In several parts of the country, including Mississippi, there is a movement to eliminate any mention or suggestion of homosexuality from undergraduate education. In Florida, it surfaced as the much talked about "don't say gay" bill. Their goal here is to protect children from ideas and influences that can harm them--without any proof that these ideas or influences actually do harm them.
I am a product of that kind of education. Until I went to college, there was never a mention of homosexuality in any of my educational experiences. We learned that Pangloss lost the tip of his nose due to syphilis, but there was never any mention that a man could love another man in even the most remote fantasy. I was a product of that kind of education, and at sixteen, I tried to use it to ruin a man's reputation and destroy his career.
I've written before about the troubles I had with my headmaster, David Hicks. David called us dolts, degenerates, and worse. He was making, what seemed to be, a specific effort to push half my friends out of the school on charges that could have applied equally to others but didn't because David Hicks never touched the kids who he imagined had fathers who earned more than the rest.
My efforts to discuss the situation rationally with David went nowhere and were evidently irritating him. By the spring of my tenth-grade year, it was clear we were headed for a collision course, one that I would lose. My dad agreed to sit in on one of my meetings with our headmaster. It was generally his policy to let me fight my own battles, secure that his reputation was enough to help aid me along the way without having to show his face. That he went in person to this meeting was most likely my mother's influence.
Although my father had little to say, David Hicks was not impressed by him, by me, or by anything either of us had to say. I could tell by the look on my father's face that even if David Hicks didn't kick me out of St. Andrews, I wouldn't be returning the next year. He had had enough.
Desperate to turn the tide of this battle and give me something to use against Hicks, I blurted out, "Professor X is a Gay!" hoping to prove to my headmaster that the true degenerates were on his side of the field, not mine. It's not important that you know who Professor X is. More than forty years later, I haven't any idea if he was actually "a gay" or not. I do know that my friend had said he was and I should be careful, or he'd look at my butt. He said it often enough that, in my moment of desperation, that's what came to mind.
Keep in mind, this is the same friend who said I should put my "mule" on the overhead projector in the hall and shine it into Peppermint Patty's classroom because it'd be funny. When I pointed out that it'd be just as funny if he projected his own "mule" into Peppermint Patty's classroom, he told me to shut up. I should have remembered that before using his reference to try and smear another man's reputation, but I didn't.
The truth is, at sixteen, I had no idea what homosexuality meant. It was in none of the books I read, none of the movies I saw, no teacher ever mentioned it, and I had yet to meet a single person who was willing to say they were gay. I was as shielded from the concept as Ron Desantis wants the students of Florida to be, and I tried to use my ignorance as a weapon.
The truth is, I was actually surrounded by homosexuals, but nobody ever said it. A fair number of my classmates would come out by the time they were thirty. Several of the shows I watched on television had people like Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Riley, Rock Hudson, and Raymond Burr in them, but it'd be another fifteen years before I had any idea of this. Paul Lynde even sued a reporter who said he was gay once and won!
All I knew about homosexuality was that it was something you really didn't want to be, and this Hicks character was endangering us by forcing a teacher on us who might look at our butts. Of all the times David Hicks ignored what I was saying when he shouldn't, this is a time when I'm glad he paid me no mind. Accusing a teacher of being a homosexual in 1980 could have been a career killer. A few years later, there was an extremely popular professor at another school who made the mistake of admitting to his students what he was and was shortly thereafter shown the door with no recourse.
My ignorance could have really hurt somebody. I wasn't a mean or vindictive kid, but the kid underground told me these people were bad, and they were bad for us, and nothing in my experience gave me any positive information about homosexuals to counter that.
Let's amplify this situation a bit. At the same school, there were several kids who would eventually tell the world they were gay. There was even one of us who was transgender. Neither society nor our school gave us any way to conceptualize this situation as anything but negative stereotypes. One woman I know who eventually told us she was a lesbian was one of the meanest kids I knew. I never understood that at the time. She was so pretty. Now I understand that she was mean to protect herself from us. We were unintentionally being really very cruel to kids we didn't mean to hurt simply because we didn't know any better.
Psychologists tell us that up to ten percent of the population doesn't fit into the traditional heterosexual description. In the late seventies, our upper school was around two hundred kids. That means that twenty of them weren't heterosexual. That means that, had they been found out, twenty of them would most likely have been bullied by my friends and me because we didn't know any better. We were told they were aliens. We were told they were this odd combination of very weak but also very dangerous. It means that there were at least twenty kids at our school who couldn't tell us a very fundamental thing about themselves for fear of how we would react.
That's a dangerous and painful situation, and it could easily have been avoided by an education that treated homosexuality as a human condition that should be discussed at least as much as the Syphilis that Pangloss died of. That's the world these "don't say gay" bills create. Children who are ignorant and uninformed can be vicious and hurtful. I was. People say they're very tired of having the "gay agenda" rammed down their throats, but I lived in a time when nobody said gay, and there was a genuine cruelty about it, cruel because homosexuality does exist and it exists without taking any victims, but without guidance, people can easily fall into victimizing them.
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