Reaching LGBT Teens

Two further thoughts on LGBT teen suicide:

First, my friend at GLSEN reported back to me that what we're learning about this month is not actually a spike in LGBT teen suicide. Although she pointed out that the start of the school year is always a difficult time for LGBT students -- and so, therefore, there is always a rise in LGBT teen anxiety in the fall -- we are also hearing more about these issues because the media is paying attention.

That strikes me as a mix of good news and bad news. The good news is that what we're learning is not a sign that more LGBT kids are taking their lives. There is not a sudden rash or epidemic of suicides occurring.

The bad news is that this is, in fact, the usual rate of suicide among our teens. We're just now hearing about it in concrete terms, with names and faces and stories attached. This is what's considered normal.

For me, that's a deeply troubling realization. Each of the stories we've heard about this month have been heart-breaking and eye-opening. And yet these kinds of stories have been going on for months and years.

Second is the question of what we in the history business can contribute to making a change. Clearly one of the lessons of this moment is that the policies that even the best-intended school systems have in place -- such as those described by the school's superintendent in California -- are not enough. So there is a need for all of us to develop some new approaches.

In part, of course, those of us who are historically-inclined can examine the ways that gay organizations and activists have tackled homophobia in the past, as well as the way that other groups have tackled other kinds of hate in schools, and bring those lessons to bear in developing new policies. We can bring those examples to the table and see what they can show us, in terms of successes and failures.

I also believe, though, that history lessons themselves can be a powerful tool. A great deal of emphasis has been placed, over the last several years, on developing self-esteem in the classroom by making sure that there are role models for young people who are teaching them and who are in the learning materials. We in the history world can start working on developing such materials.

Here at OutHistory we've been talking about developing possible curricular materials, but this has been a slow moving project for us. GLSEN and the Family Equality Council have done more. But there is much work to do. And OutHistory and other sites might be an ideal place for us to pursue this goal further.

Perhaps the stories of the LGBT greats of the past -- whether Eleanor Roosevelt or Aaron Copland or recent politicians -- will help students find hope in their futures. It's a contribution worth our pursuing.

Gay Suicides Stay in the News

The New York Times has continued to report on gay teen suicides, which in and of itself is news. Suddenly now the long-standing epidemic of LGBT teen depression and suicide is occupying the spotlight, and that's great.

In today's story, the Times discusses the significant number of teen suicides that have been reported on this month. I'm going to ask the head of GLSEN, the Gay-Lesbian and Straight Education Network, if they think this is a spike in events or a spike in news coverage: I suspect it's the former, but let's see what she says.

There is a sense, though, in reading the Times piece that school cultures and adult culture are not exactly the same thing. What is no longer considered socially acceptable for adults to say to one another or about one another at a workplace, say, still appears acceptable in American high schools. Workers in many American workplaces could not verbally assault a co-worker as a "fag" and tell him "You should kill yourself" or "You're gay, who cares about you?" -- as students apparently said to Seth Walsh, a California boy who killed himself last month. Workers who did so would, I suspect, face some kind of consequences.

But American educators seem either baffled or indifferent to the question of how to end the harassment-is-OK culture of their schools. Richard Swanson, the superintendent of the school district where Seth Walsh went to school, told the Times that the district had rules against bullying, taught "tolerance" in the classrooms, and had assemblies every few months to discuss behavior. "But these things didn't prevent Seth's tragedy," he wrote to the reporter. "Maybe they couldn't have."

Yet clearly if, over the last 40 years, we have successfully changed the homophobic culture of a large number of American workplaces, then we do, in fact, have the tools and skills to change the culture of America's schools as well. We just need to borrow those tools from one environment and apply them to another.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, "This is a moment where every one of of us --parents, teachers, students, elected officials and all people of conscience -- needs to stand up and speak out against intolerance in all its form." That's well and good, but hardly specific and hardly focused on the very well-documented plight of LGBT youth. There is a very specific form of intolerance that we need to target, and we need to do more than issue declarations of principle. And we have a history of doing this work successfully that we can and should start borrowing from.