A public service announcement
My friend Cabell is participating in a fundraiser for a Gay/Straight Alliance for Safe Schools. You know how I feel about GSAs in schools--I was a founding member of mine in my senior year at highschool. Just a few years before we started it, one of my best friends was attacked for kissing his boyfriend, and another one of my best friends was injured; she still has the scar. I've been called everything from a "dirty dyke" to "it." I hurt myself in a variety of ways to cope with the pressure. Another best friend's mother got sympathy-in-Jesus cards when the school paper outed him without his consent. My only girlfriend dumped me when people found out about us. My best friend's boyfriend wouldn't even admit in public that they were friends. I knew a kid, real sweet, who was gay and closeted, and he ended up having a psychotic break while he was trying to come out of the closet to his repressive parents with virtually no support, sadly enough during my senior year, while my best friend and I were trying to found the GSA and getting a lot of crap. There wasn't anything we could do for him after that--schizophrenia, triggered by stress, requires medication and/or hospitalization two-thirds of the time.
When we announced the GSA, I got heckled, pretty viciously, in front of teachers who did nothing. I've been threatened. I've been spit on. I've been called sub-human. At school. Someplace I was legally required to be. It's not right, and I'm asking you, as a friend of mine, as somebody who cares about kids, if you can spare five bucks, please. Donate to the GSA for Safe Schools, so that more kids don't end up like me--angry, scarred, depressive, for no good reason. Or like my friend who cracked up, or like the kids who have died as a result of unsafe school environments.
This is the twenty-first century, and already in it I've watched people suffer, in terrible ways, because of homophobia. We need education. We need support. We need to make the future different than the past. Kids have enough crap to deal with just figuring out who they are; they shouldn't be worried about their physical safety at a place where the government makes them go.
When we announced the GSA, I got heckled, pretty viciously, in front of teachers who did nothing. I've been threatened. I've been spit on. I've been called sub-human. At school. Someplace I was legally required to be. It's not right, and I'm asking you, as a friend of mine, as somebody who cares about kids, if you can spare five bucks, please. Donate to the GSA for Safe Schools, so that more kids don't end up like me--angry, scarred, depressive, for no good reason. Or like my friend who cracked up, or like the kids who have died as a result of unsafe school environments.
This is the twenty-first century, and already in it I've watched people suffer, in terrible ways, because of homophobia. We need education. We need support. We need to make the future different than the past. Kids have enough crap to deal with just figuring out who they are; they shouldn't be worried about their physical safety at a place where the government makes them go.