Rainbow Guardians

Being Gay can be rough.

Being a Teenager can be agonizing.

Being a Gay Teenager can be both.

Being a Gay Teenager in a High School where homophobic losers are allowed to prowl the halls and attempt to prove their macho-ness by bullying Gay Teenagers is Hell. And it’s been going on for way too long.

The ugliness hit me personally this week.  On Tuesday, my brother Alex and a classmate were attacked at school by 3 gay bashers.  Fortunately, it ended up being the 3 bullies who got bashed – Alex and Saul are fine.   I’ll write about the details of that adventure soon.

While Alex and Saul are okay – partly because they were prepared for this kind of thing happening – millions of other gay kids don’t fare so well.   All of which makes me fucking furious.  I’m going to rant some about it later in this post.  But one of my ways of dealing with my anger is channeling it into some art.  One result of doing that this time was to imagine a world where there are magical Rainbow Guardians who stand behind gay kids and help protect them from the shit that gets slung at them in this Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.  So here’s my image of a Rainbow Guardian.  Below it is my rant, which I hope some of you will read.

Why do we need Rainbow Guardians?  Here are some of the reasons why:

The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, a national organization that helps promote the physical safety and emotional health of GLBT kids in public schools, does a national survey every 2 years about the “School Climate” those kids have to deal with.  The results of the 2007 Survey of over 6000 high school and middle school students were released last year. Part of what it found was that:

86.2% of LGBT students reported being verbally harassed, 44.1% reported being physically harassed and 22.1% reported being physically assaulted at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation.

That’s almost fucking half of the kids surveyed who were pushed or shoved, had things “accidentally” spilled on them, or had their belongings damaged -  just because they don’t fit into a Straight American Kid box.  For our society to allow that kind of regular abuse of some of  its most vulnerable citizens to go on and on is a sign of how really sick it is.

And while the harassment itself is awful, the spillover effects are tragic.  The survey also found that:

• More than half (60.8%) of students reported that they felt unsafe in school because of their sexual orientation:
• 31.7% of LGBT students missed a class and 32.7% missed a day of school in the past month because of feeling unsafe, compared to only 5.5% and 4.5%, respectively, of a national sample of secondary school students: and
• The reported grade point average of students who were more frequently harassed because of their sexual orientation or gender expression was almost half a grade lower than for students who were less often harassed (2.8 versus 2.4).

That means millions of kids have to wake up every day and make the choice of either skipping school or going there to face a hostile environment in which they don’t feel safe.  Sick!!

It’d be nice to at least be able to say that things are getting better in the schools – but it doesn’t look that way. The results from GLSEN’s 2005 survey were that 37.8% of students experienced physical harassment at school and 17.6%of students had been physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation.  In GLSEN’s first survey in 1999, 14% of the students reported having been physically assaulted and 40% felt unsafe at school.  So the number that had been physically harassed went from 38% in 2005 to 44% in 2007 – and the number who’d been assaulted went from 14% in 1999 to 18% in 2005 and to 22% in 2007.

When you look at those numbers, it’s not surprising the number of GLBT kids who feel unsafe a school has gone from 40% in 1999 to 60% in 2007.  If our schools and our country gave a shit, those numbers should be moving, rapidly, in the other direction.  But in 2005 only 9 states had Safe Schools laws that specifically address bullying and harassment on the basis of sexual orientation.  By 2007, that number had only increased to 11 states (and my state isn’t one of them) and efforts to pass such laws were defeated in several states.  Guess why.

Right now there’s a Safe School law covering sexual orientation being considered in North Carolina.  A recent poll of N.C voters found about 70% support the bill while only 30% oppose it.  You’d think that means the law has a pretty good chance of passing.  We’ll see. A similar proposal had about the same public support last year but was narrowly defeated in the legislature.  Maybe that’s because the right wing hate group Focus on the Family launched a campaign against the law, spewing out garbage like this:

The Christian Action League is asking people on its mailing list to tell legislators to oppose it, and the N.C. Family Policy Council has written extensively on its view that homosexual rights groups are using school safety issues to promote a social agenda.

“This is a watershed issue, and if ‘sexual orientation’ is enacted into North Carolina law through HB 1366, it will serve as the basis for affirming deviant sexual behaviors throughout our state statutes,”

I wish James Dobson and all his good Christian sheep would try to convince Lawrence King of this.  But they can’t – because Lawrence King is dead.  Last February, Larry, a 15-year old middle schooler,  who was flamboyantly open about being gay or transgendered, was sitting in his computer class with 20 other students.  The kid sitting behind him, Brandon McInerney, was a 14 year old who idolized Adolph Hitler, was training to be a Young Marine, and had been the leader of a group of kids who regularly harassed Larry as a “faggott,” etc.  The harassment had intensified in the preceding weeks and several students had heard Brandon threaten to kill Larry.  Part way through class that day, Adolph Jr. pulled out a pistol and shot Lawrence in the back.  When Lawrence fell onto the floor bleeding, McInerney got up from his seat and calmly shot him again – this time fatally in the back of the head.  Then he pulled up his hoody, and strutted proudly out of the classroom.

Brandon was quickly picked up by the cops and for the past year has been in jail awaiting trial, as an adult, for murder and the commission of a premeditated hate crime.  A pre-trial hearing in the case had been scheduled to take place this week, but had to be postponed – because when someone went to pick up Brandon’s father to drive him to court on the morning of the hearing they found him dead on his living room floor.   The father had a history of alcohol abuse (and other abuse – he was convicted of shooting Brandon’s mother back in the 90′s and had recently been arrested for waving around a gun threatening to kill his sister). He apparently got very drunk the night before his son’s hearing, stumbled, and hit his head – real hard – on something.

What a sad story -full of the poison brewed from a lethal mix of domestic violence, alcohol, handguns,  homophobia, fear, and hate.

Why can’t more be done to try and create happier stories for us all?

03/20/2009 | Categories: Alex's Stuff, News, Rants, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »