Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This Is Political!
Negotiating the Legacies of the First School-Based
Gay Youth Group
Dominique Johnson
Abstract
In 1972, a group of students of color at New York Citys George Washington High
Schools founded the first school-based gay group on record in the United States,
using their school as a site of activism by participating in both their schools student
government opportunities and in an emergent social movement. The group formed
by these Bronx students can be interpreted as the very first example of what is
known today as a gay-straight alliance (GSA) even though the conventional history
of the GSA begins in the late 1980s with a group of suburban private school
students. This exclusion from the history of student participation in activism for
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) civil rights suggests a significant
alternate reading of the racism, classism, and geographic biases of the greater
LGBT movement, its organization, direction, priorities, and narratives for/about
LGBTQ youth, especially urban youth of color. Considering alternate readings of
youth participation might better enable us to envision a political strategy that
accentuates shared values of social justice, the civil and human rights to an
equitable education, and the significance of building coalitions in order to ensure
safer schools for all.
This Is Political! Negotiating the Legacies of the First School-Based Gay Youth Group
381
In 1972, a group of students at New York Citys George Washington High Schools
founded the first school-based gay group on record in the United States.
Predominantly comprised of gay students of color, the members of George
Washington High Schools student-initiated extracurricular gay group organized
boldly within their school, hoping to enact change using their school as a site of
activism by participating in both their schools student government opportunities
and in an emergent social movement. The group formed by these Bronx students
can be interpreted as the very first example of what is known today as a gaystraight alliance (GSA)extracurricular safe spaces for lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students and their allieseven though the
conventional history of the GSA begins in the late 1980s with a group of suburban
private school students (Blount 2004). With the exception of an article written by
Cohen (2005), no written record makes any reference to the work of the Bronx
students of the Stonewall era, 1 a glaring omission in the history of student
participation in activism for LGBT civil rights. These exclusions from both social
movement history and the conventional history of the GSA suggest a significant
alternate reading of the racism, classism, and geographic biases of the greater
LGBT movement, as well as its organization, direction, priorities, and narratives
for/about LGBTQ youth, especially urban youth of color. 2 This essay offers an
alternate reading of an area of LGBT history that drives educational policymaking
today by advocating a legacy that silences youth participation in political activism
within schools.
The work of the George Washington students brought what we would now consider
LGBTQ student activism within the boundaries of school for perhaps the very first
time in U.S. history. Their legacy as student activists reminds us that, at a very
early time in the modern LGBT liberation movement, gay youth were alive and well
and going to every high school (George Washington Goes Gay 1976, 23). The
precedent for youth participation set by George Washington students was crucial in
beginning the long road toward youth activism for LGBT justice in schools. These
students utilized a definitively political orientation in their activism for participation
in their school community and for safer schools where they could be free from both
physical and psychological harm. It is important to negotiate the legacy and agency
of these activist youth of the Stonewall era for todays youth. Price-Spratlen (1996)
explains this as a process of negotiating legacies, a method of introspection in
which we attempt to learn the lessons of history by seeking to understand the
contexts and contributions of our ancestors (216). By recovering and articulating
the histories of LGBTQ youth of color in educational contexts, they might be better
able to negotiate their own legacies and understand the historical contexts and
contributions of those who came before.
1
The Stonewall Riots ensued after a 1969 police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New
York Citys Greenwich Village. These riots were the catalyst for Gay Liberation and the
modern LGBT civil rights movement.
2
For a diverse and comprehensive body of research considering contexts of LGBTQ
sexualities such as race, ethnicity and social class, see: Chan 1995; Johnson 2006;
Kumashiro 2001; 2002; McCready 2001; 2003; 2005; Parks 2001; Rodrguez 2003; Russell
and Truong 2001; and Ryan 2002.
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include straight youth in any of its program activities, was predominantly a support
group facilitated by an adult, and did not identify as an alliance of gay and straight
students. When established in suburban Boston under the GSA name in the late
1980s, the private school group not only provided support, but also offered a space
where students could consider language as a means by which they constructed
their own identitiesan aspect of GSAs that continues to be one of their more
compelling components. While GSAs can play a vital role in making schools safer
and more inclusive places for all students, GSAs are only part of the bigger picture
(Griffin and Ouellett 2002, 2) in the modern struggle for a safer school climate.
The goal of the George Washington student group was to create a safer, more
tolerant climate for all students in their school. They point to the shared oppression
of all high school students and imply that they are organizing under a multi-issue
coalition politics framework. At the same time, they also specifically identified their
struggle with the Gay Liberation movement. They described how gay people all over
the world were no longer tolerating the oppression they endured as students, and
were rising up and demanding their just and true rights as human beings
(George Washington Goes Gay 1976, 21). Using the language of identity as
politicized by Stonewall (as influenced by the Civil Rights and Womens
Movements), the George Washington students resolution of student rights is the
first documented case of a group of students proclaiming: [W]e as gay students
demand the same rights (social and political) as straight students (George
Washington Goes Gay 1976, 21).
They situated their struggle in the larger political struggle of the Gay Liberation and
Gay Rights Movements by demanding that the city high schools of New York grant
them the
right to form gay groups of both a social and political nature[t]he right to
be included and to receive fair representation in any high school course
dealing with sexuality (as both sexual beings and as a political movement in
a changing society with changing cultural values), and if none exist, to have
them created[and t]he right to be treated as equal human beings, which
includes the removal of all textbooks and other educational media that treat
homosexuality as an aberration, rather than as an integral and important
part of human sexuality (George Washington Goes Gay 1976, 21).
We have only recently begun to address the borders that exist between sexual and
gender identity, and education. To do so is reformative, radical, and actionoriented. Furthermore, to configure youth as a political site, it becomes
impossible not to discuss as well the site of youth as pedagogical, which is to say
that politics and pedagogy are intertwined (Rodriguez 1998, 175). Student
activists in our schools are continually engaging in an enterprise of agency,
educating others through their participation in activism.
The racist, classist, and geographic biases of the greater LGBT movement,
reflections of society at large, are responsible for a great deal of the invisibility of
the George Washington students in LGBT educational history. Their omission is an
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Dominique Johnson (BA, Bryn Mawr College; MA, Stanford University) is the
founding executive director of The Joseph Beam Youth Collaborative, focusing her
work on gender issues in education, social justice in schools, and educational policy.
She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education.
References
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Francisco, 1950-1994. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Blount, J.M. (2004). Fit to Teach: Same-sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in
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Chan, C. (1995). Issues of Sexual Identity in an Ethnic Minority: The Case of
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Cohen, S. (2005). Liberations, Clients, Activists: Queer Youth Organizing, 19662003. Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education 2(3): 67-86.
Griffin, P. and M.L. Ouellett (2002). Going beyond Gay-Straight Alliances to
Make Schools Safe for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Students. The
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George Washington Goes Gay (1976). Growing up Gay: A Youth Liberation
Pamphlet. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Youth Liberation Press, Inc.
Hogan, S. and L. Hudson (1998). Completely Queer: The Gay and Lesbian
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