GLSEN

K–12 Queer Ed Regime

Background:

Kevin Jennings was a young, gay history teacher at Concord Academy, in Concord, Massachusetts, when one of his students, a straight daughter of lesbian moms, proposed a club. "You're gay and I'm straight, so let's call it a Gay-Straight Alliance." Thus was born the first GSA in 1988. Jennings and a lesbian teacher subsequently co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Independent School Teacher Network in 1990, which began with about seventy homosexual educators in Boston and was officially established in 1995 as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN—"'glisten,' because we homos are sparkly," wrote gay blogger Wes Ferguson.

GLSEN promotes LGBT-espousing programs in K–12 schools, such as "Day of Silence," "No Name-Calling Week," and "Ally Week." It also conducts teacher-training workshops and produces lesson plans, discussion guides, and other materials on alternative sexualities for classroom use. GLSEN gained national notoriety in 2000 when a conference it sponsored exposed children as young as twelve to objectionable and potentially life-threatening homosexual practices. The incident became known as "Fistgate."

Jennings resigned as executive director in 2008 and was appointed to the post commonly referred to as "Safe Schools Czar" in the Obama administration. Today more than 3,700 GSAs are registered with GLSEN.

Wanted For:

GLSEN's stated mission, "to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression," would be laudable and perfectly acceptable if the qualifying final eight words were simply lopped off. But sexual orientation and gender are the hinges on which the GLSEN juggernaut turns. Every program springs from its uncompromising, homophilic agenda, and GLSEN is callously unconcerned with valuing or respecting any members of the school community who harbor dissent.

They are the problem. "GLSEN recognizes that heterosexism, homophobia, biphobia and transphobia are interconnected with other forms of oppression," it explains. "GLSEN actively works to understand and address how these forces intersect and operate to undermine a safe and healthy climate in K–12 schools."

Addressing those forces means regulating students' attitudes. Consider the GLSEN Lunchbox, a comprehensive training program for teachers, produced in 2010 "to make schools safer and more affirming places" for LGBT students. The 141-page trainer's manual contains a scale for rating homophobic attitudes. The four negative "Homophobic Levels of Attitude" are: repulsion, pity, tolerance, and acceptance. (Yes, tolerance and acceptance are homophobic, and therefore forms of oppression.) The "Positive Levels of Attitude" are: support, admiration, appreciation, and nurturance.

To advance the positive attitudes, the Lunchbox contains classroom materials for activities such as inciting family dissociation ("Deconstructing Definitions of Family"), inviting gender confusion ("Getting in Touch with Your Inner Trannie"), and celebrating known pedophiles in the name of honoring LGBT history.

Most Recent Offenses:

In cases of troublesome or intransigent attitudes, in-class coercion is permissible. In May 2011, Lauren, a Christian high-school student in California, was required by her homosexual English teacher, a GSA leader, to read aloud a laudatory bio of gay activist and reported sex predator Harvey Milk. Afterward, the teacher played an excerpt of the R-rated film Milk, showing two men in bed together.

In October 2010, Johnson "Jay" McDowell, a Michigan economics teacher, asked one of his students about his feelings on homosexuality. Daniel Glowacki's answer, which reflected his Catholic upbringing, earned the junior an immediate expulsion from the classroom under threat of suspension from school.

Whatever it takes to make schools safe and affirming for LGBT sparkle. •

From Salvo 20 (Spring 2012)
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