DOS Report from Participants #2

From the GSA Talk Listserve:

I am a student at [school name] High School in [city] Wisconsin. Just a freshman trying to get through my first year of high school, which is really hard when you show you support gay pride everyday. There was no school today, so instead of my school doing it today on the specified day, we did it on Wed., our last day of school for this week. Multiple students and I are participating today as well. There were no stickers or shirts or anything like that. It was just the speaking cards that our library had let us copy in school and the message written on our hands.

We were silent the whole day, and at some point our vice principal told us we weren't allowed to because we are a protestant school and don't believe in homosexuality. But we didn't stop. All of us kept on going throughout the whole day. We showed the cards to our teachers, handed them out at school. The response was amazing. There are about 750 Kids in our school. All of us together got at least 150 to take part, mostly freshmen and sophomores. The teachers were very understanding, and proud that we were sticking up for something that we believed in. One of my close friends, who just got outed that he was bisexual, Wore as many gay pride items that he could. I made necklaces for my group, we got rainbow ribbon and wore it all day. The respose in our little protestant school where they teach that being a homosexual is wrong was amazing. There were a lot of people that thought we were crazy, but we kept on going.

I got one of the most anti homosexual kids in my school to take part after explaining this all. In turn that got many more to help out. At the end of the day, everyone was smiling, communicating between notebooks if it was vital and everything else. I have never been more proud of my school. Everyone who had participated had found something rainbow to wear, or had asked someone to draw a rainbow on them. There were a lot of tears to share that day. I had a piece of paper on my shirt that had a list of all of the people my group knew that had die of hate crimes, and everyone felt it. One of which was one of my best friends that died not to long before this for being openly gay. It was an amazing day, and everyone understood.

Thank you for uniting a school. Thank you for helping people understand. I am now the freshman who made a difference.

L.M.