of gay students.
“It’s not easy for a kid that is 15 or 16 and coming out,” Cozzalino said.
Opponents of such groups usually come up against the Equal Access Act, a federal law prohibiting schools from selectively denying clubs on the basis of content. In other words, if the Young Republicans can meet on school property, so can gay students.
However, in some communities across the country the anti-GSA contingent is so strong that the decision is ultimately left to the courts. The Salt Lake City Board of Education took the strongest action, deciding in 1996 it would rather eliminate all clubs than allow the formation of a GSA.
“It’s the scorched-earth policy … it’s better to harm all students than protect a few,” said David Buckel of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, which has played a role in a number of the nation’s high-profile cases.
Thursday, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation, Salt Lake City quietly lifted the ban on extracurricular activities. Now, all clubs–including a GSA–will be allowed to meet on school property, a victory lauded by many at the conference.
A small group of protesters picketed the meeting outside the Arlington Sheraton Hotel on Friday, saying they are morally opposed to the gay-straight alliances and worry that the groups “endorse and promote” homosexuality.
“If it’s going to be in school then two sides ought to be presented,” said Peter LaBarbara. “Why should their opinion be the only one allowed?”
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Supporters counter that the case for heterosexuality is made with every school dance and election of a homecoming king and queen–sending a clear message to gay students that they fall outside the norm.
At Sandburg High School in Orland Park, members of a gay-straight club have been meeting over the past month with administrators to discuss what the students describe as an intolerant atmosphere in the school, including the use of offensive language.
Tim Brown, superintendent of Orland High School District 230, said comments against homosexuals will no longer be tolerated. Administrators at the high school also plan to expand their harassment policy to ban discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.
Sandburg’s gay-straight club meets on a weekly basis, Brown said, and is comparable to other student groups that have unofficial status at the school, such as a Muslim group that prays in the afternoon.
Julie Libes, who started Lane Tech’s club in 1997, credits such organizations with helping not just students like her, but straight students as well.
“If nothing else,” said Libes, an Oberlin College sophomore, “it made them think about their homophobia.”
Seeing a notice for a GSA as an 8th grader at University of Chicago Lab School validated Hannah Garber-Paul’s feelings of being different and ultimately led to self-acceptance, she said.
“I went from `There are gay and lesbian students’ to `I could know some’ to `I could be’ to `I am,'” said Garber-Paul, now a senior at the school.
Betty Lark Ross said that had there been a GSA when she attended Schurz High School 30 years ago it would have transformed her adolescence.
“At the time I was in high school, this was unthinkable. [Being a lesbian] was considered degenerate behavior,” said Ross, an art teacher at Latin School who has spent 15 years with her partner. “When things are out in the open, you can live a life of integrity. You don’t have to be afraid.”
Numerous studies show that gay students’ fears are well-founded.
They are five times more likely to skip school because they feel unsafe, seven times more likely to have been threatened or injured by a weapon at school and four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A recent Gallup poll of students ages 13-17 found that “hatred of gay people” is one of the most common topics voiced by violent students.
Safety was key in a change of heart for Joyce Kenner, principal of Whitney Young High School, about gay-straight alliances.
Though she had opposed the creation of a GSA in 1996, today she says it was her own “ignorance and bias” that shaded her reaction. Whitney Young was the first Chicago Public School to deal with the controversy.
“We’re dealing with teenagers and they are still young people who need guidance and advice,” Kenner said. “These are kids, period, and they need to be protected.”