Angela
Starting a Gay Straight Alliance in a small-town high school
by Kirk Read

Smack dab in the middle of Lake Bygod County, California, Angela came out on the first day of her junior year. She’d attended a queer youth leadership workshop in San Francisco over the summer and arrived at school wearing a rainbow necklace, a rainbow pin, and a rainbow patch. Nobody got it.

During English class, students were asked to stand up and say something about themselves. Already irritated by the inefficiency of symbols, Angela said she was a lesbian. She’d spent the better part of her summer in Internet chatrooms discussing Xena, Warrior Princess. She was sure.

In a matter of weeks, she approached teachers to sponsor the Gay Straight Alliance she was planning to found. One asked her, "You don’t think I’m gay, do you?" The second teacher was a folk singer with posters of Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac on his walls. Excitedly, he pulled out a GSA handbook, a souvenir from a flaming senior boy who’d attempted to start a GSA at the same high school.

In February, a local therapist did a faculty training with a panel featuring seven LGBT young people, including Angela. Despite her drama classes, Angela shook while she spoke. Her mother stood up and expressed her support for her daughter.

Afterward, several teachers told the principal that a GSA wasn’t a good idea. A prominent religious official called the superintendent to complain. School officials tried to delay the group. Angela pushed.

During the first week of March, Angela and other students posted signs all over school announcing the first GSA meeting. Fifteen were ripped down. Anticipating this, they taped cards under each sign that read: "You’ve just committed a hate crime."

The meeting was announced every day that week, though some teachers skipped over that item while reading the daily bulletin.

The night before Friday’s meeting, Angela barely slept at all. When she finally fell asleep, she had nightmares of someone crashing the meeting with a machine gun. She spent third and fourth periods in her guidance counselor’s office, crying.

During lunch, Angela led the first GSA meeting at Middletown High School. Sixty-two people attended, including five teachers and even a handful of kids from the Bible Club. "We don’t condone the lifestyle," they told her, "but we love everybody."

All over school, students talked about the meeting. Two teachers put up signs that said "The Bill of Rights + Cultural diversity = The right to be different." In one class, a spontaneous chant erupted: "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." An athlete started a petition because he was scared of "fags making out." He wrote "GSA" at the top of the page and enlisted five others, three men and two women, who spent the next three weeks collecting signatures in the hallway.

The vice principal told the petitioners that if the school shut down the GSA, it would be forced to shut down every other club as well. In all, they collected over 100 signatures in a school of 500 students. When students refused to sign, they were called a "stupid lesbian" or a "stupid fag." School officials said there was nothing they could do unless the incidents were reported. None of the students came forward. It would all die down, they told Angela. She prepared a blurb for the announcement of the second meeting. "The theme," she wrote, "is harassment."

This time, 40 students showed up. In an attempt to legitimize the group, teachers and students suggested that the group broaden its focus to "tolerance." That was the week I met Angela, thanks to a gay teenager from her school who found me online. Angela said she was scared that people were trying to take the gay out of GSA. I asked her what she was going to do. "They’re not going to f--- up my GSA," she said.

I was the guest speaker at the third meeting. Walking into the school was eerie. The student body was nearly identical to my own high school in size and cultural makeup. It had been 10 years since I’d heard locker doors slamming. It felt like prison.

There had been all sorts of homophobic graffiti that week, sprinkled all over student council campaign posters. Some of the candidates told Angela that she could just take them down. But she didn’t want the evidence erased. With a thick black marker, Angela and a boy from the GSA crossed through phrases like "No gays allowed."

Angela spotted me in the hallway. From the force of her voice, I’d expected a six-foot tomboy with bandaged knuckles. She was a tiny wisp of a thing, wearing a Supergirl T-shirt and baggy black pants. I had to wait in the office until lunch period, because visitors were not allowed at pep rallies. God, I really was back in high school.

I had only 20 minutes with them and I desperately wanted to say something profound that would make their lives easier. I read to them from my book, How I Learned to Snap, a memoir about being openly gay in a small-town high school. They were a loud audience and frequently interjected comments and questions as I read. Ten years later, the things I remembered about high school were still painfully resonant for them.

So many adults are under the impression that the Internet and mass media have completely changed the dynamics of homophobia in schools. "It’s so much better now" is the operative mantra. It’s what we say when we don’t want to believe how much young people are still suffering in abusive school environments. For every Angela, there are countless boys being pushed down steps, countless girls whose lockers are vandalized, countless young people who don’t click with the labels of boy and girl at all. Maybe the climate is better, compared to 20 or 30 years ago. But such comparisons are small comfort when you’re being cornered in a locker room.

Several days later, Angela called me near tears.

"I just needed to talk to someone who would understand," she said. "I didn’t know where to turn."

I prepared myself for the most dire of after-school special dilemmas. Was it a friend’s suicide attempt? Was it a death threat because of the GSA?

"It’s my hair," she said. "I want to cut my hair."

She reminded me that beneath her activist bravura, she was still, through and through, 17 years old.

Her new haircut is adorable.

A former Houstonian now living in northern California, Kirk Read is the author of How I Learned to Snap, debuting in bookstores this month. He can be found at www.temenos.net/kirkread.