Students hope Day of Silence sends message loud and clear

Gym class was just not an option — what if they made fun of the way he walked?

And running for student government was too risky — what if they picked apart the way he talked?

He'd seen it all happen before, to boys who weren't even gay.

"You're paranoid, you're anxious, you're depressed," said Leoule Goshu, who graduated from Foss High School in Tacoma before telling anyone he was gay. "You don't experience what it's like to be young."

Tens of thousands of students will take a vow of silence tomorrow to call attention to the pressure gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) youth often feel at school to keep their sexuality to themselves. The silence will last for the duration of the school day, with students passing out cards to their teachers that explain their reasons for not speaking.

More than 50 high schools and colleges in Washington, including many in the Puget Sound area, are expected to participate in the ninth annual National Day of Silence — a sign that GLBT youth are more empowered, and organized, than ever before.

Despite legal challenges, nearly 2,000 gay/straight student alliances have sprung up nationwide in the past several years, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. And several states, including Washington, have passed anti-bullying laws that include provisions on sexual orientation.

These measures send a clear message that schools must, at the very least, tolerate the presence of GLBT youth. But acceptance is another story.

"There's a difference between trying to fight for civil rights and public safety and being acknowledged as a human being in your classroom," said Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington who studies gender and sexuality.

Students still get ugly words thrown at them in the hallway: A national school-climate survey by the Gay and Lesbian Education Network last year reported about 84 percent of GLBT youth said they had been verbally harassed with threats or name-calling. And beyond what is being said, there is something else that cuts deep for many GLBT youth: what is not being said.

The silence shows up, in bits and pieces, all over school. In the computer lab, when a filter blocks a student from reaching a gay-rights Web site. Or at a school assembly, where a tolerance lesson includes race, religion, class — but not sexual orientation.

Fewer than one-third of GLBT students surveyed in 2001 said they saw the issues in their lives reflected in textbooks, according to the task force. About the same percentage said they could access gay-resource Web sites at school or find GLBT resources in the school library.

When Goshu was in high school, he heard a message in that silence that straight people might not even notice: You do not belong here.

He already had heard that message at home. When he was in sixth grade, Goshu said, his father pulled him aside to deliver a warning: If you become a homosexual, I will kill you.

The words followed Goshu to high school — and nothing he saw there made him feel any better about being gay. He saw boys and girls holding hands. He saw photographs on teachers' desks of traditional families — a father, a mother, children at their feet.

What he did not see was his life.

Schwartz said gay students are facing the same "invisibility" in schools that black students faced decades ago. The black community worked to raise awareness of that problem, she said. And part of what resulted was multicultural education, a movement to include people of different cultures and colors in the curriculum.

The GLBT community is at the beginning of such a movement, Schwartz said — and there is a long way to go. In some states, such as Alabama, teachers in sex education are required by law to emphasize that "homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public."

Arizona law prohibits any talk of the "possibility of 'safe' homosexual sex." Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi and Utah have similar laws, according to the task force.

The American Family Association, a conservative Christian group with more than 2 million members, said it would support an open and balanced discussion in schools on issues such as homosexuality. But spokesman Ed Vitagliano said the group does not want sexual orientation included alongside race and gender in an anti-bullying curriculum.

"They specifically want kids to think homosexuality is normal, natural and healthy," said Vitagliano, who believes gay-rights groups are using the bullying issue to forward an agenda. "It's an opportunity to get sexual orientation on the list of things that are immutable characteristics, like race."

But advocates for GLBT youth say these lessons are not about promoting a certain kind of sexuality. The lessons are about protecting students who already are vulnerable and often suffering from rejection at home. Some public-health studies have indicated GLBT youth are at higher risk for suicide and homelessness, depression and substance abuse.

It is a strain to "come out" at any age, advocates say. But for the average teenager, it can be particularly difficult. Children at that age are naturally questioning who they are and whether they are accepted. They are particularly open to messages that parents, teachers and administrators send about what a good person looks like, acts like and feels.

So Lisa Love, health-education specialist for the Seattle School District, encourages administrators to hang posters in the hallway that read, "All Families are Welcome," with a sketch of a lesbian couple holding a child's hand. She hands out rainbow "Friendly" stickers to teachers to post on their doors as a sign they are open to talk with children from different backgrounds.

"We're heading in the right direction," said Love, who supervises the gay/straight alliances at each of Seattle's high schools. "But kids need to feel accepted in every classroom, in every building, with every person — not just once a week, during lunchtime, behind closed doors."

Working toward that goal, Love trains teachers and administrators how to intervene in any anti-gay harassment they witness. More than 82 percent of GLBT students in the national school-climate survey said teachers either sometimes or never intervened when hearing homophobic remarks.

Yet the same survey showed that GLBT students who could identify one supportive staff member were twice as likely to attend college after graduation.

For James Broetz, a senior at Newport High in Bellevue, it was his health teacher. Barbara Velategui has taught for decades at the school, serving as gay/straight alliance adviser and introducing all of her students to GLBT issues through annual speakers.

This year, she invited Broetz to sit on the panel. And when it was over, he felt nothing but relief. "Off the chest — finally," said Broetz, president of Newport's Gay/Straight Alliance.

He got congratulations from several classmates. And recently, when members wore their alliance sweat shirts for the first time, Broetz said he heard only friendly questions about what the letters "GSA" represented.

But Broetz said there is still a lot of work to be done on tolerance at Newport. "I think people are supportive to my face," he said. "But they still kind of skirt around the issue — even the slightest hint of it, and they go on to another topic."

Goshu, now that he is out of high school and living away from home, said he no longer feels so hemmed in by his sexuality. He came out two years ago to his closest childhood friends, who accepted him. Last year, he told his parents, who did not.

Goshu is a student at the UW now, feeling free to talk about all parts of his life — from the homelessness he suffered when his parents threw him out, to his volunteer experience at a gay-youth organization. He put it all down recently in an application for a fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University.

Goshu was one of 30 students accepted into the program, which trains students in public policy.

It came as a shock to Goshu, that a prestigious college would accept him despite all that was said in the essay — or possibly because of it. "I think they wanted the whole me," he said.

Cara Solomon: csolomon@seattletimes.com