by David D. Massey

Brenda Marquis was never a conventional female student at West High School in Knoxville, Tennessee. She dressed in plain baggy clothes, wore spiky hair and hung out with a boy known to be bisexual and a girl known to be lesbian.

In the summer after ninth grade, Brenda realized she was attracted to girls. “But I didn’t feel like a lesbian. That label didn’t fit me. It wasn’t until late in my junior year that I met another F2M (female to male transgender). I said, ‘This is me!’”

Brenda, now Brendon, never came out to any students, but he still suffered abuse and harassment throughout his four years at West High.

“It started early on,” Marquis recalled recently. “People would yell ‘dyke’ or ‘lesbo’ in the hallway, but you could never tell who they were. The students who called me names were never brave enough to say anything to my face.”

And it wasn’t just name-calling. “Twice I had guys twice my size slam me into lockers,” Marquis said.

Then, in his senior year, Marquis started receiving death threats.

“I received six letters in my locker,” he recalled recently. “The first one or two were just Post-it notes with Bible verses claiming that homosexuality is a sin. The third one was different. It was a death threat. The note said, ‘Gay people don’t belong in human society, and therefore it is my Christian duty to kill you.’ I was so scared I couldn’t leave the class. I called my mom. She came to school, and we met with the assistant principal because the principal was always busy. The assistant principal said there were cameras in the hallways, and she would get out the tapes and see who it was. She said this person would be stopped. I never heard a word back or if they caught anyone.
“Then the fourth note turned up. I skipped lunch and went to the office. I sat there an hour and a half, but no one had time to meet with me. Finally I had to leave to get to my next class. I received two more notes that year, but I didn’t tell anyone because I figured they wouldn’t do anything. There was never anything done school-wide, like an announcement at a student assembly that this behavior would not be tolerated.

“It’s terrifying to know that someone out there doesn’t want you to exist. That’s about the time I just shut down. I wasn’t talking to anyone. I was depressed all the time.”

Brendon Marquis graduated from West High in 2004. Unfortunately, his experience is not unusual. Countless lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students suffer verbal harassment and physical assault in East Tennessee’s public schools every school day. And the response of school officials is, with a few exceptions, woefully inadequate.

Take Larry Jones, who was the object of an unrelenting series of verbal taunts and physical assaults during his junior and senior years at Halls High School in Knox County. In December 2005, Jones (not his real name) was assaulted by a group of 8-10 students, who called him names and punched and kicked him, inflicting bruises, a broken nose, and a fractured rib. Jones did not see his assailants, no one was punished, and to his knowledge no teachers were apprised of the incident. Four months later, in the spring, Jones barely escaped injury when a student tried to run him down in the school parking lot. Able to identify the car and a passenger, Jones threatened a lawsuit if nothing was done. The driver was suspended for a few days. “It was lax punishment,” Jones noted. “You can get suspended for three days just for skipping class.”

Later, Jones said, the principal “announced to the students that name-calling and arguments in the halls had to stop,” but said nothing about either the assault or about tolerance and respect. “And of course the harassment didn’t stop.”

It was the unrelenting repetition of incidents like these that prompted a group of activists in Knoxville last fall to form the East Tennessee LGBTQ Youth Project to address the needs of at-risk lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth across the multi-county region surrounding Knoxville. This includes LGBTQ youth in schools, on the streets (homeless) and in state custody (foster care, group homes, juvenile detention). Advocacy, youth organizing, and training programs for teachers and other youth workers are among the near-term priorities for this start-up effort, which is supported by both RESIST and the Appalachian Community Fund, a Knoxville-based foundation that supports social justice efforts in southern Appalachia.
The Project forms against a backdrop of stepped-up homophobia in the state. Last fall, despite organized opposition, 80% of Tennessee voters approved a Constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman. In 2006 a bill was introduced in the state legislature that would have prohibited same-gender couples from serving as foster parents. The bill failed in committee, but only after intense lobbying by gay rights activists and progressive social workers.

Everywhere that diversity educators or anti-bullying advocates seek to address anti-gay discrimination and harassment in schools, religious conservatives are there to claim that the real goal is to push a pro-homosexual lifestyle agenda and curtail freedom of religious expression.

Unlike large urban centers, Knoxville and Knox County (population 382,000) currently have very few resources that cater specifically and openly to LGBTQ youth. In fact, aside from the Project, there is only one — Spectrum Café, a bi-monthly social gathering place for LGBTQ youth sponsored by a local Unitarian Universalist church.

Spectrum Café youth have provided leadership and energy to do more for at-risk LGBTQ youth in East Tennessee. In early 2006, Jake Green and Conrad Honicker, Spectrum regulars, had the audacity to hold hands on a stroll through a city park. For this infraction of acceptable behavior, they were physically intimidated and verbally harassed by two groups of people.

Rather than accept such treatment as the norm, the youth of Spectrum and the church organized a “Holding Hands” demonstration and rally, a mid-summer event that drew 200 gay and straight supporters. It was a first for the city, the region and the state — 100 same-gender couples, both youth and adult, holding hands in a youth-led march down Gay Street in downtown Knoxville. (In nostalgic Knoxville, the “gay” in Gay Street means, well, “merry.”)
Two weeks later, in August of 2006, Honicker entered the ninth grade at West High School, the same school from which Brendon Marquis graduated two years earlier. The name-calling started immediately, in part because Honicker paints his finger nails, and in part because he was an instant celebrity: his classmates recognized his picture from news coverage of the “holding hands” march.

Through diplomacy, patience, and a petition that drew 200 names, Honicker succeeded in meeting the requirements for a GSA (Gay Straight Alliance), which was approved by the school principal. By the end of the 2006-2007 school year, GSAs were in the process of being formed at three other Knox County high schools.

What are the prospects these GSAs can succeed in changing minds and lessening the harassment of LGBTQ students? It is still an uphill battle, Honicker admits, in part because some LGBTQ students are still afraid to come out and face the name-calling and harassment.

For that to stop, GSAs need the full support of administrators and teachers. In Knox County, the policy, at least, is progressive. In 2006 the school board beefed up its anti-bullying policy, adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to race, religion and other characteristics that motivate bullying. Later it modified the policy to say that the school system would implement practices—the board balked at the term “best practices”–to achieve safer and less violent schools.

But there is a big difference between policy and practice, and between good intentions and sufficient funding to pay for training that would help teachers deal specifically with the intersection of bullying and homophobia. Even in urban Knox County, administrators are wary of riling the religious right.

Fundamentalist Christianity has the upper hand in many rural school systems in the region. Indeed, in more than a few school systems, it is not uncommon for students to be released from school during school hours to be bused en mass to religious crusades sponsored by fundamentalist Christian churches.
The cultural differences exist on a very personal level. One mother told a colleague about the harassment her gay son received from other students in a Knox County high school, and his efforts to form a GSA that would help students prevent that kind of behavior. The colleague “is one of the nicest people I know, but after some thought she said she would have a hard time telling a child NOT to call a gay child “faggot” or worse, because she wouldn’t want to give the offending child the impression it was okay to be gay.”

This is the deeply ingrained mindset faced by supportive parents, educators and the new East Tennessee LGBTQ Youth Project. And it is worse in surrounding rural counties. In one county, a student is subjected to daily verbal harassment and physical intimidation, but teachers and administrators do not lift a hand to defend her. In another county, a straight teacher finally left a school whose principal did nothing to stop students from using derogatory terms to call her a lesbian, not because she spoke up for gays and lesbians but simply because she did not speak badly about them.

The reality is that, despite considerable risk, LGBTQ students in both rural and urban schools in East Tennessee increasingly are coming out to their friends and asserting their rights. The fact that four GSAs may be organized in Knox County within 12 months is remarkable enough. But the drive for dignity and human rights is also manifesting itself in such places as tiny Jonesborough, Tennessee, known for an annual story-telling festival and said to be the oldest town in Tennessee.

Curtis Walsh had endured years of verbal and physical abuse by the time he became a senior at Davy Crockett High School in Jonesborough in the fall of 2006. With other students he decided to form a GSA, got help from the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), and tried to follow the school’s rule book for forming clubs. “We couldn’t find a teacher who was willing to be our sponsor, and without a sponsor we couldn’t form the club.”

That didn’t stop Walsh and his friends from organizing a Day of Silence at the school last April. The observance, promoted by GLSEN nationwide, calls attention to the need for schools to be safe for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression. Instead of welcoming the effort to create a safe environment, the principal sent Walsh home for three days, later claiming he did so for Walsh’s safety. Walsh solicited help from ACLU-Tennessee, which sent a widely publicized letter to the Washington County School System, noting the many ways the suspension violated Walsh’s civil rights.

“It’s dangerous to come out,” Walsh said recently, “but [students] come out anyway. Coming out is a very big milestone that you shouldn’t do until you’re ready. But when you are ready, it will give you more peace within yourself, and you will be able to trust easier and experience life better.”

Courage such as this not only inspires but also mandates new efforts to support emerging leadership of LGBTQ students as they fight for respect and equal treatment in East Tennessee’s public schools.

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David D. Massey is the lead organizer for the East Tennessee LGBTQ Youth Project, which received a grant from RESIST last year. For more information, contact East Tennessee LGBTQ Youth Project, 1129 Burton Rd, Knoxville, TN 37919.