Health class, Harvey Milk School: a male student in drag is talking about his last experience with alcohol. "A drunken butch queen was getting on my case, criticizing me and acting flamboyant, so I pulled a knife on her." A gay youth interjects, "If you consider yourself a woman, you should act like a woman 24 hours a day." So the boy in drag appeals to the only avowed straight girl in the school: "In this situation, are you going to use your knife or not?" She says, "You best believe I'll be using my knife."
In most classrooms, such a conversation might be cause for suspension. At Harvey Milk, it is typical. This is a high school for gays, lesbians, cross- dressers and transsexuals. At other schools, their mere presence was often disruptive. Many of them were verbally abused by teachers and counselors, physically attacked by classmates, thrown out of their homes. Unsurprisingly, many dropped out. At Harvey Milk, they fit in.
A fully accredited public high school, Harvey Milk was the subject of a short-lived controversy when it began classes four years ago. It was founded by the Hetrick-Martin Institute for Lesbian and Gay Youth, a ten-year-old organization established following the brutal gang rape of a gay teenager in a New York City bar. The school is named after Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco supervisor who was murdered with Mayor George Moscone by a disgruntled former city official in 1978.
Critics charged that the school was using city funds to subsidize homosexuality. Officials replied that they were trying to provide an education for young people who might otherwise be denied one. The school does not seek to reinforce homosexuality, although it stresses the solidarity of minorities and the contributions of gay role models. Says A. Damien Martin, co-founder of the institute: "At first most help came from straight professionals, because the gay and lesbian community was afraid that if they reached out to the young they would be considered child molesters. The greatest fear of a gay person is that they will be considered a perverter of youth."
In some cases, letting students be themselves can mean letting them discover that they are straight. Says Martin: "Several young men in the school were molested by male relatives and thought they must be gay. It was apparent to us that these boys were heterosexual, but we had to let them find out for themselves."
Located in Greenwich Village, which has a large gay community, Harvey Milk has some things in common with a frontier school. It has two full-time teachers, Beth Bomze and Fred Goldhaber, and two classrooms for 40 students, only a handful of whom show up at the three-story waterfront building on a given day.