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Gay Straight Alliances
By Amy Maki
Homophobia is perhaps the most violence inspiring division which racks America’s high schools. Incidents of anti-gay violence and harassment are a sickingly common event. While we may have Queer Eye for a Straight Guy on prime time TV, the political climate we live in is still incredibly anti-gay. You hear it in the speeches of Democrat and Republican going on and on about “defending marriage”. You hear it the lyrics of popular music. And you the consequences of it lived out in the halls of schools across the country.
Anti-gay prejudice and violence, and the social and psychological climate it produces for young gays and lesbians, is a large part of the high suicide rate, for example, which GLBTQ youth suffer from.
For years now, one of the ways that gay rights and gay liberation activists have been fighting back has been setting up Gay-Straight Alliances. The idea behind GSAs is a simple one: provide a safe place for students to meet, support each other, talk about issues related to sexual orientation and organize against homophobia. They function as a support group for students struggling with their identity, as an education group that reaches out to the student body as a whole, and provides a vehicle for GLBTQ activism.
In fact the Gay-Straight Alliance movement has swept the country in recent years. Today according to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) there over 2,000 GSA’s in the U.S.
The formation of Gay-Straight Alliances has, predictably, met with a lot of controversy and opposition in my cities and towns. Given the anti-gay prejudice common, and the political offensive that the Christian right, and others of that ilk, have been waging, many GSAs start up under a hail of parent and preacher criticism. Groups, like Focus on the Family in particular, have been campaigning against GSAs as promoting homosexuality. In fact with the recent spread of GSAs to a number of middle schools (two dozen Gay-Straight Alliances have been started up in middle schools at the time this goes to press), the Christian right has become even more incensed. They’ve launched a well funded propaganda campaign arguing that projects like GSAs target impressionable pre-teens and teens, and lead them to experiment in “deviant behavior.” In fact, to read some of the literature being put out by such anti-gay groups you’d think that homosexuality was something akin to cannibalism or infanticide!
The truth is it is precisely when young people come of sexual age that groups like the GSAs, and their message of diversity and acceptance are needed. While it is our view that gay liberation and gay rights will only be fully realized under a socialist society where there is no ruling class to try and create violent divisions between workers, there is a lot of positive work that can be done to create a safer and more accepting environment for young people as we seek to find our identity. Youth for Socialist Action supports the formation of Gay-Straight Alliances and calls on our members and supporters to get involved in efforts in their schools to fight anti-gay prejudice.
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