Max Cohen

n the early morning hours of March 11, an East Campus suite was vandalized with homophobic graffiti. The suite is the residence of Norman Washington, the openly gay president of Proud Colors, an organization that advocates for queers of color at Columbia University. Admittedly this incident is still not yet fully understood: was it an illegal hate crime perpetrated by Washington's neighbors or was it nothing more than an inappropriate drunken joke, perhaps done by visiting students? Either way, it is a sign that discrimination and hate toward the queer community exists everywhere, even at a school as supposedly open and progressive as Columbia.

Yet I also think this incident shows how lucky the queer community is at Columbia. The Columbia administration has condemned the incident and is working with student leaders to develop a comprehensive policy to combat hate crimes at the University. While it is reasonable to criticize the administration for its slow response to the incident, we must remember how fortunate we all are to attend an institution that does care about creating a safe place for the queer community to live and get an education.

The queer students who attend local public high schools are generally not so lucky. According to the Lambda Legal website, the average LGBTQ high school student in the United States hears homophobic terms such as “faggot” and “dyke” 25 times per day, and 18.8 percent of these students say that faculty and school staff are some of the ones making these comments. 39.1 percent of LGBTQ students are physically harassed, and a full 64.3 percent feel unsafe in their schools. As a result, LGBTQ students are 4.5 times more likely to skip school because they feel unsafe than their heterosexual counterparts, and nearly one-third of LGBTQ students “drop out of high school to escape the violence, harassment, and isolation they face there.”

Enter the Hetrick-Martin Institute and Harvey Milk High School. The Hetrick-Martin Institute (HMI) was founded in 1979 by two social workers trying to provide a safe space for all at-risk youth, with a special focus on queer students. The Harvey Milk High School (HMHS), which is named after the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco from 1977 until his assassination in 1978, was the product of a partnership between HMI and the New York City Department of Education in 1985. For most of its history Harvey Milk was nothing more than a two-room after school program. Controversy erupted in 2002 when the Board of Education approved a $3.2 million expansion of the program into an eight-classroom high school for roughly 170 students.

Now I'm not sure about others, but when I think of a high school devoted to queer students in New York, the first image that comes to mind is a small multi-ethnic school with plenty of drama (in both senses of the word). In short, I think of the school from Fame. HMI's website reinforces my prejudices with pictures of what appear to be gay gangstas on the verge of breaking out into song. And according to a report on the Department of Education's website, the school even specializes in theater arts and dance.

Despite the great potential for a sitcom somewhere in all of this, HMI did allay many of my concerns about HMHS. For instance, I had been worried that the school encourages students to determine their sexuality at a very early age. It turns out that the school is primarily for students who have already been abused at other schools due to their perceived sexual orientation. In other words, heterosexual students are allowed to attend. In fact, HMI does some pretty fancy footwork to step around any potential accusations that HMHS segregates students by sexual orientation. In a public response to a somewhat nasty New York magazine article about the school, HMI writes that the NYC Department of Education is simply recognizing the “issues faced by at-risk youth, some of whom are gay and lesbian” (italics mine). Other parts of the website emphasize that heterosexuals are not discriminated against during the application process, and one section even leaves out the topic of sexuality altogether when it states that “HMHS is a practical, safe solution for certain at-risk students subject to extreme levels of violence and harassment.” The FAQ section puts it most eloquently: “It doesn't matter whether you identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or straight, transgender female or male. It doesn't matter if you are 'Out, loud and proud' or on the 'DL', 'In the Closet' or 'Living Large.' You can be a goth or a geek; a baller or a candy raver, --- or, WHATEVER.”

But honestly, who are they kidding? A skim of newspaper and magazine headlines reveals how the school is most often perceived. A 2003 CNN article headlines, “First public gay high school to open in New York City” and the BBC profiled the school in a 2004 feature entitled, “When most of your school is gay.” While the school may not be exclusively intended for the queer community, it seems likely that this is the population it most often attracts. Unfortunately, I was unable to interview students at Harvey Milk to verify my conclusions because of DOE regulations. Happily, at a summit held at Columbia, I found numerous students, both queer and straight, who are involved in LGBTQ activism and attend other local high schools. Their opinions regarding their peers at Harvey Milk varied widely. One voice in particular was highly critical of the school. “It's a total joke,” said Travis Ballie, a student at the private Beacon School, where he is head of the Gay-Straight Alliance and organizes the school's participation in the AIDS Walk. Ballie correctly pointed out that HMHS is only able to serve between one and two percent of queer students in New York's public schools, and accused Mayor Michael Bloomberg of using Harvey Milk as a crutch rather than supporting anti-bullying measures throughout the school system.

Others were more positive about Harvey Milk. “I think it's a great idea, personally,” said Diana Marin, a junior who is the founder and president of the GSA at the private Hewitt School. Most of my other interviewees, some of whom had never heard of Harvey Milk, generally agreed that it sounded like a good idea. “A lot of people do need a refuge,” said Sarah Hirsch, a junior at the public Ridge High School in New Jersey where she is a leader of the Club for Open Minds. “Going to school with all queer kids would be awesome.”

But even Hirsch raised caveats. While acknowledging that the idea of HMHS “is good in small doses,” she warned that the “sacrifice of a normal teen experience is too much,” especially since straight culture is so dominant. “Better the devil you know,” said Hirsch. Domenique Collins, a junior and a GSA member at the public Montgomery High School in New Jersey, was also ambivalent. “Not that it's a bad thing, but isn't it a sad thing that it exists?” she mused.

EMILY SETTON

Indeed, many of the students I interviewed took the position that though a sign of the bad times we live in, HMHS is necessary. As A.J. Wolbrum, a junior at the private Birchwathen Lenox High School, noted, the students at Harvey Milk “didn't choose to be outcasts.”

Virtually none of these students believed that HMHS was a viable long-term solution to the problems in the queer student community. The consensus was that the school system as a whole needs vast improvement. Collins agreed with Ballie that there needs to be city-wide funding for new programs that promote tolerance, while Wolbrum proposed a more radical solution: “Kids are so ignorant these days ... they don't know what 'fag' or 'diversity' means.” She proposed putting more queer authors into the students' reading lists. “If it's just there [in the curriculum] you can't control it” or tune it out, the way homophobic students can ignore assemblies or after-school programs.

Pragmatism ruled the day when I asked my high school interviewees what they thought about the philosophical problems of having the state pay to segregate queers from straights. Marin said that a queer school is no different from a women's school. Even Ballie admitted that HMHS does not quite practice discrimination.

Wolbrum argued that she didn't “think [segregation] was negative because there are [...] so many genres of schools, why shouldn't there be one for queer teens?” When I asked if Muslims, Hispanics, or other groups that are discriminated against should also have their own schools, she modified her view, suggesting that there should just be one school for particularly at-risk students. But either way, she added, “the fact that straight students can [attend] shows that they're not trying to segregate.” When I asked Wolbrum if she would ever consider attending Harvey Milk, she said no, since as a straight person, she would not feel comfortable there.

None of the others I interviewed said that they would be interested in going to Harvey Milk either, as they all feel reasonably safe in their own schools. Sure, Hirsch said that one of her queer friends was threatened with physical violence and that queer students regularly have donuts and water thrown at them. And, yeah, maybe Marin's and Collins's schools try to hush up any talk about GSAs and queer issues And although there are only five openly gay students at Ballie's school of more than 1,000, and even though he claims that “people say 'that's so gay' and can't handle that people at [his] school are gay,” he doesn't know of anyone who has been discriminated against physically.

I was horrified. What does it say about our educational system if a lack of physical abuse is considered safe and supportive enough by these high school students? Perhaps these students can get by, but many of their classmates probably feel unsafe knowing that both threats of abuse and actual donuts may be flung at them if they come out of the closet. I am willing to accept that Harvey Milk is legitimate as far as the expenditure of public funds goes, as long as it truly is a last resort for queer and straight victims of abuse. But I agree with Wolbrum, Ballie, and the others: HMHS is no panacea. The best thing that we can do for queer high school students is to improve the curriculum and environment in all of our schools. Unless we root out hate and homophobia at an early stage, and in all possible forms, can we ever expect an end to incidents like the one in East Campus, no matter how progressive we think our society may be?