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rfmcdonaldThis piece by Xtra!'s Natasha Barsotti isn't surprising, sadly. I don't remember being bullied when I was in high school in the late 1990s on Prince Edward Island, but I equally don't remember anything remotely queer-supportive--youth programs, anti-bullying initiatives, even recognition in class materials--being voiced there. I was lucky, I suppose.
When Susan Rose brought her anti-homophobia workshop to Newfoundland’s northern peninsula last May, she was greeted by a guidance counsellor who told her the area had no gay and lesbian students.
It didn’t take her long to figure out why. Homophobic slurs peppered the hallways and classrooms and one student put his finger down his throat when Rose asked if the slurs were generally uttered in anger.
“Wow, if I were gay or lesbian here, I certainly wouldn’t come out,” Rose said, with a glance at the guidance counsellor.
“I guess I was really ignorant, wasn’t I?” the counsellor said to Rose afterwards.
Rose encountered another nervous guidance counsellor on Newfoundland’s west coast. This one was pacing back and forth in the school library, worried that he wasn’t going to be able to deal with the fallout of Rose’s Making Queerness Visible workshop.
“He said, ‘Not that I don’t want your presentation here. It’s here and we’ll deal with it, but I’m just so nervous about tonight.’
“He said, ‘You’re opening up a door. You’re talking about homosexuals. You know as well as I do, I’m going to have dozens of kids going home tonight saying they’re queer[.]’”
[. . .]
According to a national survey conducted in 2007 by the queer lobby group Egale Canada, 75 percent of queer students feel unsafe at school, and one in four said they were physically harassed for being gay.
Six out of 10 queer students surveyed also reported being verbally harassed for their sexual orientation, while half said they hear homophobic slurs on a daily basis.
“That type of information is essential because that gives us a reflection of what the reality of our children’s lives in schools are,” says Chambers Picard, who sits on Egale’s Safe Schools Initiative committee.
