Soon after the Center on Halsted opened in 2007, Rick Garcia, whose office overlooks Halsted Street, began to notice something troubling.
The Center, near downtown Chicago, is perhaps the Midwest’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community center. “All of sudden,” says Garcia, political director for the LGBT advocacy group Equality Illinois, “the street was inundated with kids — kids who’d been abandoned by their families, who had nowhere else to go. All I could think was, ‘Why aren’t these babies in school?’”
Chicago’s public school system had a problem. LGBT students were three times more likely than straight peers to miss school because of threats to their safety, according to a 2003 districtwide survey; and students who faced regular harassment were more likely to drop out. For these kids, schools were failing.
In fall 2008, Chicago officials took a drastic step. They proposed a “gay-friendly” high school where students of all sexual orientations could learn in bully-free classrooms where a safe and welcoming environment was the norm.
Some gay-rights advocates — including Garcia — publicly questioned whether the district’s plan to protect LGBT students only worked, in reality, to segregate them.
“If we create ‘Homo High,’ we don’t have to prohibit this behavior in other schools,” Garcia said recently, recounting his opposition. “The reality is, we have to live as neighbors. We have to learn to tolerate one another, if not accept one another. All our kids should be safe in all our schools; segregation is not the answer.”
Officials eventually withdrew the proposal. If it had passed, the new campus would have opened this September, becoming one of only a handful of LGBT-friendly public high schools in the United States.
Anti-gay backlash played a large role in the opposition to Chicago’s proposed Pride Campus. Two other LGBT-friendly schools — New York City’s Harvey Milk High School and The Alliance School in Milwaukee — have also sparked ire from social conservatives.
But these schools can also be troublesome for those who want LGBT kids to learn and live free from harm. For some gay-rights advocates, LGBT-oriented schools smack of “separate but equal.”
Others believe LGBT-friendly schools offer a refuge and a blueprint — a chance to reach kids whose lives, sometimes literally, are at risk.
“Across the country, folks who support gay rights are starting to think about these issues,” says David Stovall, an associate professor of educational policy studies and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“In popular culture we’ve seen a shift toward more widespread acceptance of LGBTQ spaces,” Stovall says. “Now we’re at the point where people are asking, should the focus be on taking care of our own concerns, or should we be pushing for a more integrated model?”
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