Rural high school students create ‘straight pride’ stir

Students from at least three rural, mid-Michigan high schools participated in an event they dubbed “straight pride day” last Friday. And while the events were without disruptive incident, they were not without controversy or concern. Students, parents and school officials spoke to Michigan Messenger about the event in the days leading up to it.

Treyton Gregg, a 17-year-old junior at Laingsburg High School where the event was evidently centered, said he was worried about the event, particularly in light of how some of his peers responded to the estimated 50 student who participated in the Day of Silence event the previous week, an annual event when students protest anti-gay bigotry by staying silent for the day.

“I was called fag too many times to count,” says Gregg, a tinge of anger and hurt in his voice. “It bothered me. It hurt. These are people I’ve gone to school with for years.”

Asked if he had been called “fag” in the past, Gregg said he had, “but not so frequently.”

Others who participated in the event were subjected to bigoted language as well, and Gregg says one participant reports having been slapped.

The “straight pride” event was organized on Facebook on April 16, the day of the national Day of Silence event. Groups opposed to homosexuality have developed a counter event they call the Day of Truth. The Day of Truth event is usually scheduled for the day after the Day of Silence. While this straight pride event has no association with the Day of Truth, it was likewise in response to the Day of Silence.

Gregg said he is glad the event did not go over well.

“On the straight pride day the majority of the school chose to ignore the event. Most of the student body commented throughout the day that the people who were wearing black were being petty and rude,” Gregg wrote in an email to Michigan Messenger. “The people wearing black were a definite minority. Many students chose to wear rainbow and neon colors in support of the non-heterosexual students. I had expected maybe at least one or two physical confrontations but there wasn’t any of that kind of problem. I’d say the day was a victory for the LGBT community since so many people refused to hate.”

Organizers attempted on the Facebook pages to stress that the event is not about hating gay people in any way. But comments on the event and group pages for “Straight Pride” include the use of words like “fag,’ “dykes” and one post which read, “Hell yeah, that’s what I’m talking about!…I’m a queer beater and a chaser lol.”

Another supporter of the group noted his support by citing the Biblical verse of Leviticus 20:13, which calls male homosexuality an “abomination” and calls for those who participate in it to be put to death.

“[That language], frankly, puts a target on that student,” says Michael A Foster, superintendent of the Laingsburg Community Schools. “Teachers and administrators are going to be watching that student to make sure they don’t get out of line.”

And while Foster says he may find certain “issues and attitudes” to be “personally reprehensible,” he is obligated to protect the First Amendment rights of all the students — even those expressing unpopular views.

“Within the limits of the law — and the First Amendment — as long as their expression is not disruptive of school, we are bound by law to permit it,” he explains.

Messenger spoke with the superintendents of St. Johns and Bath school districts in background interviews. Both expressed concerns about the “straight pride” day.

Michael Mahoney, a parent in the Laingsburg district, emailed the Laingsburg school principal, Denny Fulk, referring to the event and Facebook group as a “hate group.” In a response email Fulk assured Mahoney that the district was looking into having a school-wide discussion about LGBT issues and bullying.

Gay rights advocates reacted to the event with disappointment and concern.

“A ‘Straight Pride’ event smacks of heterocentrism. This society is built to support one man, one woman relationships. ‘Straight Pride’ is a coward’s way of showing off a straight privilege. A ‘Straight Pride’ celebration is a slap in the face to all other forms of relationship recognition,” said Alicia Skillman, executive director of the Detroit-based Triangle Foundation, a civil rights organization for the LGBT community that also monitors hate crimes against the gay community.

“Being able to celebrate, publicly, your form of relationship building is a privilege, a privilege that heterosexuals have day in and day out with no hesitation,” Skillman continued. “Most heterosexuals never think about that privilege. LGBT people in Michigan, more often than not, celebrate privately for fear of discrimination. The discrimination can occur in many forms: firing, eviction, and violence. Also, there is safety in numbers — which is why there are events like Motor City Pride, to celebrate being lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender by a huge mass of people so no one gets hurt. We long for the day when all people can come out of the closet about their orientation.”

Jeffrey Feldman, an author and professor at New York University, runs the Frameshop. His field of study is the rhetorical frame surrounding political debates.

“I would say the frame these kids are using is ‘debate’ itself — the very idea that there is parity between their so-called form of ‘pride’ and gay pride. This frame allows them to ask ‘Why is your pride OK, but ours is not?,’” said Feldman in an email to Michigan Messenger. “That’s a question you can ask once you put everything on the same level. The original and still meaningful pride frame is ‘inequality’ — which defines ‘pride’ as a move to be valued as equal to heteronormative culture. That leads activists to ask ‘Why gay pride? So we can live as equals in a world dominated by straight culture.’ The straight supremacists want to brush away the idea that there is inequality because it implicates them, and they want to do it by forcing everyone to debate whether or not all forms of difference are identical (which they are not). If they win, all they really need to do is celebrate everything — e.g., there is no such thing as discrimination, and they are not implicated.”

Daryl Presgraves, spokesman for the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, condemned the group activity.

“This kind of activity can perpetuate the extreme victimization that LGBT youth experience in school. Nearly nine out of 10 LGBT students in Michigan experience harassment in school because of their sexual orientation and almost half experience physical harassment,” he wrote in a statement to Messenger. “Last week’s Day of Silence was about raising awareness of anti-LGBT bullying and improving school climate for everyone. Based on comments on the Facebook page and event, it seems this event is about celebrating the hostile environment that continues to be the norm for LGBT students.”

All of this plays out as lawmakers continue to wrestle with passing a comprehensive anti-bullying bill. House members on the education committee last week held hearings about the legislation, and plan to vote it out of committee this week. That legislation does not include controversial language known as enumeration, or listing, of protected classes. The language is controversial because conservatives, rallied by Gary Glenn of the American Family Association of Michigan, say passage of such language will further what they call the “homosexual agenda.”

But a new study by the Harvard School of Public Health released over the weekend adds ammunition for pro-enumeration forces. That study found that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adults were one to two times as likely as heterosexuals to have experienced violence, often times in childhood.

Using data from a nationally representative sample of more than 34,000 adults, the researchers found that 45 percent of sexual minority women and 28 percent of sexual minority men had experienced violence or abuse in childhood, compared to 21 percent of women and 20 percent of men in the general population.

“I think people know there’s discrimination, but they don’t know the breadth or severity of it – or how lasting the impact is,” lead author Andrea Roberts, a postdoctoral fellow in epidemiology at Harvard, told the Boston Herald.

Foster, the Laingsburg school chief, says ferreting out bullying is like untangling a “spider web” and that it can sometimes be “impossible to sort out.” That, he says, makes the job of not only school officials difficult, but for state lawmakers as well. He echoed Sen. Wayne Kuipers (R-Holland) in viewing the difficulty of defining bullying with enough specificity to craft strong legislation and policies.

“It’s a real tough job as a school administrator to deal with the bullying issue because it happens in the community; it happens at parties; it happens more often than not now on cell phones, text messages and on Facebook and Twitter and those kinds of places,” he says. “It manifests itself at school because the kids happen to be there together.”