Silence is part of speaking up

People joke these days that the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name has become The Love That Won’t Shut Up.

Gay and lesbian Americans and their allies are finally making themselves heard. Even in some high schools.

It wasn’t always this way. I first joined the gay youth movement back in 1989, when I helped establish Oasis, a Tacoma support group for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youths. Only one of our 150 members was “out” at school, and he was receiving death threats.

I knew of no openly gay teachers or administrators. But even then, the teenagers I worked with yearned to be open and honest about who they were. Heterosexuals often ask me why gay teenagers would want to talk about their sexuality in the first place. “Their wanting to talk about sex is just another form of rebellion, right?”

But being openly gay doesn’t mean rebellion, and it isn’t talking about sex. It just means no longer maintaining the elaborate ruse of pretending to be straight.

I always ask heterosexuals to imagine their teen years if they had had to hide the fact that they were straight. That means no talking about which pop star you thought was cute and definitely no idealized night at the prom. You might have had to date someone you’re not emotionally attracted to, even becoming sexually active in order to keep your lie intact.

In other words, being a closeted gay or lesbian teenager means being silent. And for someone who is itching to forge a self-identity, as all teenagers are, this is a very frustrating way to live.

In 1996 some gay and straight students at the University of Virginia created the Day of Silence—going a whole school day without speaking—to protest the silence of most gay students and teachers and the fact that most school curriculums ignored the contributions of gays and lesbians in history and literature.

Since then, the protest has mushroomed. This year, on Wednesday [April 26], an estimated 500,000 gay and straight students from at least 4,000 schools, some in the Tacoma area, will participate in what is now called the National Day of Silence. In the history of the civil rights movement there have been few protests this dignified and this exactly appropriate.