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What's left unsaid about sexuality and schools can be harmful, author says
Craig Chamberlain,
News Editor
217-333-2894, cdchambe@illinois.edu
10/25/04
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CHAMPAIGN, Ill.
— Sexuality is not an easy topic for discussion as it relates
to schools, but what is left unsaid can cause a lot of harm, says Cris
Mayo, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of
a new book.
Discussions about issues of sex and sexuality, even if potentially divisive,
are necessary to deal with discrimination against gay and lesbian students,
to show them compassion, and to practice the ideals of democracy, says
Mayo, author of “Disputing the Subject of Sex: Sexuality and Public
School Controversies” (Rowman & Littlefield).
“Sexuality
is increasingly addressed by public schools, but it is often addressed
in a way that marks sexual minorities as only quasi-legitimate members
of the school community,” she wrote in the introduction to the
book.
Schools continue to see “enormous rates of harassment and violence”
against sexual minority students, and their dropout rate is three times
that of heterosexuals, she said. Many schools are caught, often by law,
between trying to protect those students from harassment while also
barring discussion of gay and lesbian issues in the curriculum.
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The message is
“on the one hand, ‘You’re protected’; on the
other hand, ‘We must never speak of this again,’ ”
Mayo said. “We’re at a time in our culture where we’re
attempting to completely ignore people and claiming that that’s
respectful.”
Too many schools have conduct policies that call for students to be
respectful to all, but are not specific in naming gay, lesbian, transgender
and bisexual students, she said. “But in order to be respectful,
you have to be specific … without the naming of the specific protected
class, those students have no recourse whatsoever when they’re
harassed,” she said.
Mayo originally began her research by looking at the New York City school
system and its response to the spread of AIDS in the mid-1980s. She
speculated that the high rate of HIV infection among the city’s
adolescents had forced the schools to produce a model curriculum that
addressed sexuality, IV drug use and other related issues. “I
had hoped that the AIDS crisis would have begun a major overhaul in
the way schools looked at youth and sexual identity,” she said.
That was not the case, however. Mayo found that conservative voices
had stymied the changes she had hoped to find. “So I became interested
not so much in what the policy looked like as how the policy came to
be and how it was wrangled over.”
She explored controversies over sex, AIDS and gay-inclusive multicultural
education, looking at how communities, schools and sexuality have collided.
Her book uses case studies, interviews with students and analysis of
curricular materials to help readers understand how these educational
controversies play out and the power dynamics involved.
The central point
of her book, Mayo said, is that “sex and sexuality are not private
concerns, they are public policy concerns” when it comes to schools.
“Sexual minorities ought to be protected in a democracy in the
same ways that we have tried to protect other kinds of minority status,”
she said.
“I think the first key assumption has to be that there are gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in your community already.
You are not going to educate them out of existence, you are not going
to stop them from growing up, and you are not going to stop them from
being involved in your schools.
You need to recognize that, in fact, they are already there. And if
you understand that you’re not looking at an outsider you can
keep out, and you’re not looking at a deviant insider you can
change, then you have to accept the fact that people are there as rights-bearing
fellow citizens.”
