When
I was a kid in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System back in the ’70s
and ’80s nobody ever talked about forming a gay-straight alliance
club. Nobody ever talked about gay anything unless it was in a disparaging
manner. There were a few individuals in later years of high school that
got up the guts to come out (if I was wearing a hat I’d be tipping
it at Raymond, Todd, Terry and Justin right now) but I wasn’t one
of them.
Right after I was handed my diploma I did — at the age of 17 — but
by that time I wasn’t surrounded on a daily basis by confused juveniles
and homophobic administrators.
Even though I hadn’t come out yet, I distinctly recall one particular
teacher at Spaugh Jr. High — her name was Marilynn Hartley — voicing
her disapproval about how she perceived my sexuality on more than one occasion
in front of multiple students. Then there was the band director — Joseph
Chambers — who felt he had to tell the entire class that he thought
it was “disgusting” when Elton John admitted he was bisexual.
How many students in the room that day felt they themselves were “disgusting” because
their teacher had just said so?
In Salisbury at Rowan County High School 17-year-old Britney Sharp has
been the focus of a lot of attention lately because she and another student
formed a Gay/Straight Alliance (GSA) club this past February. When Sharp
approached the principal about securing a meeting place for club members
to talk about issues that they face, she was told that approval for such
a club would have to come from the Rowan County School Board.
Initially, members of the board — begrudgingly — approved the
club because they were advised that they were required to do so by law.
Poof! Bam! Zowie!
Operation Save America (OSA) to the rescue! Faster than the chariot of
Moses, able to leap the tallest steeples in a single bound, it’s
Possessed Evangelical Man (PEM)!
“The national God is going back to school campaign starts with a
bang!” Shouts PEM. “If we do not fight this battle now when
we have a good chance of winning in Jesus’ name, we may find ourselves
having to fight when there is little or no hope of victory, realizing that
it is better to die free than live under the bondage of homosexual slavery.”
Huh?
“It is time for God’s Church to rise up, come out of the closet
and confront this giant in the name of Jesus Christ,” screams PEM. “The
theology of the Church must become biography in the streets!”
Blah, blah, blah.
Flip Benham, of course, is the wordsmith behind all this theocratic gobbledy-goop.
Benham and his followers at OSA showed up at Rowan County High School and
then again before the school board, convincing them to do a 360 and vote
against Britney’s.
GSA.
While Benham was at the meeting he handed out about 40 T-shirts, which
students have been wearing to class since the board announced that they
intended to disallow the club.
Small technicality: Turns out the board twisted the facts.
“When they were told that legally they couldn’t refuse the
GSA, board member Jim Shuping dug around and found a policy that prohibits
any club that interrupts class time,” said Alex Wagaman, a representative
of the National Conference for Community and Justice. “Principal
Ron Turbyfill told them that the club did not interrupt class time, so
he didn’t feel like that was applicable.”
Cabarrus County School Boardmembers announced that they would not allow
the club, when in reality Shuping put forward a motion to form the appropriate
policy for the board to vote on at its next meeting (according to their
calendar the next meeting is April 27 at 6 p.m.).
In other words, the club is actually still allowed to exist, if a teacher
agrees to take on the role of advisor.
One of the two advisors who were supporting the club has already backed
off because she says she’s afraid she’ll lose her job.
According to Sharp, Principal Turbeyfill and Vice Principal East are being “reassigned” to
other schools.
Meanwhile, Sharp’s days at school have grown increasingly difficult.
“The next day at school there were about 15 people wearing those
Operation Save America shirts,” says Sharp.
“A lot of them walked past me and Jeff, my best friend, and they
would say stuff like ‘Shut Down! You got your gay club taken away!’
“Then later in the day after it was decided that I should leave the
campus for my own safety, they were screaming things at me like ‘Carpet
muncher! You and your lesbian lover are going to hell!”
In another extremely unusual incident, Sharp recalls a time in her Algebra
class when a student sitting next to her pulled out his Bible and started
reading from it.”
According to Sharp the class advisor Rose Chorriher, “didn’t
do anything about it until the end of the class.”
Despite the fact the student was in an Algebra class and not a biblical
study course makes it clear that his feigned “reading” was
in protest to Sharp’s presence. The fact that the class advisor did
not intervene until mere moments before the class bell rang confirms that
she was not concerned about Sharp and other students being distracted from
their appropriate course of learning.
I know that many of us have forgotten the difficulties faced by a child
or teenager that others perceive as different from themselves — not
to mention the child or teenager who’s actually bold enough to come
to terms with what it is about themselves that’s actually different.
Hat’s off to you, Britney. ;-)
David Moore Editor
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