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by Sheryl McCarthy
July 31, 2003
Trying to reach anybody at the Harvey Milk School over the last few days was like trying to get through to the Oval Office.
The principal was busy interviewing staff for the coming school year, the receptionist told me, while the school's press spokeswoman was tied up in meetings with Department of Education officials. Moreover, they've been bombarded with inquiries since Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that this tiny, privately run school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered youths is about to become a bona fide New York public school - the first public high school for homosexual students in the country.
The mayor's announcement provoked a howl from the usual opponents of change and accommodation to anyone not in the mainstream. Some editorial writers compared running a public school for homosexual students to running racially segregated schools in the old South.
Are gay students the only ones who face harassment, they asked, snidely inquiring whether there's any such subject as "gay math"? And what will come next, they demanded to know, a school for Haitian kids, for Russian immigrants? Goodness gracious! And so un-American.
One columnist inveighed that the government ought not be running a school whose values go against the Bible, the Quran, the Torah and the Buddhist scriptures.
Please. I'm sick of people who, in the guise of supporting equality and promoting the American values we supposedly all share, practice bigotry.
When I visited Harvey Milk 15 years ago, in its modest lodgings in Manhattan's meatpacking district, it was run by the Hetrick-Martin Institute, an organization devoted to supporting the needs of homosexual youths which has run the school up until now. Its 20 students were refugees from the anxiety, abuse and even violence they had suffered at regular public schools.
The school appeared to be working beautifully. I met Maria, an 18-year-old lesbian who left her Queens high school where students called her "dyke" and where her family felt she was an embarrassment to her niece, also a student there. Finnegan, 19, had dropped out of his Queens high school, where he constantly caught flak, had been harassed by his Jehovah's Witness family, left home, attempted suicide and wound up in a psychiatric hospital. Donna, a lesbian who'd been called "she-man" at her former school, could never come to class before without getting picked on.
At Harvey Milk, they found a comfortable place where they could study and develop themselves without the distractions of a hostile environment.
You might infer from some recent developments that society's growing acceptance of homosexuality precludes the need for a separate high school. But David Buckle, an attorney at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, says the organization still gets calls from students who are cornered in gym locker rooms and dark hallways, and who have to leave home for school earlier than other students to avoid being attacked on the bus and so they can hide until the school bell rings.
Buckle described the expansion of Harvey Milk as a very positive thing. "It's too bad that it has to happen, but thank goodness that it has."
One of the great things about New York is its willingness to try to accommodate so many different kinds of people in a constructive way. One million public school children already choose from a dizzying array of schools geared to a wide spectrum of personal interests and proclivities. They include schools for students who use sign language, who sing and dance and play instruments, those who want to do automotive work, and girls who want to develop leadership skills without the distraction of boys. Surely, there's room for a school for fewer than 200 gay and lesbian students.
One of the final acts of the former Board of Education before it was demolished and replaced by the Department of Education was to vote to make Harvey Milk a full-fledged public high school and to set aside the money to expand its physical space. I think the old board went out in style.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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