Gay–straight alliance

So...

And I was in like programs that were all about, you know, like the Gay Straight Alliance.

And I had people to like tell me what being gay is and that being gay is OK. You're not immediately going to hell because you're gay.

And when I found that out, I was like, OK, maybe I can tell my parents and we'll just see what happens.

Um, so this was, you know, being called the F slur, you know, I remember a classmate of mine threatened to kill me in eighth grade.

Um, and then I transferred schools in ninth grade and I joined the, you know, the gay straight Alliance club, which, you know, I expected to be a place to kind of get some support for, for being bullied in this way.

But what I found there instead was basically this group of older girls calling themselves queer or asexual or pansexual and all these words I hadn't heard before.

And like the regular activity in this club was watching YouTube videos by transgender YouTubers.

So what – the tomboy class in schools, how would that work? What would you hope to achieve by that?

Well, it would be like a club, just like the chess club or the Gay-Straight Alliance, that when kids are not necessarily fitting into the role that they are supposed to accept… it would give confidence to girls who are adventurous, who like mechanics, who like to work on cars, who are into sports.

I think what I was surprised a little bit when the comments started coming in about the tomboy club was that women all over the spectrum just started coming out of the woodwork saying, I was a tomboy, and these are older married ladies.

And so these are about age-appropriate issues.

And one of the outside speakers at the conference was Steve Wilkins.

In the meantime, some of our NSA students were doing some evangelistic outreach at the University of Idaho and and had started attending the Gay Straight Alliance.

They were not being disruptive, wanted to befriend the students there, and so forth.

Some of the students there were cool with it, but others were furious.

People were really freaking out about, and again, gay men, not much about lesbians, except maybe in family law where the husbands or the fathers of the children, if they had them together, wanted to be sole custody parent and find them unworthy, right? That they weren't a good custodial parent.

Of course, there were the GSAs, right? The Gay-Straight Alliances that were in the high schools all around the country.

And there had to be a teacher or administrator who was sort of the formal leader of the group.

But I think that that happened in such a way that it didn't really make the national news.

I would like to say that I had all these ideals and whatever, but I was really just a teenager and I didn't know shit.

But the reason I was in the Gay-Straight Alliance was because I didn't like people being bullied.

It was as simple as that.

It's just I thought it was...

Yeah.

So like our saga group, our Gay Straight Alliance is always like, can we borrow that? And I'm like, yeah, man, go for it.

But the faculty liked it too.

Like they really enjoyed it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I should have known it was going to happen because I was leading the Gay Straight Alliance at my college and they asked to write a story about the organization and I wasn't out, right? Like I was out to myself.

I was out to some friends.

I was at a time where it was like no labels, right? Like my mom would keep asking me like, are you gay? And I was like, mom, don't label me.

really good history classes, which like, you know, set me up, um, uh, really good art department with a fantastic teacher.

And I helped to found their first gay straight Alliance, which is what we called it then.

Right.

And I'm not sure what we call it now.