Essay on visit to the gay group of my high school.

July 2002

By STEVE FRIESS

They looked at me like I was some sort of relic. I was.

“I don’t understand something,” one bewildered 16-year-old boy asked. “You say you fooled around with other boys when you were a teenager but you ‘didn’t know’ you were gay. How can you not know something like that?”

I blushed. I laughed at myself. And I tried to explain. “Well,” I stammered, “it was a different time back then.”

Back then? I only graduated high school in 1990. But with the rapid pace of progress in the gay movement, a dozen years is apparently an eternity.

My high school now has one of those gay-straight alliances I’ve been reading about in controversial news stories. Only, from what I could tell when I eagerly took them up on an invitation to meet with them, there’s no controversy here. They don’t just meet on campus, which has sparked uproars all over the nation, but during school time -- and under the guidance of a faculty member whose lesbian wedding was noted by the principal in a school bulletin.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so mind-blown. I did not grow up in Provo, Utah, or Irmo, S.C., or Findlay, Ohio, or any other place where Bible-thumping terrorism continues to haunt my friends’ lives and psyches well into their 30s. I was raised just 30 miles from Greenwich Village in Syosset, N.Y., a wealthy, largely Jewish enclave on Long Island where our parents were as liberal as they could be and still be Republicans. Even in the late 1980s, our health classes included the opportunity to smell spermicide and put condoms on bananas.

Nobody overtly preached against homosexuality in a strident way, and one class bully was tossed from a class for making fun of gays and calling the teacher a dyke when she tried to stop him. Sure, “queer” and “faggot” were bandied about in the hallways, but I never feared for my physical well-being. In fact, our favorite teacher was an obvious, if closeted, gay who explained the homoerotic content of Shakespeare and “Moby Dick" in 12th grade English.

Still, I did what everybody else did in “my day,” so recent though it is. I kept it to myself. Even in this environment, which wasn’t pro-gay so much as absent of virulent homophobia, I told nobody, kept my massive crush on the most handsome boy in school firmly under wraps and prayed more than anything that this desire would disappear. And I did not, under any circumstances, self-identify as gay -- even when I was making it with one of the neighborhood boys.

What was missing then is what I witnessed now. Peers. Openly gay faculty. Straight and supportive friends. Rosie O’Donnell on national TV to tell my soccer-mom that it was OK or, at least, not that weird.

This wasn’t some tiny group I met, either. More than 25 gay, lesbian, bi and supportive straight teens gather every Tuesday to talk about their lives, bring in speakers, make plans to print up stickers with pro-gay messages to hand out throughout the school.

The group vice president, a completely out 17-year-old junior with frosted hair and a radiant smile, was asking the others to bring in something for the group’s upcoming bake sale. That same kid is reading “Tales of the City” for a book report at his English teacher’s recommendation.

The straight kids there seemed impervious to the fear that other straight teens would think they are gay by hanging in this crowd. One girl said it didn’t matter, that everybody thinks that anyway because she’s athletic. Another told of a bizarre odessy in which everyone from her friends to her parents were so convinced she was a lesbian that she started to believe she must be, even though it didn’t feel right to her. And a third girl approached me afterwards to say she thought I was “really cute,” marking the very first time any girl told me that at that damn school.

I spent much of my time with them gushing my admiration. I must’ve looked like a sentimental old fool, and my appearance was clearly more of a history lesson for them than anything else. One girl asked me rather pointedly why I referred to the man I married as my “partner” instead of my “husband,” implying that I was somehow still holding back from having it all.

They weren’t all completely comfortable and some even told of problems with their parents and friends. But they weren’t paralyzed by a fear of bashing, and one said his big brother promised to beat the crap out of anybody who made trouble for him or his friends.

On my way out, I popped into Principal Jorge Schneider’s office. He knew me well as a student but didn’t know I am gay, so I wanted to tell him how that group might’ve made a huge difference in my life once upon a time. He shrugged when I told him how controversial such a thing is, noting that the only complaint so far came from parents concerned their gay 9th grader would become sexually active by meeting older boys in the group. Schneider told them that their son’s willingness to have sex is a parental, not a school, matter.

I walked off in awe. If someone like me had spoken at my school in 1988, it would’ve changed my life. But I didn’t change anybody’s life with my visit; these kids were beyond that. I'm already dated, and I’m not even 30.

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