That’s SO Gay!

April 22, 2008

Last night, at the community college where I teach Ted and I gave a presentation titled That’s So Gay! for our annual Literary Arts Festival. It was the kickoff event, a reading/interrogation by several of the professors of the school. Our theme for the Lit. Arts Festival this year is The Writer As Activist and we have Marge Piercy as our final event. She’s coming out May 2 and will be both reading and offering a workshop to some of our best and brightest creative writing students.

So Cool! A chance to work with Marge Piercy. I’m envious of them. Two of my students were chosen to work with her. Not too shabby, i’d say.

Anyway, last night, Ted and I split our presentation. I spoke for the first half and he spoke for the 2nd half. My half talked about the bullying and harassment of gay teens and pre-teens. Basically harassment, teasing, bullying of any GLBTQ youth. I ended the discussion with the mention of Lawrence–Larry– King, the 15 year-old Oxnard, CA boy who was killed by a fellow student for being too gay. King was a jovial, bubbly, out and proud kid who wore eyeliner and high heeled boots to school. He loved bugs and chess and Project Runway.

The administration knew he had been harassed and bullied, but nothing was done to curb this. No intervention, no assembly to discuss how to deal with differences, how to respect individuality. Larry was shot in the head–twice– in front of his fellow classmates, by a 14 year-old boy, whom Larry had professed a crush on.

It’s preposterous and horrifying to think this happens EVERY day in our schools.

One statistic I found said that Gay students hear anti-gay slurs as often as 26 times each day; faculty intervention occurs in only about 3% of those cases. (from GLSEN).

(from Advocate.com) Shelia Kuehl, who is the first lesbian person elected to California’s state legislature is working with a number of school districts to put education programs in place to keep our students safe, to promote compliance with the laws we have passed and to prevent future violence.

She suggests that we might ask what is being done in our public schools to teach conflict resolution and respect for differences. She states, “If we are to be self-critical, we might better ask ourselves if we have done all we can to promote that sort of necessary education.”

I began my discussion with an anecdote about my own experience–being bullied through junior high by a kid named Kenny La Fond who was a couple of years older than me and the older brother of a classmate of mine. Here is an excerpt from my discussion, with photos:

This is a school photo of me from when I was eleven years old. I was in fifth grade at Hill Creek Elementary in Santee. That was the year the soccer team I played on placed third in the county. It was the year my mother took my sisters and I on a trip to Hawaii—the first trip we had taken as a divorced family—without my father. It was one year before I made my community theater debut at The Santee Community Theater in the children’s play, “Alaska,” where one reviewer game me a “nod for best stage presence and timing.” It was also the year that I was famously, or infamously dubbed “Fairy Lips” by Kenny La Fond—a seventh grader and the older brother of a classmate. He called me this for an entire school year, and through most of the rest of middle school.

You might wonder why he called me Fairy Lips? There’s nothing in this fifth grade picture of me that would suggest that my lips were anything other than thin and maybe a little chapped, my teeth were large and I had an overbite (later fixed by braces), my hair was longer than usual but that was the style then, and I think my mother might have made that terrycloth shirt by hand, but I can’t remember.

What I do remember is a couple of years of feeling like something was wrong with me. A couple of years of dreading walking from class to class when someone like Kenny La Fond or one of his friends—and he had many—would say something demeaning, or humiliating, to me. Say something that would suggest that I was somehow less of a person than he was, or some sort of freak because I had a little more spring in my step. Or I preferred going to the library at recess to read biographies of people like Florence Nightingale and James Madison. Or maybe because, as one teacher put it on my 5^th grade report card:

Bobby Williams is a conscientious student who loves to talk, especially to the girls in the class.

Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I knew I was different. I wrote a novel about a talking Sunflower Seed when I was seven. By age ten I was an expert player at Trivial Pursuit, the Silver Screen Edition—I was once interviewed at a local tournament by newscaster Marty Emerald. I was especially adept at memorizing the names and films of movie stars from the 1940s and 1950s. I liked to draw, I liked to write. I was a creative, sensitive boy.

It’s reprehensible, though, that, as a young person growing up, these differences, which could have been, perhaps should have been, a celebration, were instead an invitation for harassment and bullying, and for me—a cause of shame.

At the age of eleven, I was too young to refer to myself as anything yet—gay or straight—I didn’t even have an inkling of what those words meant. Too young to have any sort of identity other than I was a fan of the TV show Charlie’s Angels and I liked to collect Star Wars action figures.

I was merely a boy that wanted people to look at me and like me, for my creativity, for my individuality. But instead, I was being defined by Kenny and his friends, and the people—my peers, my teachers—who didn’t know how to deal with, much less respect, difference. Probably because they were never taught to.

With the words that were being used to define me, by Kenny and others, words like Fairy Lips, or sissy, or gayboy, and many others—they wanted to tear me down, to ridicule me, to make me feel that I was unworthy, unlikeable, and most of all unacceptable.

And they knew just the right words.

[...]

But the reality is, that as silly and seemingly insignificant a name as “Fairy Lips,” or sissy, or calling a boy a ‘girl,’ or calling a young girl a lezbo, or being called a freak, or strange, or unnatural, does cause harm, it does affect us.

Words are powerful. We know this. We learn this in school. We teach this in school from an early age.

Ted’s discussion/speech was equally effective and wonderful. He spoke about the careful choice of words to describe and attack gay people. (maybe he’ll post his discussion on his blog…?). In his discussion he quoted Whitman, notably this beautiful poem (my favorite of Whitman’s poems, and the one that I sent to Ted when we first started dating):