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.
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."
