In the beginning of the seventh grade, sophomore Shawn Gongwer had a huge posse of friends. By the end of the year he only had two or three.
Gongwer had finally dropped the bomb to the school: he was gay.
This is the kind of prejudice that gay and lesbian students face when coming out of the closet. According to Gongwer, his experience with prejudice was more under the surface than dramatic: “It wasn’t so much blatant, like throwing stuff at me,” he said. “For me, it was like the silent treatment from the entire school.”
Gongwer told the first person in March of his seventh grade year. But, he says, once he changed his status on MySpace profile, it was truly official. He never had to tell his family personally. “My cousin [who saw my MySpace] told my aunt, who told my grandma, who told my other aunt, who told my mom,” said Gongwer. “So within a week of changing my MySpace, my entire family knew.”
Gongwer says that his family took the news fairly well. “We don’t talk about it, usually,” he said. “When they do, it’s really awkward.” Nonetheless, it’s ultimately a non-issue. “They treat it like any other thing. It’s just normal,” he said.
However, his friends were a different story. “Seventh grade is really early,” Gongwer said, explaining the nasty reaction from his friends. “There was a lot of unknown. The idea of one of their friends being [gay] was difficult to comprehend.” For a while, Gongwer says, there were only a handful of people that he could say hello to when they passed by. But things have gotten better for him since then. “I feel really lucky, living in the area that I live in, that I can be so open,” said Gongwer.
During the past two years, Gongwer was notoriously flamboyant, a show which he admits that he was just putting on. “I like being the center of attention,” he explained. “I kind of used this fact [my homosexuality] to my advantage by creating a persona… that puts me in the limelight.”
“Last year,” said Gongwer, “I was really, really gay.” But Gongwer has brought it down since then. “I’ve realized over the course of 8th grade that that’s not really the person I want to be,” he said. “I’ve toned it down a lot. The person who I am now is really me.”
But not everybody is so open about their sexuality. Take Homestead student John Doe (name has been changed to protect anonymity). Doe has only told his close friends about his sexuality. His parents also know, although they found out by reading a letter from one of his friends. “They didn’t really flip out, but they didn’t take it well,” he said. After finding out, Doe says, they forbid him to tell anyone else because he could “just end up getting hurt.”
When Doe told his friends, he didn’t see any blatant explosions of prejudice. “Some of them definitely were more distant afterwards, but they got over it,” he said. One of his friends was raised by his father to believe that homosexuality is wrong. “We’re more acquaintances now,” he said.
Gongwer discovered his homosexuality the summer before fifth grade. Doe, on the other hand, thought he was straight until his freshman year, when he went through a period of questioning before realizing that he was a homosexual. “It’s a gradual change. It’s not something that comes and hits you,” he said.
Before that year, Doe had no reason to believe that he was gay, and accordingly, he paid little attention to being politically correct. “I’m not gonna lie,” he said. “I was so stupid. I went with everyone, saying, ‘Oh, you’re gay’.” Once he knew, it took him less than a year to come out. But: “It was really hard, actually, telling someone,” he said.
At least at Homestead, homosexual students have a place to go: the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), a club that meets in D-2 every other Wednesday at lunch. The club’s advisor, 3-D design teacher Alinka Niva, says that she had several homosexual friends in college, not all of whom were comfortable coming out of the closet. “Even though I did not grow up that way,” Niva said, “I really feel for these kids because of the fact that they have no one to listen to them.”
The club’s main events, according to club president and junior Susan Hartzman, are National Coming Out Day in October (Hartzman says that she knows at least one person who has used the day to come out) and the Day of Silence in April. The Day of Silence is a nationwide custom in which students don’t talk for a whole day in solidarity with homosexuals who are forced to be silent. “We’re hoping to get more people involved this year,” said Hartzman. The event will take place this year on April 25.
Niva receives several gay rights newsletters for the GSA, and in one of them was enclosed a copy of a letter, sent by a student writing under a pseudonym to the administration of a Bay Area high school (the school was unspecified). The letter aims to explain and raise awareness about the Day of Silence. “If I myself can feel a fraction of what people who have to live in real silence feel, then this day is a success,” wrote the anonymous student. “It’s really powerful to be silent.”
According to Niva, she puts the letter in every teacher’s mailbox every year with a request that they share it with their classes. Over 90% of the teachers decline to read the letter aloud, Niva said.
“Kids here have a real hard time coming out, because they have a certain status that they want to maintain here at Homestead,” she said.
But coming out isn’t the only problem. Gongwer says that he has had some particularly nasty experiences going on dates. “I just get these looks from people,” he said. “It’s hard enough being a teenager in a relationship. You don’t realize how much public hatred there is until you go on a date.”
“You hear all these arguments, like, ‘People choose to be gay’,” said Gongwer. “And it’s like, why? Why would you want to have that burden on yourself, to know that the government doesn’t accept me, my family doesn’t accept me? Why would anyone choose that?”
Sophomore Annika Nabors doesn’t have an answer, but she’s decidedly less affected by the dilemma. Bisexual and in a successful straight relationship, Nabors explained that in middle school she discovered her homosexuality, then leaned back towards bisexuality in high school. She still says that she prefers girls, although “there is the occasional guy that can turn my fancy,” she said.
Nabors’ views on what causes homosexuality are unusually moderate. “I don’t think it’s entirely genetic. I think it’s a combination of nature and nurture,” she said. According to Nabors, people have “inclinations” in their genes, which can then be affected by choices they make. For an example, she cited gay men who stay in the closet their whole lives and manage to create families. “You can kind of override [your sexuality] if you really, really want to,” she said.
Sophomore Rebecca Hartzman, who is bisexual and in a lesbian relationship, has a similar point of view. “It might have to be a combination of genetics and the environment,” she said. “It’s not really a choice, it’s just like an unconscious mental thing.”
Both of the girls say that they’ve had very mild experiences with prejudice. “I haven’t had a really bad experience with people I’m close to,” said Rebecca. She added, “Before I even knew I was homosexual, I knew I was for gay rights.”
Rebecca said that part of her good luck has to do with going to Homestead. “The school is actually pretty good about it,” she said. “If people have a problem with it, they don’t beat you up and kill you; they just go quietly to their little pollbooths and vote ‘no’ on gay marriage.”
Nabors, on the other hand, thinks that her relatively easy experience has to do with her being a lesbian rather than a gay male. “This is a male-dominated society, and most guys find lesbians hot,” she said. “But they’re kind of creeped out by gay guys.”
So why are people “creeped out” by homosexuality? According to Niva, some people think that by associating themselves with homosexuals they’ll somehow become homosexual themselves. “I don’t understand that mentality,” she said.
But Gongwer offers a bit of insight. According to him, it’s unlikely that we’ll see gay marriage in twenty years. Why? Historically, Gongwer says, it was in the 1800s that African-Americans were emancipated from slavery, and they didn’t receive full equality until the 1960s. Considering the fact that gay marriage was still widely considered evil in the 1970s, Gongwer says, it’s remarkable how quickly the gay rights movement has progressed.
And it’s no wonder why. The last lines of the anonymous letter implore people to stand up for gay rights: “I always feel responsible for any acts of discrimination because I have the power to stop them,” the letter states. “I feel like that’s the whole point of America… to be able to step up and change things that are wrong. And if every person relies on someone else to step up, no one ever will, so isn’t it up to me?”
And that may not be as difficult as we think. “Even just speaking out when people say ‘That’s so gay’ can be really powerful,” said junior Shelby Matsuoka, a member of the GSA.
The next meeting of the GSA is on February 27, the Wednesday after we return from winter break.