Make gays feel safe, valued at school

By Deb Price / The Detroit News

When Brother Adrian devoted one day of biology class to human sexuality, he probably had no idea how profoundly he was affecting one of the ninth-graders at his Catholic boys' school in Cleveland.

The year was 1973. And Jeff Perrotti felt terribly isolated as he listened to the sex-education lesson and knew that he secretly was attracted to boys.

"I gave myself a directive at 14," Perrotti recalls with a well-earned chuckle of satisfaction. "I said to myself, 'Don't ever forget how alone you are feeling right now. And make sure you do something when you grow up so other kids don't have to feel this way.'"

Perrotti, now 42, became a driving force behind a groundbreaking Massachusetts project to combat anti-gay harassment and suicide among gay teens. That safe schools program, begun in the early 1990s, was a pet project of Republican Gov. William Weld, who persuaded the state's board of education to work to make classrooms safe -- physically and emotionally -- for gay students. Weld also convinced his state Legislature to ban discrimination against gay students.

And, slowly, life has begun to improve for gay teens, particularly in Massachusetts and at the more than 800 schools around the nation where students have forged gay-straight clubs.

"One of the wonderful things today is that young gay people don't have to say any more, 'I feel like I'm the only one,'" says Perrotti, who, with Kim Westheimer, is the author of a inspiring new book, When the Drama Club Is Not Enough (Beacon). Based on its authors' experience with Massachusetts' pioneering safe-schools program, the book offers nuts-and-bolt advice to students, parents and educators about how to make gay young people feel comfortable and respected at school.

"Now you hear kids talking about how it took them two years to come out at 14! Things are so much better. And people need to hear success stories. Our book really speaks to the power of having high expectations of people, of speaking to people's best sides and expecting people to be there for you," adds Perrotti.

As his book points out, "The core of safe-schools work is cultivating empathy and compassion." And it underscores the good news that once the special problems faced by gay kids are understood by educators and fellow students, those gay students stop being quite so isolated:"Walk into any school and you will find teachers who care about kids, teachers who are distressed to hear that students are hurting. ... Walk into any school and you will find students seeking justice as well as knowledge."

Westheimer stresses, "All children should be safe to attend school. And safety goes beyond the right not to be beaten up. Safety also means being able to express who you are and to see yourself reflected in the school environment. Otherwise, kids feel invisible, they have a sense of self-hatred and that who they are is not OK out there in the world."

Destructive school environments that alienate and terrify gay youth don't change by magic or overnight. But such climates can improve, as optimists Westheimer and Perrotti have seen first-hand, when even a few good-hearted people work to make the situation more humane.

"We have learned to value the small steps:putting up a gay-positive poster, speaking up against an anti-gay comment, adding one new book to the library, having two parents attend an after-school forum, starting a (gay-straight alliance) with three members, merely raising the topic of gay and lesbians students. These actions are revolutionary," they point out.

They tell of a girl upset that her school didn't have a gay-straight alliance. "I wondered," she said, "why someone didn't do something. Then I realized, I am someone."

Each of us is someone who could, in some small way, help make gay kids feel safe, welcome and valued at their schools. What better time to begin than the start of a new school year?

Deb Price's column is published on Monday. She can be contacted at (202) 662-7370 or dprice@detnews.com. Write letters to letters@detnews.com

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