I was perusing Facebook and stumbled upon this article shared by a friend entitled “Middle School tries to sneak in ‘gay’ assembly — but MassResistance intervenes!” I was led to a webpage with MassResistance’s slogan, “Pro-family activism that makes a difference!” proudly plastered at the top. This so-called “gay assembly” they are referring to is a Gay-Straight Alliance.
The article claims that a mother contacted MassResistance, a conservative action center, with a concern about an assembly regarding the new Gay-Straight Alliance club being formed at a public middle school. She was concerned that parents hadn’t been notified about the meeting or received the option to remove their kids from the assembly.
MassResistance goes on to warn about the “LGBT agenda” and how anti-bullying legislation is allowing “homosexual and transgender programs to be brought into the public school.” MassResistance pits parents versus schools to effectively try to keep GSAs and the “gay agenda” out of public schools. MassResistance is an organization that adamantly opposes gay marriage and has a whole pamphlet on all the awful things “same-sex ‘marriage’” has done to destroy Massachusetts and families.
For those of you who don’t know, a Gay-Straight Alliance is an optional afterschool club just like sports or art club. It is a safe space for any student (LGBTQ or otherwise) to make friends, support each other and fight discrimination, violence and harassment. It is a place to learn about gender identity and sexual orientation issues and educate the school community.
Gay-Straight Alliances connect LGBTQ students with allies and role models to help form a safety net during a time when teenagers are beginning to explore and experience their identities. GSAs are an important asset to not only LGBTQ students, but to school communities in general. As a group, they often organize anti-bullying work that benefits the whole community and makes the school a safer place.
Anti-bullying legislation works the same way. It protects all students from the harmful treatment they might endure from bullying. It educates administrators and teachers to better respond to bullying. Why anyone would oppose making our schools safer for our children is beyond me.
This article hit even closer to home for me, because the middle school at the center of this is Lynnfield Middle School, a school only five minutes away from where I call home. To paint you a picture of Lynnfield, it is a community that is 95 percent white, more conservative than the rest of Massachusetts, has a median family income of $82,386, and has a public high school ranked number 28 in the state.
I tell you these statistics because nothing exists in a vacuum. While these statistics do not speak to Lynnfield as a whole, and this one concerned mother does not speak for all of Lynnfield, it is a still-startling story to hear. Each of these factors plays a role in how a community responds to social events and influences an individual’s beliefs. And it proves that even in Massachusetts, over 10 years after same-sex marriage was legalized, there can be backlash against something as harmless as an after-school group.
By resisting change and rejecting differences, communities lacking diversity are perpetuating fear of the unknown. However, most of the time, this fear is not justified or rational, and as you meet people who are different than you, you begin to realize they aren’t so different after all.
This is why Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, urged people to come out in the ’70s. As more and more people came out, the community would have to accept them and realize that they are no different from everyone else. When you realize your daughter, son, sister, brother or friend is gay, it changes things. Gay people are no longer this “other” or a group to fear. They are your friends and family.
Over the break, I was shopping with my family (yes, despite what MassResistance believes, queer people are part of families too) at a marketplace in Lynnfield. I wonder if I ever met this concerned mother in passing. Did she notice me at all? Was she uncomfortable? Has she ever met a queer person in real life?
In the end, this parent chose to opt-out her child from the assembly. I feel sorry for that child and for that mother. She let her fear of the unknown deprive her child of a valuable life experience, even if it was just an assembly.
You can’t opt-out of diversity in the real world. Although some people may try, successfully interacting with people who are different from you is an important part of growing up as a well-rounded adult. Learning to see and understand things from multiple perspectives is something that cannot be taught in an atmosphere that doesn’t first learn to respect and value differences. Hopefully one day, we can all live in a world that respects and values differences, so we will all truly appreciate one another.
In the early 1950s when I was 16 years old, I quit a Chicago high school, because I had “those’ tendencies. Back then being queer, and that is what we were called, it was considered Taboo, in school, at home and the work place and still labeled mentally ill, and most important… there were no support groups to council gays of all ages. I moved to San Francisco to start the 1960s to be myself.
By the end of that decade I was involved in the early gay rights movement. I counted Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk as friends,played it the first gay softball league in the country(today there are over 50 cities with gay sports leagues.
I had the honor to speak on several occasions to Chicago’s Walter Payton College Prep High School’s Gay- Straight Alliance. Thankfully, I told the students that their school and their peers that kids no longer have to quit high school, or young adults need to move from their hometowns just to be themselves. Sadly, not all schools have or allow G/S/ Alliance after school programs. I hope in time, and the sooner the better that more school systems fight to get them in all school districts.