Apr 15, 2005  |  By: YUSEF NAJAFI  | COMMENTS     

An estimated 450,000 students across the United States took a vow of silence on Wednesday, April 13, to bring attention to the discrimination that many gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students face in schools today.

This year’s “Day of Silence,” organized by students between the ages of 13-18, coincided with the launch of a new campaign from the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, titled “Teach Respect.” The campaign was created to help dismantle violence, harassment and bullying brought on due to a student’s sexual orientation.

Kevin Jennings, executive director of GLSEN for the past 11 years, said surveys conducted by GLSEN show that most of the participants in the “Day of Silence,” are heterosexual students.

“More and more young straight people see this as a basic issue of fairness and they’re willing to stand up and do something about it. I also think there’s a historic shift happening among junior high and high school students,” he said. “‘The Day of Silence’ started in colleges, but many more high schools are doing it.”

“It’s taken off and it’s spread like wild fire,” he said.

Now GLSEN is also advocating for gay rights through “Teach Respect,” by using public service announcements in print media and radio to “raise awareness of the harmful effects of bullying and harassment in American schools.”

Still, despite the popularity and success among some students, schools are not always supportive of the “Day of Silence” demonstration, Jennings said. Just because a school is listed on GLSEN’s Web site as participating, does not mean the school has officially taken part in the demonstration, and GLSEN is regularly asked to remove school names and even threatened with lawsuits, Jennings said. He added that the school names are submitted by students who independently planned to participate.

“It’s sad to me that we have to have the students teach the teachers on this issue,” Jennings said.

“Our national school climate survey, a survey of 1,000 LGBT high school students online and alliances, found four out of five LGBT students are harassed, and that 83 percent of the time when words like ‘faggot’ and ‘dyke’ are used, teachers don’t intervene.

“It’s ironic and disappointing that students have to do the educating but I applaud them for doing the leadership.”

Anti-gay response
Tim Bueler, an 18-year-old high school senior from Rancho Cotate High School in Rohnert Park, Calif., and founder of the High School Conservative Club of America, said there are 11 chapters of his group across the country that plan to mimic the group’s anti-gay efforts, demonstrated last week.

With the help of GayMarriageNo.org, the conservative club protested the Day of Silence by holding the Day of Truth, on Wednesday, April 6, and Thursday, April 7 at Rancho Cotate High School.

Bueler, who is also the president of HSCCA, said school officials demanded a halt to the demonstrations as soon as the group entered the high school with sweatshirts that read “No Gay,” on the front and “Homosexuality is a sin,” on the back.

“[School officials] said it was bigotry, and I asked if the Bible is hate speech,” Bueler told the Blade this week. “I asked [them] to look at the Bible for its educational code for tolerance, and [they] wouldn’t.”

Bueler said HSCCA continued its demonstrations with signs that included biblical passages the next day across the street from the public schools.