Mamaroneck Students Cheer Gay Rights Speaker

by Joan R. Simon with photography by Terry Toll

(December 4, 2003) Kevin Jennings, founder of GLSEN (the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) electrified the Mamaroneck High School student body on Wednesday morning, December 3 with his story of growing up gay in a poor white Southern family. Jennings told the packed auditorium, “When you’re given privileges, you’re given responsibilities.” He encouraged the students to make a difference in their own environment and pointed out there was much to be done:

• A survey completed by the Gay Straight Alliance in anticipation of his appearance revealed that 90% of Mamaroneck students admit to hearing homophobic terms used at school.
  
  
• Intervention occurred “sometimes” or “never” according to 81% of the respondents.
  
  
• And, 43% of students heard derogatory comments in the classroom, a higher percentage than Jennings had ever seen before.

“The most important thing you can do is not be silent,” he said. If where you are “is a place of bigotry,” he warned, “you have no one to blame but yourself.”

Jennings grew up outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the son of a Southern Baptist preacher, who died when Jennings was 8, and a highly intelligent mother from Appalachia, who was schooled only until the age of 9. Her determination to see one of her five children get the education she was denied helped Jennings succeed as a scholarship student at Harvard.

“The people who tell you that you cannot change the world are lying to you,” he said citing dramatic changes that have happened in the 40 years of his lifetime in civil rights for blacks and equality for women. “There is still one group your government discriminates against,” he warned: gays and lesbians.

Jennings’ speech was sponsored by the Gay Straight Alliance, a high school organization now in its sixth year at MHS, with financial support from the Mamaroneck Schools Foundation and the school district. Jennings started the first GSA 15 years ago as a teacher in Massachusetts, and now there are 2000 GSA’s nationwide. Mamaroneck’s GSA Co-President Sarah Muffly noted, “Fifty-nine percent of Mamaroneck students felt that LGBT (Lesbian-Gay-Bi-sexual-Transgender) students would feel accepted at Mamaroneck High School,” according to the survey.

Meeting with parents Wednesday evening, Jennings explained the discrepancy between this relatively positive response and the earlier survey results, saying, “Kids know what they’re supposed to say to a question like this. There is a certain level of denial.” Change will not come, he added, if there is no “social penalty” for derogatory name-calling. He advised parents that most kids are “coming out” between the ages of 15 and 17, rather than during the college years as had been the case in prior decades. This makes the high school environment even more critical.

Mamaroneck students were curious about Jennings’ own high school experiences and questioned him about where derogatory words for gays originated and about TV shows that feature gays. “I loved how he talked about himself, not just as a gay man, but as a Southern man, a white man, and how he really captured the different kinds of prejudices people have,” said junior Madeline Scheffler. “Kids don’t hear things like – you can change the world. It’s terribly inspiring for us.” The students gave Jennings two standing ovations.

The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) is dedicated to making schools safe learning environments for all youth and providing teaching materials on queer studies. Jennings is the author of several books, including Becoming Visible, a gay-lesbian history reader for students, and he wrote the prize-winning documentary on gay history, Out of the Past.

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