Last year, Lena Reese and Sarah Alcorn, high-school students in a coal-mining county in eastern Kentucky, set out to learn about gay history. Instead, they found themselves making it.
The two heterosexual girls are part of a group of about a dozen teens in tiny Cannonsburg who became the target of downright meanness—foes ridiculed them as 'faggot kissers,' for example—aimed at stopping their gay-friendly club from meeting at school.
The vicious backlash taught them and a growing number of allies just how much their gay-supportive club is needed at their school and the community at large.
A gutsy, year-long battle by Lena, Sarah and other Gay Straight Alliance members led to a historic federal court ruling April 18 ordering school officials to let them meet.
Now, with only a few weeks left in the school year, the club is finally meeting, happily strategizing about how to stop anti-gay bullying.
'It's incredible to be part of something that people are comparing to the African American and women's rights movements,' says Sarah, a 17-year-old junior at Boyd County High School. 'We developed tough skins and really grew up fast.'
She sweetly adds, 'Our group is a support group to let (gay) people know they have friends.'
The club's members have gotten a bitter taste of what earlier American freedom fighters experienced when they battled similar forms of bigotry: They were taunted and told they couldn't be true Christians. They saw school officials crumple under threats by adults, choosing in December to ban all school clubs to avoid obeying a 1984 federal law that says schools can't pick and choose which properly organized clubs to recognize. And they weathered protests against them, including a rally by 2,000 residents of Boyd County (population 49,752) and a day-long boycott of school by half of the student body.
'If I didn't stand up, this problem couldn't be corrected for kids coming up in the high school,' Lena says of why she didn't give up. 'I thought that (the anti-gay climate) needed to stop here. I'll be able to leave high school knowing I accomplished something and made the school a little bit safer for other people.'
Kevin Jennings, director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (glsen.org), says the amazing fight by the Kentucky students reflects emerging trends.
Gay kids are coming out earlier (the median age, studies say, is now 15 to 17). Their straight friends increasingly want to help create gay-friendly school environments. And parents are standing up for their gay children. Most parents—83 percent, including 77 percent who identify as born-again Christians, according to a GLSEN-commissioned study—favor school policies that protect gay kids from harassment and violence.
As a Massachusetts teacher, Jennings helped form the first Gay Straight Alliance in 1989. Today, 1,600 GSAs meet coast-to-coast.
'What is happening is that as these students are more and more empowered, they are not settling for second-class citizenship,' says Jennings. 'They are organizing. They are resorting to litigation. They are demanding policy changes. And their allies are standing by them.'
U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning's ruling builds on earlier decisions ordering schools to let GSAs meet. It goes further, though, by wisely rejecting the 'heckler's veto' argument that the clubs should be banned because their mere existence can trigger hostile reactions.
Attorney Matt Coles, whose American Civil Liberties Union helped the teens go to court, declared: 'This (ruling) has to be the most incredible encouragement to kids all over the country: You can take on the local establishment and win. If it can happen in rural Kentucky, it can happen anywhere.'
Our country progresses whenever good-hearted people of any age embrace a civil-rights struggle as their own. That's the lesson being taught by brave bands of students at places like Boyd County High.
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