Gay in School

There’s a fascinating article in Newsweek all about a fifteen-year-old gay boy who was murdered by a classmate. The boy was openly gay, more than a little flamey, and shot in the head by a fourteen-year-old boy in front of a classroom full of witnesses.

The article raises lots of issues, including one about gun control, but to me it just seems like a rather tragic story on all sides. I think the school was trying to find a balance, I think the victim was something of a bully, and I think the shooter clearly had his own issues (possibly sexual ones?), that went beyond that horrible day.

I do think of the legitimate concerns the article raises is about gays at middle school and high school. Now I know lots of eople say, “They can’t know they’re gay at that age!” Really? At what age did you know you were straight? At what age were you craving members of the opposite sex? Well, it’s the same for gay kids.

Gay kids at all levels need to be allowed to be “out” in school. They should have the exact same freedom as other kids, but they also need to have the same limitations. From what I can tell in the story, the victim went around taunting other boys, hitting on them in the locker rooms and things like that. Stuff that’s clearly sexual harassment. If a boy was doing that to girls, he’d be talked to seriously, perhaps even suspended. I don’t know how much talking-to the boy in this story was getting (some, at least, from what I gather), but it clearly wasn’t enough if the behaviors were continuing. Equality means, after all, not just the same rights but the same limitations.

For the record, by the way, I don’t think the other boy should be charged with a hate crime (I don’t like those in principle, since they punish people for what they were thinking when they did something), and I certainly don’t think he should be tried as an adult. What’s the point of having special laws for kids if you can just set them aside when you want to?

You know, I wasn’t really out when I was in high school. It wasn’t until my second year as a senior (don’t ask), that I even figured out what I was. Thankfully at that point I was attending New Century High School, a school that ran in the evening and was for, basically, freaks like me. We bristled at it being called an “alternative” school, because as far as we were concerned it wasn’t. What it was, though, was a place that accepted pretty much everyone. People in Washington will probably get the reference when I say, “Picture the Evergreen State College, only in high scool”.

Anyhow, it was a place where I could safely be who and what I was, start my first real romantic relationship, and know that I wasn’t going to have to put with any crap. On the other hand, I also knew that if I stepped out of line and, say, grabbed another boy’s ass while in the cafeteria, without his consent, I’d get smacked down by the school, and rightly so.

Ah, the whole thing is a mess, though at least there’s one joke I can milk out of the article.

In the sixth grade, a girl started a “Burn Book”—an allusion to a book in the movie “Mean Girls,” where bullies scribble nasty rumors about the people they hate—about Larry. The Larry book talked about how he was gay and falsely asserted that he dressed in Goth and drag. And it ended with a threat: “I hate Larry King. I wish he was dead,” according to one parent’s memory of the book.

Look, people, I don’t like his TV show either, but there’s a limit.