Equality Forum Day 6 (2): All About Me
OK, I’ll ‘fess up: I attended the program From PTA to GSA mostly because, as the parent of four-year-old twins, I wanted to hear strategies for navigating what I assumed to be the dark waters of the school experience for my kids. As soon as I walked in, I knew I’d made a good decision; in typically academic fashion, the organizers of the panel had strewn a table with a wealth of useful materials for LGBT parents of school kids. These materials addressed the tough questions I suppose I’ll have to face once my kids are old enough to realize, as my partner David says, that “some people are mean to their parents.”
Mountain Meadow is a summer camp that has also worked with GLSEN (The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) to produce research documenting what we all know: Kids from same-gender families have it tougher in school than their classmates from other homes (whether “traditional” or single-parent). The fruits of that collaboration are in a research paper called Involved, Invisible, Ignored: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Parents and Their Children in Our Nation’s K-12 Schools.
That paper demonstrates just what you’d think it would: Kids of LGBT parents have it tough, and of course it gets worse as the kids get older. But the anecdotal information has more punch: For example, one kid was told he could only make one Mother’s Day gift, even though his teacher knew he had two moms. (Who on earth was this teacher, btw? Nice job.)
After Stephen Duffy, the Executive Director of Mountain Meadow, presented this case, the panel turned to two kids for their stories. One was a thirteen-year-old boy named Nicholas, who admitted to being kind of a bookworm. He had told only a few of his friends that he had two moms, for fear of reprisal (not his word — he’s a bookworm but only 13, for heaven’s sake!). Nicole Reyna, a local high school junior who lives with her mother most of the time, but sometimes with her dad and his partner, represented Nicholas’s story at a later point; in middle school, she, too, had been “out” about her parents to only a few of her closest friends, but now she’s a true activist, having traveled to San Francisco to march in the Gay Pride Parade there. In her words: “Equality should just be there. We shouldn’t have to fight for it.”
I was surprised to learn that often schools’ Gay-Straight Alliances are less than welcoming to these kids, because they’re not gay. But what about the “straight alliance” part of GSA? To the extent this exclusionary impulse is a reality, it cements the point that a great deal of work remains to be done.
Some of that work is being done by people like Erika T. Garnett-Wootson, a teacher and GSA Advisor for Philadelphia’s Martin Luther King High School, who might with accuracy be called “The Reluctant Activist.” For reasons she didn’t articulate fully, Garnett-Wootson served for a while as a sort of “underground advisor” for LGBT students with sufficiently developed gaydar (when’s the last time you saw that word, incidentally?) to have sussed her out. Then she just jumped in and formed a GSA, serving as its advisor. This began about four years ago.
Her story stands as a kind of universal lesson about the risks and joy of taking a tough stand. At first ridiculed or ignored, her school’s GSA is now a part of the furniture. Conditions are better for everyone at the MLK school, and students and Garnett-Wootson can thank each other for that.
Do I need to start worrying about this stuff now? To an extent, yes, but the Garnet-Wootsons and steadfast students in GSAs throughout the country allow me the fantasy that perhaps my concern will amount to little.
One Response to “Equality Forum Day 6 (2): All About Me”
May 30th, 2009 at 3:32 am
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