The Harvey Milk School

The Harvey Milk School

by Andy Humm

August 08, 2003

Gotham Gazette -
http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/civilrights/200308
05/3/484

A New York City high school for gay students is making
front-page news. The New York Post claimed an exclusive
on its front page July 28, trumpeting, "GAY HIGH: New
City School A First" about the Harvey Milk High School
that the paper said is "devoted exclusively to gay
kids." But the school, which is named after a member of
the San Francisco board of supervisors (its city
council) who was killed by a political rival, was
actually founded in 1985 as a Board of Education
program for clients of the Institute for the Protection
of Lesbian and Gay Youth (since renamed the Hetrick-
Martin Institute) It is the plan to expand the school
from 50 to 170 students and its reclassification as a
stand-alone high school that has attracted tabloid news
interest and attacks from conservatives.

But it is also receiving scrutiny from civil
libertarians, who frame the debate as a matter of civil
liberties - for the non-gay students that they fear
might be excluded from the school.

The debate comes at the same time that both the Pope
and the president have weighed in on same-sex marriage,
in an attempt to re-frame that debate from an issue of
civil rights for gay people to one they might call
moral rights for non-gay people: While "it’s very
important for our society to respect each individual,"
President Bush said, "on the other hand, that does not
mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on
issues such as marriage."

This is happening now because, thanks to recent events
such as the Supreme Court ruling overturning state
sodomy laws and the approval of an openly gay bishop in
the Episcopal church, gay rights is looking like an
increasingly accepted concept, and, thanks to changing
attitudes worldwide, gay marriage is looking like an
impending reality: Holland, Belgium, and parts of
Canada have already opened marriage to gay couples,
with Massachusetts expected to follow any day now by
court decree.

With so much gay news around, it was probably hard for
the Post to resist entering into the fray by claiming
an exclusive. But the Hetrick-Martin Institute sent out
a press release about the expansion of the Harvey Milk
school way back in June 2002 after the Board of
Education approved the $3.2 million necessary to
renovate the space for the school and fund its
operations. Since then, reporters have covered these
plans on occasion, including me.

I actually worked for Hetrick-Martin myself from 1986
to 1995 as its director of education. The institute was
one of the first agencies anywhere to recognize that
HIV, with what we learned had an incubation period of
about a decade, was a major threat to teenagers who
could pick up the virus without developing symptoms
until well into their 20s. Much of my job was to go
out into mainstream schools educating young people and
youth service providers about AIDS, but I also
sometimes educated students from Harvey Milk.

The Harvey Milk High School program started under a
Board of Education policy of making an onsite teacher
available to any social service agency that had 20 or
more young people who were not attending school. So,
the board didn’t vote to create a "gay school," it just
did not discriminate against an agency whose clients
were mostly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered -
many of whom had been harassed and hounded into
dropping out of school.

As much as the place made news from the beginning, with
news camera crews chasing students down the block after
school, so also from the beginning, a civil rights
argument was used against it. Many educators, including
United Federation of Teachers President Sandy Feldman,
expressed reservations about what looked like a
segregated learning environment. (She has since come
around to seeing the need for the school.) Norman
Siegel, then director of the New York Civil Liberties
Union, was ready to try to stop the program from going
forward on civil liberties grounds, but was dissuaded
from doing so.

"I was told that it was for kids who had dropped out
and that the program would help reintegrate them into
mainstream schools," Siegel says.

Almost two decades later, Siegel, who is now director
of the Freedom Legal Defense and Education Project ,
says that almost never happened, and he believes the
school should be investigated for possible violations
of the law, including a 2002 state law banning
discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. "If
the parent of a non-gay student is turned down for the
school, I would bring a complaint," he says. (There
have in fact been non-gay students in the school,
including a girl whose mother was lesbian; the girl had
been subject to harassment in her previous school.)
Siegel has a strong record of support for lesbian and
gay rights, but says that when gay students are being
bullied, "don’t take the victim out of the school, take
the bully out.

"We seem to be throwing in the towel on integration, on
the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education,"
Siegel says. "The United States Supreme Court said
that separate is inherently unequal. Schools that are
all-black, all-female, or all-gay/lesbian offend that
doctrine."

He is not alone in holding these views. "The city
should never suggest that the solution to problems of
discrimination and persecution of students who are
perceived as different is to segregate them from the
rest of the population," the New York Times wrote in a
recent editorial about the Harvey Milk School. "The
needs of gay teenagers can best be served by making
sure that they, like all New York students, are able to
attend regular public high schools in safety, free from
bullying." In an Op-Ed in the same newspaper, a gay
student also argued for mainstreaming, citing his own
experiences.

Much the same arguments were used by the National
Organization for Women against a school segregated by
gender. In response to the establishment of an all-
girls public school in East Harlem in 1997, NOW-New
York City president Anne Conners said at the time,
"While it’s true that girls are discriminated against
in school, this is a Band-Aid approach to educational
equity. What we need is systemic change and the
establishment of sex equity in all schools through such
practical measures as increased funding for girls’
sports and improved, mandatory teacher training."

There are several levels of irony in this debate, one
of which is that it allows long-time opponents of gay
rights to couch their arguments as one of compassion or
civil liberties. For example, State Senator Ruben Diaz
has also threatened legal action against the Harvey
Milk School. "Instead of separating homosexual
students," he told the Post, "schools should teach
tolerance." Some may suspect Diaz’s devotion to
tolerance, since he once tried to block the Gay Games
sports festival from taking place in New York because,
he said, it might cause the spread of AIDS.

More ironic still: For all those years that Harvey Milk
was a one-room schoolhouse helping a handful of
students to complete their high school education, the
Hetrick-Martin Institute was also part of the Education
Coalition on Lesbian and Gay Youth, which was lobbying
the school chancellor and Board of Education to make
mainstream schools safe for lesbian and gay students.
While chancellors from Nathan Quinones to Harold Levy
agreed to limited staff training (mostly for guidance
counselors), each resisted the kind of programming
instituted by school systems in Los Angeles and San
Francisco where each school designates a point person
on gay issues who conducts training and is available to
resolve conflicts.

Chancellor Joseph Fernandez was famous for pushing
through an explicit HIV/AIDS education program in 1991,
complete with condom availability (a program that has
not been repealed but often goes unimplemented) and for
trying to discipline School District 24 in Queens for
resolutely refusing even to mention gay issues despite
the mandates of the board’s policy on multicultural
education, which then included sexual orientation as a
category. (The Board of Education later rescinded this
at the behest of Mayor Rudy Giuliani). The myth at the
time was that Fernandez was forcing schools to use the
controversial second grade teacher guide, "Children of
the Rainbow," which included a section on families
headed by gay or lesbian parents among other family
constellations. Fernandez in fact had only insisted
that each district in its own way comply with policy by
dealing with gay issues in some form by the sixth
grade. The misunderstandings about Fernandez’s
position, fueled by the tabloid press, contributed to
the board’s refusal to renew his contract in 1993.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg is defending the Harvey Milk
School, saying at a news conference on July 28, "Some
of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been
constantly harassed and beaten in other schools,"
insisting that the school "sort of solves that problem.
It gets them an education without having to worry."

But even with an expansion of Harvey Milk to 100 and
later 170 students, it is clear that, in a system with
more than a million students, most lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender youth will remain in
mainstream schools. Debra Smock, administrator of the
Harvey Milk School, said, "In a perfect world, there
wouldn’t be a need for Harvey Milk School." But the
question is whether this school will be used as an
excuse to abandon efforts to change the anti-gay
atmosphere in the vast majority of mainstream schools.

There is school anti-bullying legislation still pending
in Albany and in City Hall, described in my civil
rights column in May. But these are just the kinds of
moves opposed by the most vigorous opponents of the
Harvey Milk School.

Some school systems elsewhere, including in small
Midwestern towns, have instituted programming for gay
students in response to successful civil rights
lawsuits brought by gay young people who were
repeatedly harassed and beaten in school while the
administration looked the other way. No such lawsuit
has been brought in New York, but that is what it might
take to get the Department of Education to do more than
create the safety valve of a Harvey Milk School.

Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on
Human Rights, and co-host of the weekly "Gay USA" on
Manhattan Neighborhood Network (34 on Time-Warner; 107
on RCN) on Thursdays at 11 PM.