Sue Hyde and Lisa Keen on GLBT Youth's Legal Rights

Just as most publishing houses are cutting back on titles geared toward an LGBT audience, Boston-based Beacon Press is doing just the opposite. This June, Beacon launched a new series titled Queer Action/Queer Ideas. Edited by Michael Bronski, author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle For Gay Freedom, the series aims to bring books to LGBT readers that deal with serious topics in accessible language (read: not academic).

The first two books in the series deal with political organizing and legal rights for LGBT youth. Both succeed in getting their messages across. In Come Out and Win: Organizing Yourself, Your Community, and Your World, longtime political activist Sue Hyde offers not just a how-to on political organizing, but an informative, easily digestible history of the LGBT movement. Her advice ranges from the simple (don't forget to bring cookies to your political meetings) to the detailed (a step-by-step guide for student organizers responding to a hate crime on campus). Hyde, who has worked for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force since 1986 (first as the director of NGLTF's project to repeal sodomy laws and, since 1994, as director of the Creating Change conference), has attended more political organizing meetings than most - and it shows. She smartly brings readers along the spectrum of the LGBT movement. First, she makes the case for activism. Then she takes us through the "assimilationist versus the radical" battles of the 1990s. She ends with a stirring cry for the right to be public about - what else? - our sexuality. In true organizer fashion, she ends each chapter with a to-do list for further action.

Lisa Keen's Out Law: What LGBT Youth Should Know about Their Legal Rights is an often-times startling look at the attacks currently being launched against LGBT youth by right-wing activists. Keen, an award-winning journalist and co-author, with Suzanne Goldberg, of Strangers To The Law: Gay People On Trial, dissects the legal landscape for openly LGBT youth, shining a light on the many ways in which the law alternately protects LGBT youth and the many ways it doesn't. More importantly, Keen makes clear that much of the legal wrangling stems from the failure of adults in positions of authority to respond to the unique needs of LGBT youth either willfully or out of ignorance, sometimes with tragic results. As Bronski bluntly states in an editor's note at the start of the book, "Historically young people have been told that they will be protected by their families, their elders, and their government. This happens far less than it should, and so it is imperative that young LGBT people learn to take care of themselves." Whether you're taking your first steps out of the closet or girding for battle with your principal about starting a gay/straight alliance, Out Law is a handy guide for LGBT youth.

Bay Windows editor Susan Ryan-Vollmar recently spoke with both authors.

Q: I was surprised by all of the history you packed into this book. I was expecting a how-to for students or folks in rural areas on forming political groups. It made me wonder who you had in mind as your audience as you wrote the book.

A: Michael [Bronski] started talking to me about the need for a book that gave someone who maybe did not know much about the LGBT movement the necessary background to [get involved]. This is what he said to me, he said, 'You know I teach at Dartmouth, and those kids aren't dumb. But what I find is that they know almost nothing about the history of the LGBT movement. So to have a conversation in which I reference Stonewall leaves them all with blank looks on their faces because they don't know anything about it. And if I want to talk with them about what's happening right now for LGBT people in a political framework or cultural framework, they don't have the reference points to follow my thinking, and besides which they don't know the first thing about organizing.' So he helped me frame the book so it would be both interesting and historically informative.

Q: One thing I found interesting was how you handled the conflict that came to a head in the 1990s over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" between assimilationists and more lefty reformers. I thought you were diplomatic in making the case for both types of activism.
A: What was really helpful for me was to have the opportunity to step back from the daily work of political organizing to just reflect on what the mission of our movement is. I'm talking about our movement - not any particular organization. And the overall mission for our movement is to end oppression based on sexual orientation and gender identity wherever it happens, whenever it happens and to whomever it happens.
So when we come into conflict within our movement about whether a particular aspect of oppression based on sexual orientation or gender identity is deserving of our time and attention, when we come to those points of conflict, we need to stop. We have to remember and think back to Harry Hay [founder of the Mattachine Society in the 1950s] and to Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon [founders of Daughters of Bilities in the same time period], who dared to speak at a time when [so few did]. We need to think back to what they were trying to do. They were trying to end oppression.

Now it's 2007. We have enjoyed great gains. We've enjoyed this proliferation of community organizations and community institutions, and now this goes to the organizational question. Certain organizations will key in on how to end the oppression based on sexuality and gender identity. But one of the points I was trying to make in the book is that we can argue with each other until we are blue in the face over specific kinds of strategies and tactics - but we should never, ever pretend that anybody's work to end oppression is not worthy. Every single instance is deserving of our attention, our interest and our energies.

Q: What would you say to someone who looked at all of the gains that have been made since Stonewall - here in Massachusetts, of course, we can get married - and concluded that there just isn't as urgent a need for activism around LGBT issues as there once was?
A: Well, some young transwoman just got beat up in Lowell - that's why we need activism. Because my kid got harassed on the playground the other day because he has lesbian moms. We have made great gains with the political elite in the state of Massachusetts. And that has resulted in wonderful changes at what I would call the top level of thinking about LGBT people and LGBT lives. And the filtering down of that thinking can be seen in how the marriage question is being answered differently in 2007 than it would have been in 2002. We've come a very long way. But even in Massachusetts, which I think is the best state in the country for queer folk to be living and working and learning and raising kids, even in Massachusetts, we have unfulfilled promises to our people.

We need to be politically active just by being out and open in our daily lives. We need to bring it down to the neighborhood. We need to bring it down to the school where our kids go. Talking to parents at school. Talking to our neighbors. Talking to the woman we see every week at the grocery store who rings up our order. We need to bring it to a much more personal level. Tip O'Neil said of politics, "It's all local." The women's movement said of politics, "It's all personal." And we need to make it personal and local. And then I think we will get much closer to the moment where we could, with truthfulness, say we've really done a good job here in Massachusetts. That we've accomplished not only what we wanted to accomplish in terms of reforming laws and making it a safer place for people to live on the macro level, but that we've created change on the micro level as well. This is about changing one person at time, one mind at a time.

Out Law: What LGBT Youth Should Know about Their Legal Rights by Lisa Keen
Interview by Laura Kiritsy

Q: You've been reporting on LGBT legal issues for many years, but how did you wind up writing a book geared toward young people?
A: Michael Bronski gets the credit for that. He came up with the idea for a book that focused on issues that affected youth. I'd been reporting on gay issues forever, I had heard of this story and that story but I hadn't really delved into youth issues and it was quite a rude awakening for me. I'm serious, it was quite a rude awakening at how much gay youth are on the front lines on so many things. I don't know if it's because the right wing thinks, "Hey we've got a vulnerable group here. Let's get the most vulnerable of them all. Let's go after the young people who are gay because maybe they don't have the savvy, they don't have the resources, they can't get the attorneys, they don't know what their rights are." So some of these fights are taking place in schools and over T-shirts and things like that. And what I also found, to my awe, is that a lot of young LGBT people know - I mean, they're ready to fight. They aren't going to take it. And when you tell somebody that they can't wear a T-shirt that says, "I'm gay and I'm proud," they fight it. And I think that's wonderful. Back when I was in high school I would never have fought it. Frankly, I never would have worn the T-shirt when I was in high school. We've come a long, long way.

Q: On one hand it's great that there's a visible audience for the book - LGBT youth - but on the other hand, it's troubling that any kid needs a handbook of their legal rights. Is now a good time or bad time to be an openly gay young person?
A: Well, it's the best of times. But it's not Easy Street. It's a lot easier to be gay today than it was when I was a kid. But it's real different. There are many, many battles that arise out of being openly gay. Maybe the early part of our movement made it possible for young people to be openly gay but it didn't clear all the obstacles, it didn't clear all the landmines that exist for young people who have the courage to be openly gay and who have better environments in which to be openly gay. Young people are fighting different battles than we fought 20 or 30 years ago. Take this group, I think it's in Minnesota, that wanted to form a gay/straight alliance and the school wouldn't let them. Now, there's a federal law that enables them to do it. But [opponents] were so clever, what they did - this is another tactic of the right wing going after the youth, which is a despicable tactic - they said anyone who joined a group in high school, their parents would be notified of what groups they joined. So that, of course, would discourage someone who's just trying to figure out, "Am I gay?" and going to a gay/straight alliance. Or maybe someone who knows his parents don't want them to be gay it's going to be an obstacle for them, it's going to be a very serious obstacle. So what this group did, which is just so brilliant, is they changed the name of the organization to the Human Rights Group and they said the purpose of the group was to encourage discussion and enlightenment of the human rights of all people. I think it was brilliant. So sometimes we can be so brilliant and not have to know the law but a lot of times we really need to know the law. We really need to know when to say, "Oh, yes I can," and when to go for help. That's very important.

Q: The idea of not wanting to let students start a gay/straight alliance or even wear a pro-gay T-shirt screams to me that educators have some sort of fundamental fear of openly LGBT youth. What's going on here?
A: A couple of things: One is that I hesitate to say it's LGBT youth versus educators. Because so many teachers and librarians - you know, people who are in schools and in the environments where young people need to grow and learn - are wonderful people. There are so many wonderful people who want to give kids the room and information they need to grow up to be who they are and who they want to be. But there are too often people who are in positions of authority - sometimes they are in positions of authority at school, sometimes they're police officers [or] people who are charged with providing medical service or whatever. They're just in different places where they are trying to create obstacles for gay people to be open about who they are, to explore who they are. And that's where we absolutely need to make sure that young people have knowledge of what they have a right to do and what they have a right to see.

Q: What do you think is the most pressing legal issue that needs to be addressed in order to keep LGBT youth safe and healthy?
A: I would say that it's the right to privacy. We have it, but there is - especially for young people - a lack of knowledge that they have a right to keep private information that's so private as sexual orientation [or] that they have decided their sexual orientation or the fact that they are exploring their sexuality - things like that. And there are so many ways and places in which that information ... has such power over a young person. If you're openly gay, you already know ... you're gay, you're very comfortable being open about it because you're in an environment that's accepting, then you're fine. But if you are a young person either who doesn't know if you're gay or if you know you're gay but your environment is not accepting, or maybe your environment is accepting at home [and] maybe it's not in school [or] maybe it's not in your community, then the information about you being gay or say, going to the library and trying to look up a book - maybe trying to look up this book - to explore information you need to understand yourself - that information, if it gets out without your control, can be devastating to you. The most dramatic example I found to illustrate just how devastating it is was Marcus Wayman. One bigoted, hateful police officer decided he was going to get back at this kid. ... And I imagine he was going to get back at him because Marcus was quite an impressive young man. He was doing very well. He was popular, he was on the football team. Maybe this police officer who sort of never really measured up thought he'd cut Marcus down, and the way he did it was to threaten to tell his grandfather Marcus was gay. It was devastating to him. Devastating. So devastating he went home and killed himself. And you know what? Nobody knows if Marcus was gay. Not even his mother. And his mother filed a lawsuit that ultimately, the Fourth Circuit [Court] ruling said, "Yes, you have the right to control intimate information about yourself and the police officer violated that right." And maybe if Marcus had known it, maybe he could have told the police officer, "Hey buddy you're out of bounds here, that's illegal." Maybe not. But Marcus didn't even have the option of trying to protect himself in that way. He felt totally, totally vulnerable. And kids are not comfortable feeling vulnerable. Sometimes it takes a little searching to find the law that protects you against people who have power and abuse it but in most cases there is law to protect you.

Q: Beyond young people, who else needs to read this book?
A: Parents. Even though some of the material [isn't new] - obviously adults know they have a First Amendment right - there's an awful lot of arenas in which parents may not know the First Amendment rights of a student can be abridged to some extent in a school setting. It's complicated - a kid can wear a shirt that says "I'm gay and I'm proud," unless that kid is going to a school in which the wearing of that shirt really could trigger a disruption. And there are schools like that in this country, where hostility towards gay people is so great that just wearing a gay pride T-shirt could trigger a fight. Now, in those instances school authorities have the right to tell you can't wear that shirt. And they also have a right to tell someone [wearing] a "Faggots should be dead" shirt ... not to wear that shirt too, for the same reason. So I think there are some things that adults who care about LGBT youth can learn from the book.

Special Event! : Sue Hyde and Lisa Keen will talk about the issues raised in their books, Come Out and Win: Organizing Yourself, Your Community, and Your World and Out Law: What LGBT Youth Should Know about Their Legal Rights, respectively, at 6 p.m. on June 19 in the Rabb Auditorium of the Boston Public Library, 700 Boylston St. They will be joined by a panel of local LGBT leaders and activists including Lee Swislow, executive director of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders; Diego Sanchez from AIDS Action Committee; Aliza Shapiro from Truth Serum Productions; Jeremy P. Hayes from Suffolk University; and Aydan Rodriguez from BAGLY.