Rainbows flooded the streets. More than 60 booths from local business and organizations set up camp in Heckscher Park. Attendance was at an all-time high for the 24th annual Long Island Gay Pride Parade in Huntington June 14.
This year, the parade, much tamer than its rambunctious New York City counterpart, had a new addition: the Riverhead Middle School Gay-Straight Alliance.
Riverhead’s GSA, newly formed only a month-and-a-half before the parade, marched with Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth, an organization dedicated to providing programs and services to local youth dealing with issues regarding their sexuality.
The Riverhead group is headed up by Riverhead Middle School Latin teacher Lorene Custer. A 19-year veteran, Custer says she’s always seen the need for a club like the GSA at the middle school. The idea that she should be the one to start the club struck her earlier last year, when Custer was teaching her students about gender in Latin. Latin, like many other languages, has something called grammatical gender, in which nouns have natural genders assigned to them, denoted by the ending of the word.
For example, “silva” is the word for “forest” in Latin, and is feminine. The word “liber” means “book,” and is masculine.
The discussion in class turned towards gender in the biological sense, and its place in ancient society, as well as in society today.
One girl in particular became very interested and outspoken on the subject. Her name was Ocean, and she is now the president of the middle school’s GSA.
“Ocean was the one who really began talking to the other kids, starting a discussion. She was just so sophisticated in her understanding of gender and what it means for us,” Custer said. At the end of every year, Custer assigns her seventh-graders an essay reflecting on what they learned that year and what influenced them the most.
“So many kids talked about Ocean, and how they never knew any of the stuff she talked about before,” she said.
A few days after the discussion, Ocean presented Custer with something which her teacher has affectionately nicknamed “A Treatise on Gender,” in which she discussed issues of gender and gender roles in society.
“It was two pages, single spaced, in this teeny, tiny, 10-point font,” Custer said.
It was then that Custer realized that her students were not only ready to talk about these sorts of issues, but that they had already begun thinking about them on their own.
“I think it’s always been obvious that there was a need for this club,” she said. “It actually got to the point where I was surprised that no one had made it yet.”
As quickly as she could, Custer got the ball rolling to begin the club. It had its first meeting late this year.
Club meetings often began with a spoken confidentiality agreement between the teacher and her students. Custer calls it the “sub rosa” agreement, a Latin phrase meaning “under the rose” that was coined from a myth where secrecy is exchanged for a beautiful rose.
During one of its first meetings, the club decorated a distributed seven shoe boxes with the words “GSA” on them. These boxes, with slats cut into their lids, were set out in different classrooms around the school. At the beginning of class, teachers would encourage students to write questions and comments for their peers in the GSA, submit them to the discussion box and attend meetings to have their anonymous questions answered.
Custer used these student-submitted prompts to drive the weekly discussions in her club. With a full year ahead of her next fall, she hopes to do a lot more of these types of outreach in the school next school year.
The club meets in the library, which, like many other classrooms in the school, has a sticker on the door that marks its as a “safe place.” This sticker, handed out by the GSA and provided by LIGALY, tells LGTB students struggling with personal issues know that the teacher inside that room has designated themselves as available to help.
From the first meeting, Custer said she knew she had done the right thing by starting the club. She described middle school as a potentially “scary” time for the students, and not only because the increased rates in suicide and homelessness among gay youth.
“What’s really scary for a kid at that age is the feeling that they might be different, and I’m sure that’s true of anything. If you’re feeling different, you’re likely to feel uncomfortable in your own skin,” Custer said. “It’s important to provide these kids with a space to not feel that uncomfortableness, and to just be able to talk.”
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