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Though a few states, including California and Massachusetts, are thinking about statewide guidelines on how to discuss homosexuality in the classroom, most of the change is taking place at the city or county level. After a 1989 federal study showed that one-third of adolescents who kill themselves are young people struggling with their sexual orientation, school officials in Virginia's Fairfax County decided to expand their wide-ranging family-life education program. "We had a moral obligation to combat a devastating trend," says Gerald Newberry, coordinator of the county's family-life education programs. "We needed to communicate to our kids that people are different, and that we don't choose our sexual feelings -- they choose us."
Now Fairfax ninth-graders see a video called What If I'm Gay? Originally broadcast on network TV, it concerns three teenage boys who are friends, including one who is struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality. For , homework, students are encouraged to ask their parents what they would say if one of their children had a gay friend. In the human-sexuality course he teaches in Alexandria, Virginia, Larry Gaudreault concentrates on the accumulating evidence that sexual orientation may be in some measure biologically determined rather than a freely chosen "life-style." "We try to dispel the myth that homosexuality develops later in life as a result of one's environment," he says.
Fairfax permits parents to have their children excused from classes in which homosexuality is discussed, an option that school officials say only about 1.5% of parents exercise. Wayne Steward, 17, a gay senior, is convinced that such programs work toward eliminating prejudice. "When students don't understand what differences there may be ((among people))," he says, "they can let fear cloud their judgment."
In Seattle this year, the public health curriculum will include for the first time a two-lesson segment for juniors and seniors on sexual orientation. In lower grades, teachers and administrators are being trained to take seriously any incidents of antigay graffiti and name calling. "School buildings are not automatically going to be safe and comfortable places for kids unless adults take an active role in making them that way," says Pamela Hillard, coordinator for sexuality and HIV education for the Seattle public schools.
In the future the notion of the gay-positive classroom may go further, to examine the contributions that gay men and women have made. Arthur Lipkin, a Harvard University research associate, is developing a curriculum to help high school teachers incorporate information about gays into history, literature and psychology lessons. A series of lessons dealing with the history of gays over two centuries was recently tested among 10th-to-12th-grade social-studies classes in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The kids were riveted by the subject matter," reports Lipkin, "because they don't ordinarily see it discussed as a serious academic subject."