Homophobia in my school

Some of the regulars here may remember an experiment I did in school last year: I kept a notecard with me throughout the day, and every time someone made a verbal statement that used "gay", "queer", "fag", or other such words as insults, I made a note of it. By the end of the day, I had a record of the number of times homophobic comments were made during that day. I kept it up for a week at a time, but I never really did anything with the results except posted them here. If you know anything about where I live, pro-gay petitions and projects and support of any kind are shot down immediately.

Well, I decided to repeat this experiment this year - a new group of students, the new ninth graders, would mean slightly different results. Below is a list of the number of times those words were used each day:

Monday: 14
In comparison, this was a slow day. I guess everyone was too tired to trash us homos.

Tuesday: 46
In all the days I've been doing this, I've never gotten a number higher than 40. 46 is ridiculous. A lot of the instances came from a group of people who kept trying to outdo each other with insults, among them being "queer", "faggot", "c*cksucker", and plenty of other colorful words. The highest number I've ever gotten. 46.

Wednesday: 22
Nothing really interesting happened here either. Just the usual bigotry.

Thursday: 39
Here, a group of people at lunch started naming the people, places, teachers, assignments, stores, movies, songs, etc. they thought were "gaaaay". I just kept ticking away with my pen.

Friday: 10
In contrast to Tuesday, this is the lowest number I've ever gotten. It's still too high, but no particular person or group said more than one offensive comment towards LGBT people. It was a relief, but it was also a little surprising.


Anyway, I just thought some people would be interested to see what my school is like in regards to attitudes about gay people. Comment any way you want. Thoughts, opinions, angry rants, whatever you feel like.

 

@amyleona and biisme: Sure. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this, so feel free to try it at your own schools. My own doesn't even have a GSA, the Baaahhh-ble wouldn't approve of it, but I think it would be a great idea to bring this up at one.

@jazzrawr: From the ones I counted, most of them were guys, but I remember a girl coming up with the incredibly clever "gaytarded" one day this week. High school kids.

 

I'm not sure you know what kind of place I live in; if I somehow managed to get this into the school newspaper without outing myself to the entire school, nothing would come about it. Unlike some people, these kids really don't care. I told one of them, individually, that one day they were going to say something like that to a person who really was gay and may hurt themselves because of it. There response was little more than 'Good, one less homo'. I mean, if you have suggestions I'd love to hear them, but I would prefer my nice, roomy walk-in closet to schoolwide outing and torment for something that would probably never get off the ground anyway.

 

No, I didn't specify what type of insult was being made when I marked it down, but in the whole week I think I heard maybe one or two "dyke"s getting tossed around. The attitude of the hetero males in my area is usually "Eww, don't get close to me, you queer...but lesbians are hot! Mmmm!". One person mentioned how a teacher at a school they used to go to is a lesbian, but nothing offensive was said, so I didn't count that.