LGBT Youth Continue to Lack Social Support

Growing up gay is not easy, especially at younger ages when one does not even know the term for who one is.  All you know is that you are different even if one cannot describe or quantify the difference.  As one gets older, the disconnect grows stronger and, in my case, high school was a nightmare, as I tried to hide my innate difference.  Today, things are far better for many LGBT youth, but for many others, little has changed over the last 50 years.  While there are now LGBT role models and celebrities and some schools have gay-straight alliances, church and family expectations and anti-gay bigotry still make lives of many LGBT youth a living hell.  Indeed, estimates are that 40% of all homeless youth are LGBT, often thrown out by parents or feeling forced to flee.  Now, with the Trump/Pence regime pushing the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize anti-LGBT discrimination, the stress many LGBT youth experience is likely to increase.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the lack of social support so many LGBT youth experience.  Here are highlights:

The 12-year-old drag star Desmond Napoles is one of a growing number of kids who have embraced an LGBTQ identity at an early age. He has already come out as gay. Recent postings on his Instagram feed, which has 181,000 followers, feature him posing in a purple wig with red lips pursed, or in a rainbow dress at Brooklyn Pride. . . . “He is spreading the message that it is okay for kids to drag,” his mother, Wendy Napoles, told Gay Star News. And to “explore their identity and express themselves, without shame, without hiding.”

Her son may be precocious, but most queer kids remember feeling different very early in their lives. . . . . Years later, a family photo surfaces—of a boy holding a doll, say, as his brothers roughhouse nearby—that, in retrospect, makes the story seem obvious. These unwittingly campy childhood photos also communicate a reality generally overlooked in society: Budding queer identities have nonsexual elements that often form long before puberty, signaling what lies ahead.

Nevertheless, seeing preteens involved in drag shows—an age-old staple of LGBTQ culture, often performed in gay clubs—makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Critics have accused Desmond’s mother of allowing her son’s sexualization and exploitation. After another preteen boy performed drag in Ohio, state Republicans proposed legislation barring these performances, linking them, without evidence, to child trafficking.

Over time, American society has been steadily making peace with gay adults, gay marriages, even gay political candidates. Yet it still broadly pretends that people are straight until, at some point after age 18, they proclaim themselves otherwise. . . . . by this logic, all things LGBTQ should be relegated to adult spaces, preventing children’s premature sexualization. This explains why the backlash to preteen drag performers like Desmond has been so fierce—and why so many queer kids, with their difference manifesting as awkwardness, are forced to tread the rough waters of adolescence with no social support.

Numerous studies have shown that children who eventually come out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—scientists call them pre-homosexual, or pre-GLB kids—demonstrate more childhood gender nonconformity in their speech, body language, and choice of activity than their pre-straight contemporaries do. These reports have also produced evidence of a “dosage effect”: The more gender nonconformity someone shows in childhood, the more likely they will identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual as an adult.

Critics instead see adults in and aligned with the LGBTQ community as sexualizing children by exposing them to what a National Review writer calls a “deeply and perversely erotic subculture.” Conservative media have accused Wendy Napoles of endangering her son.

This adult disquiet allows for the continued neglecting of nascent queerness, leaving pre-GLB kids to be mocked, rather than affirmed, fostering another generation of queer people who carry scars into adulthood. “Growing up gay, it seems, is bad for you in many of the same ways as growing up in extreme poverty,” Michael Hobbes wrote in a much-discussed 2017 HuffPost article. A 2015 study showed that gay people as adults produce less cortisol, the hormone that regulates stress—–“their systems were activated, so constantly, in adolescence that they ended up sluggish as grownups”––than their straight counterparts. A 2014 study similarly showed that “stressful life events” inflict more damage on gay kids’ nervous systems than on their straight peers’ nervous systems.

Growing up LGBTQ is isolating, a reality pointedly depicted by a 2016 Saturday Night Live sketch titled “Wells for Boys.” . . . .To that script we might add: Some kids are straight; other kids are gay.

But pre-GLB kids, even if they’re not as forthright in their nonconformity as Desmond is, should not be forced to wait for adulthood to receive society's permission to be themselves. Instead, they need age-appropriate safe spaces—so they don’t have to co-opt more mature queer arenas—in which they can come to grips with their otherness. Queer kids know they’re different, even before most have the words to say so; for their sake, we need to listen a bit more closely.

Protecting LGBT Youth From Betsy DeVos and Bullying

With Republicans pushing for "bathroom bills" and "religious freedom laws" - better described as special right to discriminate laws - and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos wanting to "bring God back into the classroom," the atmosphere for LGBT children and youths could quickly become toxic. And then there is racist and homophobic Jeff Sessions' reversal of Justice Department support for the protection of LGBT youth under existing laws that would grant protection against discrimination due to sexual orientation and/or gender identity.  It is a troubling situation, especially given the higher drop out and suicide rate for LGBT youth, not because of their sexuality or gender identity per se, but because of the mistreatment and abuse the "godly folk" and their off spring believe they have the right to inflict upon them.  Indeed, Betsy DeVos' family has given millions of dollars to groups that seek to guaranty the continued right to abuse and bully LGBT students and obstruct efforts to protect them.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the problem and proposes some solutions that may be difficult to achieve given the anti-LGBT agenda being pushed by the Trump/Pence regime.  Here are excerpts: 

A recently released RTI International study sheds new light on the school safety issues facing LGBTQ youth. The study, which examined two decades of research on victimization among LGBTQ youth, uncovered a troubling picture of the environments LGBTQ students face in schools.

Physical and verbal bullying of LGBTQ students is commonplace. In a representative sample of eighth-graders in Washington State, 14 percent of boys and 11 percent of girls reported being bullied because of their perceived sexual orientation in the past 30 days alone. LGBTQ students are two to three times more likely than their peers to be physically assaulted or threatened at school. 

Students who experience anti-LGBTQ bullying are significantly more likely to report depression and suicide attempts, skipping school, poorer school performance, and dropping out of school. Victims of anti-LGBTQ bullying tend to fare worse than students bullied for other reasons, perhaps due to the ways that hate-related victimization reinforces existing perceptions of hostility (e.g., hearing homophobic comments at school).

Even within this scenario, Orwellian equality rears its head. While research shows many LGBTQ students are victimized, some are more likely to be than others. Transgender youth and youth with unique gender expressions are at a higher risk for bullying, as are those in rural or impoverished communities and those who attend schools without gay-straight alliances. 

As LGBTQ individuals come out earlier than before, it’s becoming even more pressing for schools to create a safe environment for their students.

Action is urgently needed to address the hostile environment that LGBTQ youth face at school and its effects on school engagement, mental health, and long-term opportunities. Our study points to three potential strategies that could help to address these issues:

• Competency and advocacy training for school psychologists and teachers — who generally report supportive attitudes toward LGBTQ students but lack the knowledge and skills to advocate for them — could help create more supportive, less hostile climates in schools.

• Fostering the development of gay-straight alliances in schools, which seem to offer some protection against school-based victimization risk, is another promising approach. Although secondary schools are not permitted to ban gay-straight alliances if they allow other extracurricular groups (per the Federal Equal Access Act of 1984), school principals still commonly take measures to exclude them (American Civil Liberties Union, 2015). Such discriminatory practices must be addressed and replaced with active support for groups and services that make schools safer.

• Increasing resources to respond to victims of anti-LGBTQ bullying, particularly to prevent suicide and school dropout. Affirming and culturally responsive services for LGBTQ bullying victims are critical, particularly given the fact that help-seeking often requires LGBTQ students to disclose not only the stigmatized experience of bullying and victimization, but also a stigmatized gender or sexual identity to school counselors or other professionals.

 While I was not "out" in high school - I remained closeted for over two decades after I graduated - I recall some of the bullying and harassment I received.  No student should ever be place in a situation where thoughts of suicide are ever present and suicide seems to be the only means of escape.  I experienced this first hand.  

Anti-Gay Betsy DeVos Seeks to Inject Right Wing Christianity into Public Education

One thing is always a constant with the Christofascists: they believe that everyone must adhere to their beliefs and they will resort to any means to accomplish the imposition of their version of Sharia law on all.  With Donald Trump's selection of a cast of the most racists and reactionary individuals in recent memory for his cabinet, religious freedom for non-Christofascists will be under attack. Indeed, Betsy DeVos wants to inject right wing Christianity back into the public schools to do "advance God's kingdom," as defined, of course by Ms. DeVos and her fellow extremists.  Among those specifically targeted by DeVos are gays against whom she has long wage war going all the way back to the 1990's when she and other zealots mapped out a plan to defeat the "homosexual agenda"  and "organized homosexuality."  DeVos has been a huge bank roller for anti-gay and anti-religious freedom groups ever since.   The Advocate looks at DeVos' frightening vision for public education as she works to dismantle it.  Here are excerpts:

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's pick for secretary of Education, compared her work in public education reform to the battle of David and Goliath, and said she wants to "advance God's kingdom."

In an audio clip exclusively obtained by Politico, Betsy DeVos and her husband, Dick DeVos, revealed how their religion fuels their drive to reform public education.

The audio from a 2001 conference known as "The Gathering," an annual meeting featuring some of the nation's most wealthy Christians, DeVos, and her husband, Dick DeVos, were interviewed about a failed Michigan ballot initiative that was going to amend the state's constitution to allow public funds to be used on private and religious schools. The couple backed the initiative.

Betsy DeVos is also not exactly a friend to public education. An advocate of school choice, she believes government bodies should provide vouchers to parents who want to send their children to private schools but can’t afford them.

They also commented on how public education has "displaced" the place of the church at the center of communities, and they said that providing parents with school choice is one way to undo that displacement.

Betsy and Richard DeVos have previously provided funding to antigay initiatives. They headed the effort to amend Michigan’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage and gave $200,000 to the campaign, Raw Story notes. Voters approved the amendment in 2004; it was struck down, along with other states’ anti–marriage equality laws, by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

A transcript from one of the meetings of "The Gathering" provides more insight into the bizarre and obsessed world of DeVos as others like her.  The agenda? To infiltrate the public schools and oppose everything from the "safe schools" concept which argues that schools should be a refuge for all students to stamping out gay-straight alliances.  That DeVos will be in a position to implement some of her agenda is frightening.  Not only LGBT individuals and their friends and families but anyone who believes in religious freedom for all Americans should be very, very  disturbed.

Ontario, Canada: All Schools, Religious or Otherwise, Must Host Gay-Straight Alliances

The Canadian province of Ontario has dealt a major blow to the Catholic Church's undisguised anti-gay discrimination by announcing that ALL schools in the province, including Catholic school which receive government funding, must host gay straight alliances.  Needless to say the bitter old men in dresses in the bishoprics in Ontario have their patties in a major wad.  To me it's a simply call: receive any form of government funds and you lose the right to discriminate based on alleged religious belief or otherwise. It is the same standard that should be applied in the USA to Catholic hospitals and universities all of which receive large amounts of state and federal tax derived dollars. It would make the greedy bastards in the bishops miters decide which they worship more: bigotry or money.  If they opt for bigotry, then let their institutions wither and die.  The statements of bigoted parents are noteworthy and likewise reflect an all too common desire to have special rights and privileges: taking government money and yet being free to discriminate and trample on the rights of others.  Here are highlights from the National Post:

The Ontario provincial government has ignored months of behind-the-scenes negotiations by announcing Friday that all schools, religious or otherwise, will be required to host gay-straight alliances, Church sources say.  As part of the original Bill 13, which was intended to curb bullying in schools, the province included a provision for organizations with the name “gay-straight alliance or another name.”

Ontario Education Minister Laurel Broten said there would be no compromises.  “Schools need to be safe places for kids to be themselves — and for some kids, that means being able to name a club a gay-straight alliance,” Ms. Broten said. “I don’t think there’s anything radical about allowing students to name a club.”
Church sources said they were blindsided and disappointed by the announcement. Cardinal Thomas Collins, the head of the Archdiocese of Toronto, is expected to make a statement on Monday.

Teresa Pierre, who is part of a group of Catholic parents opposed to Bill 13, said forcing gay-straight alliances into the school would erode Church teaching.  “Our concern is that this anti-bullying legislation is meant to bring a change in the Catholic curriculum,” said Ms. Pierre. “We are concerned about the potential erosion of Catholic principles.  She added later: “The Church’s position on homosexuals is not different than any group struggling to abide by Catholic teaching. It is no different than straight teens that are sexually active. We wouldn’t have a club centred around birth control.”

The government hopes to pass the legislation before the legislature rises for the summer on June 7.

What's Wrong With Being Gay?

A column in the San Francisco Chronicle that looks at the Christian Right's jihad against Kevin Jennings, the assistant deputy secretary of education, who heads the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, raises a good question. Namely, what's wrong with being gay? The answer is nothing at all unless one subscribes to ignorance and bigotry based on few passages from an ancient,often historically inaccurate, much edited and modified writing known as the Bible. Same sex attraction has been documented to exist in virtually hundreds of animal species and increasingly has been shown to be an innate as opposed to learned phenomenon in humans. You either are gay or you are not - it does NOT changes despite the claims of snake oil merchant like preachers, many of whom are out to make a quick buck off of the fears of others. Hence, there is nothing to "promote" despite the claims of the theocrats. Moreover, the fact that religious based ignorance and bigotry is allowed to attempt to influence science and public policy in a nation that claims to guarantee religious freedom to ALL is a travesty - and evidence that much of America's promise to its citizens continues to be a fraud. Here are some highlights:

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Let's suppose, for a moment, that conservative critics are correct: Gay educators want to "promote homosexuality" in American schools. So what? That's the real question behind the recent attacks on Kevin Jennings, the assistant deputy secretary of education, who heads the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. Fifty-three House Republicans signed a letter Oct. 15 calling on President Obama to fire Jennings, who founded the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 1990. According to its critics, GLSEN spreads "the gay agenda" - that is, it tries to make more people gay.

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By denying the charge that they're promoting homosexuality, gay activists implicitly endorse the idea that there would be something wrong if they were promoting it. . . . But none of this should matter, he quickly added. One day, Jennings said, "most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality, would say, 'Yeah, who cares?' because they wouldn't necessarily equate homosexuality with something bad that you would not want to promote."

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So the real question isn't whether Jennings and other educators want to promote homosexuality. It's about being gay, and whether there's anything wrong with that. And on that question, Americans remain deeply divided. So I have a proposition: Let's have a full and free airing of the question in America's high schools.

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I believe that increasingly such discussions are happening in the nations' high schools and that in many cases, the students decide that there is nothing wrong with being gay - something that scares the daylights out of the Christianists who subconsciously know that they are losing the "culture wars." Meanwhile, I have to wonder about the mental issues that make Christianist strive to make others live their lives in misery and self-hate merely because we do not subscribe to their intolerant religious beliefs. These folks say that its the gays who are sick, but in reality it is they themselves who are sick spiritually and in some cases mentally (e.g., think Randall Terry and Peter LaBarbera).

Kids Openly Gay At Earlier Ages

This story from the Los Angeles Daily news (http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_8709749) looks at a phenomenon that is easily seen even in places like Norfolk and the rest of Hampton Roads – hardly a hotbed of liberalism. Last night, going to The Wave to dance and get my weekly shot of aerobic exercise, I find that it is comforting to see young boy next door and girl next door type gay couples that seem totally at ease with their sexual orientation. I can assure you, such was not the case when I was 18 or 20. In fact, I was 21 when the APA declassified homosexuality as a mental illness, not that such action had much impact on the societal negative view of gays in conservative Central New York where I lived at the time. Going to college in Charlottesville, Virginia, things were not any better.

It truly is a different world from back in that day – as I found out when my ex-wife and I told my son I was gay nearly five years ago and his response was that it was OK and that one of his high school friends was gay. The he gave me a big hug. Hopefully, this new generation will see the end of anti-gay bigotry. Next weekend, I will be meeting with some of the leaders of some local GSA’s who are working to become more organized and who have asked HRBOR members for input and possible mentoring as successful role models for gay students. Here are some story highlights:

When a gay teenager was gunned down earlier this year at an Oxnard school, the violence resulted in the unexpected: Young people, gay and straight, rallied across the nation for civil rights. And even at an age when they're grappling with their own fragile sexuality, teens weren't afraid to stand up for the classmate who had been different.

"In middle school, you don't think about your own sexuality so much as you think of what society thinks is normal for kids, and you try to blend in," said 18-year-old Luis Roman, a gay community college student and youth leader for the Gay-Straight Alliance, an advocacy group active on high school and middle school campuses. "So for these kids to come out and say that just because he was gay, that isn't a reason to get shot, that was mind-blowing to see that courage, for kids to stand up.

"While there is increasing acceptance, the world's still a hostile place for gay teenagers," said Virginia Uribe, a retired LAUSD counselor and founder of the district's Project 10, a support program for gay students. "They deal with hostile families, hostile churches, if they're involved, and they deal with hostile schools. "Certainly the (school) administrators should be at the top of the food chain, making the charge against discrimination. Many times they're reluctant to take a stand with regard to gay kids until something terrible happens."

Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students are coming out of the closet younger and younger. Roman told his parents he was gay when he was 15 - younger than his counterparts who spoke up a decade earlier, but older than the middle-schoolers coming out today, he said. Many find their courage in a changing society that includes openly gay celebrities, from news anchors to sit-com stars, Uribe said. "I think some students are feeling more comfortable coming out, feeling empowered in the sense they are aware they have certain rights," said Uribe, now executive director of the nonprofit Friends of Project 10, which supports the LAUSD program.

Project 10 sponsors 46 Gay-Straight Alliance chapters on LAUSD campuses, and in recent months two middle schools have formed chapters, said Stephen Jimenez, who works in the district's Education Equity Compliance office and oversees the program. "All our clubs are student-centered, usually started by gay students and their straight friends," he said. "The students themselves come forward and say, we want to start a club."