Has It Gotten Better?
I will be meeting the mother of Justin Aaberg tonight at the Out Twin Cities Film Festival.
Justin's family is being honored there tonight. He committed suicide last fall due to anti-gay bullying at Anoka High School, one school over (same district) from Blaine High School, which I attended. He was the fifth kid, at 15 years old, to take his own life from that school in the past year, three of which were believed to be tied to struggles with sexual identity.
Anoka-Hennepin School District 11 is extremely conservative and is located in Michele Bachmann's congressional district if that helps paint a picture. Under the district's current "neutrality" policy, the work I did as a junior and senior at Blaine High School in 1997-98 would be banned. That neutrality policy was set up, in my opinion, to protect conservative/religious students and teachers from having to hear about or discuss LGBT issues / struggles / accomplishments / etc. Part of the whole "if we ignore it, it goes away" mentality.
In my years as a junior and senior there, I set up a gay/straight alliance (which has probably long since shut down) at Blaine, worked with a few counterparts at Anoka HS (Blaine's sister school and the school Justin attended) to set up a GSA there, talked to students about gay issues in Mr. Samson's great Multicultural Perspectives classes, and wrote a couple of articles for the school newspaper (which the principal banned from being published). Keep in mind, most of this happened before Ellen Degeneres even came out, if that gives you an idea of the institutional mood and mindset I had to deal with on a daily basis - not to mention the harassment and bullying I faced everyday being one of only 3-4 out individuals in a school of 3,000 students.
I have no idea what I will even say to her - I tried to make things better when I was there and it obviously didn't have the impact I hoped for. I feel like I let her family down.