Breaking the Silence with Kevin Jennings

In its seven year history Equality Utah’s Allies Dinner has attracted a number of high profile speakers, including author Andrew Tobias, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights Kate Kendell and Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation president Neil G. Giuliano. This year Kevin Jennings, editor, author and executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, will join their number.

“I’ve always felt this real special affinity for Utah,” said Jennings in a phone interview from his New York City office. “I grew up in a similar kind of place in North Carolina, where there is a dominant religious group that is hostile [to gays], so I know a bit of what people are up against. And some of the early critical battles of GLSEN that were in some ways make-or-break battles happened in Utah.”

Jennings is referring to the 1995 controversy over the formation of East High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance during which the Salt Lake City Board of Education did away with all extra-curricular student clubs to prevent a GSA forming at the Salt Lake City high school. The decision sparked student protests and a special legislative session and garnered national media coverage.

The board rescinded the club ban in 2000, but not until after a lawsuit that reached the state supreme court.

GLSEN was involved, said Jennings, because the club’s faculty sponsor had approached them for help in starting their GSA. Initially, Jennings said he was skeptical when one of his employees at the time remarked that the club’s formation was “gonna be a big deal.”

“And then all hell broke loose,” he remembers. “It was a pivotal moment in GLSEN’s history.” Jennings and his staff knew it would be, he said, when students looking to start GSAs crashed their Web server and phone system fifteen minutes after MTV aired a special about the controversy that included GLSEN’s contact information.

“I have to forever thank the right wing zealots of Utah for bringing our signature program to the attention of the nation,” Jennings remarked. “Thank you, thank you for doing that!”

Jennings created the country’s first gay-straight alliance in 1988 when he was a young history teacher at Concord Academy in Massachusetts. Raised in rural North Carolina, Jennings said he understood what it was like to grow up gay in a hostile environment and became an educator to make sure the next generation of gay students “would have it better than I did.” Strangely, he said his Baptist upbringing, which emphasized honesty and “doing right by others,” helped him pursue this goal.

“When I realized I was gay no choice but to come out because I was taught not to lie,” he explained.

During his third year at Concord Academy a suicidal gay student made Jennings’ drive to help gay students all the more urgent.

“I had a gay student sitting in my office one day who said he wanted to kill himself,” Jennings remembered. “When I told him not to he said, ‘Why shouldn’t I, my life isn’t worth saving, anyway.’” The conversation deeply troubled Jennings, who had himself attempted suicide at age 16. Two weeks later he came out to the entire student body during a special assembly. Shortly after that a teenager came to his office saying that she wanted to “start a club to fight homophobia.” Her request shocked Jennings, he said, because she was not a troubled lesbian student but a popular straight girl.

“I said, ‘why do you care so much?’ And she said, ‘That’s easy. My mother is a lesbian and I’m tired of getting put down here.’ When Jennings asked her what she wanted to call it, he said she replied: “You’re gay and I’m straight, so let’s call it the gay-straight alliance.” Interest in the club soon spread and two year later, Jennings began GLSEN without a dime in the bank during what he jokingly calls “a fit of insanity.” Since that date it has overseen the implementation of a 1993 Massachusetts law banning in-school discrimination based on sexual orientation. Currently 10 other states offer similar protections.

Today GLSEN has helped to create more than 4,200 GSAs around the country. It has also created a number of programs geared towards ending school bullying – particularly that towards gay and transgender students. This year approximately 7,700 junior high and high schools campuses took place in GLSEN’s Day of Silence, where participating students draw attention to the social and political silencing of gay and transgender people by not speaking during parts of the school day or its entirety. GLSEN has also launched No Name-Calling Week, a movement encouraging students from fifth to eighth grade students to stop verbal bullying.

Although GLSEN and queer students have come far in the past 20 years, Jennings said that this progress was tempered by the murder of gay eighth grader Lawrence King by a 14-year-old classmate who was reportedly upset that King had asked him to be his Valentine. This year’s Day of Silence was dedicated to King’s memory.

“Ten years ago there was enormous attention when Matthew Shepherd was killed. Ten years later it’s a gay eighth grader, so we clearly have an enormous amount of work left to do,” said Jennings. “I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished and daunted by how far we have to go until young LGBT people just are physically safe when they’re at school.”

He also had harsh words for anti-bullying policies and laws that do not specifically cover gay students, including a Utah law passed this year that creates minimum standards all public schools must follow when dealing with bullying or hazing. Statistically speaking, Jennings said, such regulations do not make gay students safer and in some cases actually cause more harm than does the lack of any rules about bullying.

“Our research which is the most comprehensive in America shows that the rates of bullying are slightly higher in states that have generic laws than no laws at all,” he said. “[Laws like Utah’s] are another example of people putting politics ahead of kids. We know which policies work better. This is not Kevin’s opinion; it’s a statistical fact based on districts and states that have comprehensive, generic and no laws. When we don’t enact the laws that help kids nothing changes. These legislators did absolutely nothing but pat themselves on the back. It will have no impact on Utah schools, none.”

But ending bullying does not start with a law or a school policy, Jennings added. Rather, it starts with education.

“The story of Lawrence King is in the end a story about the limiting of policies,” Jennings continued, adding that in a GLSEN survey of high school principals only two percent said they had any training about “LGBT issues.”  “If you want teachers to meaningfully implement a policy, you have to give them training. Then you have to look at curriculum.”

Jennings has also pursued his goal of helping make all students safer in a number of books that he has authored or edited. These include Always My Child, a resource book for parents with gay students about the daily struggles – including in-school harassment – their children face; and Becoming Visible, a gay history text for classroom use; One Teacher in Ten, a collection of essays by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teachers. He has also written a memoir, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, which details in part his mother’s transition from fearing gays to founding a chapter of Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and becoming one of her son’s strongest supporters. Near the end of her life, Jennings said she volunteered at an AIDS hospice that served gay black men.

“I have enormous hope because I’ve seen how people can change and grow,” he said. As a history teacher, he added, the achievement of full civil and political equality for gay and transgender people is inevitable – merely a “question of when.”

However, he added, gays and their allies, and not time, are the only forces that can bring about this change.

“Things haven’t gotten better for LGBT people because time has passed but because people of all sexual orientations and ages have stood up and said, ‘This has got to stop,’” he said. “We today are the beneficiaries of people who took a stand when it was much more frightening than it is now. You look at what it was like to take this stand 20, 40, 60 years ago and I think that imposes on us today a moral obligation to stand up for next generation, because a previous generation stood up for us.”

Ultimately, Jennings said he accepted Equality Utah’s invitation to speak at this year’s Allies Dinner out of respect for the often difficult stand gay people and their allies are taking in Utah.

“Frankly, it’s not very hard to take a stand [for gay rights] in New York City, but it’s much harder in Salt Lake City, and especially when you get out to other places, like Provo,” he said. “I hope I can impart a little bit of inspiration that night, but in reality I’ll probably be getting more inspired than they will.”

Visit Jennings’ blog at kevinjennings.com.