Read and write
WTF IS THIS
document_3.pdf
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=htip20
Download by: [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] Date: 15 August 2016, At: 08:35
Theory Into Practice
ISSN: 0040-5841 (Print) 1543-0421 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/htip20
Voices of Queer Youth in Urban Schools: Possibilities and Limitations
Mollie V. Blackburn & Lance T. McCready
To cite this article: Mollie V. Blackburn & Lance T. McCready (2009) Voices of Queer Youth in Urban Schools: Possibilities and Limitations, Theory Into Practice, 48:3, 222-230, DOI: 10.1080/00405840902997485
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00405840902997485
Published online: 07 Jul 2009.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 736
View related articles
Citing articles: 20 View citing articles
Theory Into Practice, 48:222–230, 2009
Copyright © The College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University
ISSN: 0040-5841 print/1543-0421 online
DOI: 10.1080/00405840902997485
Mollie V. Blackburn Lance T. McCready
Voices of Queer Youth in Urban Schools: Possibilities and Limitations
This article reviews scholarship that represents
urban students who self-identify as lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning. It
draws on empirical examples to illustrate promi-
nent themes across this scholarship, including the
homophobia they experience, the impact it has on
their academic performance, and the activism it
sparks. Finally, it considers implications for ur-
ban educators working with queer youth, specifi-
cally, the need to understand and be prepared to
address multiple social and cultural issues that
intersect with sexual and gender identities.
Mollie V. Blackburn is an associate professor of educa-
tion at The Ohio State University; Lance T. McCready
is an assistant professor at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education, University of Toronto.
Correspondence should be addressed to Mollie V.
Blackburn, Teaching and Learning, The Ohio State
University; 200 Ramseyer Hall, 29 W. Woodruff Ave.,
Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: [email protected]
U RBAN COMMUNITIES AND SCHOOLS are
home to a wide array of social and support
services by and for queer youth in and out of
school. For example, there is San Francisco’s
Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Cen-
ter (LYRIC; Consolacion, 2001) and The Attic
Youth Center in Philadelphia (Blackburn, 2004),
among many other community-based organiza-
tions beyond school walls. Some services are of-
fered at schools, but outside of official curricula,
such as Los Angeles’ Project 10 (Uribe, 1995)
and gay-straight alliances (GSAs) across North
America (Lee, 2002). Many of these GSAs are
housed in metropolitan-area secondary schools.
Moreover, many cities, like Toronto, for ex-
ample, have large GSA networks that include
multiple high school programs. In addition, there
is evidence of teachers’ and administrators’ ef-
forts to combat heterosexism and homophobia in
their classrooms, schools, and districts (Cohen &
Chasnoff, 1997); there is even the Harvey Milk
School in New York City and the Triangle Pro-
222
Blackburn and McCready Voices of Queer Youth in Urban Schools
gram in Toronto, which are designed specifically
to provide a safe and supportive academic envi-
ronment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
and questioning (LGBTQ) youth (http://www.
hmi.org/). The Milwaukee Public School System
has approved, unanimously, the nation’s first
gay-friendly middle school (US News & World
Report, 2008). Given these services, one might
assume that urban communities and schools are
meeting the needs of queer youth, especially in
comparison to suburban and rural locales. In
fact, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education
Network’s (GLSEN) most recent national school
climate survey (Kosciw, Diaz, & Greytak, 2008)
has suggested that “students in small town and
rural schools were less likely to have access to
LGBT-related resources and supports than stu-
dents in urban and suburban schools” (p. 94). The
voices of queer urban youth, however, suggest a
more complicated story.
We turn to scholarship that captures youth
voices from San Francisco and the Bay Area
of California, the New York metropolitan area,
Atlanta, Memphis, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia,
Chicago, and an unnamed Midwestern city to il-
lustrate this point. We pull together diverse voices
talking about their experiences in these cities
across time, albeit almost exclusively within
the 21st century, to address the prominent is-
sues of homophobia, academic performance, and
activism that we discovered in our review of
scholarship. We draw primarily on qualitative
work out of respect for research methods that
accomplish particular work in the world, work
that is the articulated mission of this issue,
because qualitative methods are most effective at
capturing and making sense of people’s unique
accounts, voices, and perspectives. No other kind
of research does this more powerfully. There are
places, however, in our review, where we draw
on quantitative studies. These are included in an
effort to contextualize the qualitative accounts.
There are other places where we reference jour-
nalistic texts. We recognize these as nonscholarly,
but believe they make a significant contribution
to our understanding of LGBTQ students in
schools in cities, because they accomplish what
most scholarship on LGBTQ students does not:
centering sexual identity and gender expression
alongside, rather than instead of, race, class,
religion, social geography, and political econ-
omy. This contribution is so significant because
in current scholarship, queer youth in urban
schools are not being viewed in their proper
contexts. Overall, our purpose is to listen to
voices presented in multiple and variable texts
to figure out how context matters. In doing
this work, we are repeatedly reminded of the
importance of intersectionality, a theorization of
people’s experiences growing out of multiple cat-
egories of differences, including, but not limited
to, social geography. This theoretical reminder
undergirds our discussion of the power strug-
gles that occur to define and maintain space
for social support, academic achievement, and
activism.
Homophobia
Even with the rich resources to support gay
life available in many urban communities, youth
in cities across the United States continue to re-
port school environments rife with homophobia.
Such environments are the result of verbal and
physical abuse enacted by homophobic students
and the perpetuation of such abuse by the fail-
ure of adults in schools to address such abuse.
These environments are exacerbated by adults in
schools who overtly exhibit homophobia.
That homophobic students verbally and phys-
ically abuse LGBTQ youth in US schools is
well documented by the GLSEN study (Kosciw
et al., 2008), which found 86.2% of LGBT
students experience verbal harassment because
of their sexual orientation and 66.5% because
of their gender expression (p. xii). It also found
that 44.1% of LGBT students report having
been physically harassed because of their sexual
orientation and 30.4% because of their gender
expression. Moreover, 22.1% of this population
reported being physically assaulted because of
their sexual orientation and 14.2% because of
their gender expression (p. xiii). It is worth not-
ing, though, that the GLSEN study is not limited
to urban schools; only 32.4% of LGBTQ students
223
Urban Youth’s Perspectives on School, Teachers, Pedagogy, and Curricula
who responded to GLSEN survey characterize
their schools as urban (p. 11).
To illustrate that such homophobic abuses are
occurring in urban schools, we turn to accounts
captured by qualitative studies. For example, in
the Bay Area, which is renowned for being queer-
friendly, David, who was a Black gay male, said,
“People used to think I was a girl and I used
to get teased a lot because of that: : : : People
eventually started throwing things at me and
shit” (McCready, 2004b, pp. 138–139). Somkiat,
a gay student who attended a racially diverse
Midwestern city school and was not out (openly
gay), described his daily experience this way:
Everyday they make fun of me and stuff. They
call me “gay” and “faggot” and stuff. And, when
I’m in class, people, guys don’t want to sit by
me because they think I’m going to touch them
and whatever: : : : When I’m late for class, I
really don’t want to go in because I’m scared
[that] when I walk in they’ll make fun of me.
They always do that. My teacher, she sees it
too. She always talks to me after class is up: : : :
I feel like there’s nobody there to protect me.
(Ngo, 2003, p. 118)
The harmful affect of Somkiat’s classmates’ ho-
mophobia is accentuated by his teacher’s inability
to confront such hatred.
Dylan, an out gay student in Atlanta, Georgia,
experienced homophobia like Somkiat, only it
was made worse by school officials’ failure to
address the hatred:
One day in the parking lot outside his school,
six students surrounded [Dylan] and threw a
lasso around his neck, saying, “Let’s tie the
faggot to the back of the truck.”: : : The school
took no action to discipline Dylan’s harassers.
Instead, school officials told him not to discuss
his sexual orientation with other students: : : :
After the lasso incident, the harassment and
violence intensified: : : : “It gave permission for
a whole new level of physical stuff to occur.”
(Human Rights Watch, 2001a, p. 1)
The tendency of school officials to fail to ad-
dress homophobic abuse is also documented by
GLSEN’s school climate survey (Kosciw et al.,
2008). According to this report, when LGBT
students told school staff about “incidents of
victimization, students most commonly said that
no action was taken” (p. 41). Although this
finding was more pronounced for suburban, small
town, and rural schools, even in urban schools,
only “21.7% of students : : : said that school
staff intervened most of the time or always when
hearing homophobic remarks” (p. 71).
Moreover, GLSEN found that 59.7% of LGBT
youth reported hearing homophobic language and
67.7% reported hearing biased language about
gender expression from teachers or other school
staff. Although this statistic was not analyzed by
GLSEN according to locale, and the dynamic
has not been the focus of qualitative studies
of LGBTQ youth in urban schools, that urban
school officials exhibit overt homophobia has
been captured in newspapers. For example, Mar-
ion Bolden, the superintendent of Newark Public
Schools, made the executive decision to black out
a photo of Andre Jackson, a senior, kissing his
boyfriend in the school yearbook. Ms. Bolden
said she thought the photo was suggestive, but
Jackson said, “I didn’t intend to say ‘Oh hey,
look at me, I’m gay.’ It was just a picture showing
my emotion, saying that I’m happy you know. It
was to look back on as a memory” (“Gay pair’s
photo,” 2007). In Memphis, Tennessee, principal
Daphne Beasley went as far as to make a list
of student couples to see who was engaging in
public displays of affection, and when she came
across the names of two gay male students, she
outed them or disclosed their sexual identity to
their parents. One of the outed students, Nicholas
(last name omitted) said it was “frightening to
see a list with my name on it where not just
other teachers could see, but students as well
: : : I really feel that my personal privacy was
invaded. I mean, Principal Beasley called my
mother and outed me to my mother!” (Friedman,
2008). Although Bolden and Beasley seem to err
in opposite directions, both could have served
their students better if they had more nuanced
understandings of their students’ (dis)comfort
with their sexual identities.
Overall, it seems LGBTQ youth experience
homophobia in urban schools from students and
224
Blackburn and McCready Voices of Queer Youth in Urban Schools
staff, and school staff members do not excel, rela-
tive to their nonurban counterparts, at addressing
the abuse. This is made even more significant
by the fact that such abuse impacts the academic
performance of this population.
Academic Performance
That homophobic school climates negatively
impact the scholastic achievement of queer youth
and supportive school climates have the opposite
effect are both documented by GLSEN’s most re-
cent school climate survey (Kosciw et al., 2008).
With respect to homophobic school climates hin-
dering academic achievement, this study found
that the reported grade point average of stu-
dents who were more frequently harassed be-
cause of their sexual orientation or gender ex-
pression was signi?cantly lower than for stu-
dents who were less often harassed (p. 84). In
terms of supportive school climates strength-
ening academic achievement, the same study
found:
Students who were out to all students and
staff at their school reported a greater sense of
belonging to their school community than those
who were not out: : : : [And] having a greater
sense of belonging to one’s school is related to
greater academic motivation and effort as well
as higher academic achievement. (Kosciw et al.,
2008, p. 89)
Again, these findings are not uniquely pertinent
to urban students. (As a reminder: Approxi-
mately one third of survey respondents described
their schools as urban.) The following accounts,
however, are focused on students in schools in
cities, and they highlight the former dynamic,
that is, homophobic schools hinder the academic
achievement of LGBTQ students.
Teddy in San Francisco and Kira in Philadel-
phia both reported being good students before
coming to know themselves and/or being known
as not-straight. Teddy, a Filipina-American,
Catholic student, withdrew from school when she
came to understand herself as lesbian her junior
year. She was not out to anyone else, but she
struggled with internalized homophobia:
I loved school. I excelled academically until
high school: : : : However, in my third year, my
grades dropped dramatically, I stopped going to
classes for weeks at a time, and I just barely
graduated. What changed? I realized I was a
lesbian in my junior year. I was depressed and
withdrew from interacting with my friends from
school. Mostly, I would skip class to spend my
days in a park alone with a book or my guitar.
Although there were a few on-campus resources
for queer youth, they were never announced
publicly and I never knew of them. I never
told anyone I was lesbian until I was twenty.
(Consolacion, 2001, p. 84)
Whereas Teddy’s educational success was hin-
dered by her internalized homophobia, Kira, a
biracial, working-class dyke raised by an African
American foster mother, was a strong student
whose schooling was thwarted by homophobia.
Kira attended a magnet high school for the arts
in Philadelphia, the type of school depicted as
safe for queer teens in popular media such as the
Hollywood film Fame. For Kira, however, it was
difficult to find a peer group, and the isolation
brought on by not having friends eventually
caused her to leave school:
I had friends that just stopped talking to me
and never explained why: : : : I didn’t really
care that I didn’t have any more friends. I just
wouldn’t, I just wouldn’t go to school: : : : It’s
really hard to sit at a lunch table if you don’t
talk to anybody: : : : When you go to the same
school for four years, and then, your senior year,
you’re alone, you’re just like, ‘ok,’ so you don’t
go to lunch, then, eventually, you just don’t go
to school. (Blackburn, 2003, ¶43)
As these voices of queer youth in urban schools
reveal, homophobia negatively affects academic
performance. Although some queer youth leave
school for good as a result of the hatred they
experience, others return later, or never leave at
all, instead choosing to stay and make space
for themselves (Blackburn, 2003; McCready,
2007).
225
Urban Youth’s Perspectives on School, Teachers, Pedagogy, and Curricula
Activism
School-aged young people, responding to
race-, gender-, and sexuality-based oppression,
have served as the catalyst for several new social
movements in America’s cities, including Black
Power, Women’s Rights, and Gay Rights. Even
the first GSA can be traced to a group of students
at New York City’s George Washington High
School who, in 1972, founded the first school-
based gay group on record in the United States
(Johnson, 2007). Queer youth in urban schools
continue this activism today through professional
development, official curricula, and GSAs.
David, for example, designed professional
development sessions on meeting the needs of
queer students. When he returned to his Bay
Area high school, he parlayed his experience
working at a local queer youth center into anti-
homophobia workshops and panel presentations
for administrators. He said, “To be able to sit
up in front of the administrators and talk about
my experiences was really something. After that
I became even more vocal in classrooms, voicing
my opinion” (McCready, 2001, p. 50).
Queer youth also find ways to make space to
assert themselves and work against homophobia
within the official curricula of schools. Justine, a
middle-class, lesbian, African American student
at the same urban magnet high school that Kira
attended, brought a lesbian love poem from the
queer youth center where she spent time, and
photos from a lesbian history book of her own
to school for a class project (Blackburn, 2002–
2003). Thus, she found ways to make space
within the parameters of her curricula by includ-
ing materials and information about herself as a
lesbian, which, in turn. educated her classmates
and teachers about the lives of queer people.
Another way queer students in urban schools
engage in antihomophobia work is through
GSAs. Lee’s (2002) study of a GSA in Salt Lake
City captured youth voices naming several bene-
fits of their GSA, with safety being one the most
important. For example, Erin, who is implicitly
identified as lesbian when she refers to the gay
community as her community (p. 22), said, “I
personally feel a lot less scared, because of the
group. Because we have numbers now. Because
we are visible” (p. 21). Erin, among others, also
reported improved relationships with “adminis-
trators, teachers, family and peers” (p. 18) as
a result of their participation in the GSA. She
said, “I feel more willing to identify with a
diversity of people at school. Now I feel rooted
in who I am. I can go talk to other people. I
don’t need to wimp out” (p. 18). In addition to
feeling safer and sharing better relationships with
people at school, and perhaps because of these
things, the students in the GSA asserted that their
academic performance improved as a result of
their participation in the club. For example, Kelli,
a lesbian, said:
I faced a lot of harassment being one of the
only “out” students at East High School before
the club. And I was terrified to go to school.
I avoided going to school. I failed most of my
classes my freshman through junior year. My
senior year I attended regularly and held down
the best GPA I’ve had since I’ve been in school.
(Lee, 2002, p. 17)
The experiences of young people in Salt Lake
City suggest that GSAs hold tremendous promise
as organizations that support the development of
queer youth in schools. This finding is supported
by GLSEN’s most recent school climate survey
(Kosciw et al., 2008).
However, there is a growing number of studies
of GSAs that suggest that queer youth who
attend urban schools in non-White, multiracial,
poor, and working class communities experience
difficulty starting and/or accessing their schools’
GSAs. For example, McCready’s (2004a) study
of Project 10, which functioned as a GSA at a
Bay Area high school, revealed the shortcomings
of this club when it came to meeting the needs
of queer students of color. Jamal and David
both described the club as inaccessible because
it was “under surveillance by their heterosexual
Black peers” (p. 42). “Jamal believed these dy-
namics were particularly evident when students
read the daily Bulletin announcing school-wide
events, including Project 10” (p. 42). When Jamal
was in predominantly White classes, Project 10
announcements would be read aloud with little
226
Blackburn and McCready Voices of Queer Youth in Urban Schools
event, but when a similar announcement was read
in predominantly Black classes, Jamal said,
They would skip over it like the club did not
exist. They would either speak through it, or it
was just treated differently than the other club
announcements:: : : There was a running joke at
school, like people wanted to go and see who
actually went to the club: : : : Like you don’t
want to be seen walking up to the third floor on
the day that Project 10 is meeting. (McCready,
2004a, p. 43)
Even when a student of color like David endured
the scrutiny to attend a Project 10 meeting,
he felt alienated and excluded. He called the
group “a select group of White girls : : : just
teatime for a few lesbians and their friends: : : : I
went two consecutive weeks and then I stopped
going because it wasn’t doing anything for me.
There’s nothing there for me” (p. 45). Because of
these dynamics, which McCready theorized stem
from racial segregation and the normalization of
Whiteness, the GSA, at least at this school, failed
to meet the needs of queer students of color.
Quinn’s study of queer girls of color starting
a GSA at an all-girls public charter middle- and
high school in Chicago points to different though
equally troubling social and cultural dynamics
related to leadership and participation. The group
started to create, formally, a space for socializing
and support:
At first we used to just : : : talk to a counselor
: : : ’cause everybody was pretty much in the
closet, and : : : just we only knew who was gay
or not: : : : And then after that, it seemed like
somebody thought of a GSA. And then from
then on, it just snowballed. (Quinn, 2007, p. 35)
When parents heard about the GSA from their
children, some organized to oppose the group be-
cause they believed it was immoral, that students
in middle school were too young to hear about
the group, and it might cause them to question
their sexuality. School administrators initially
dismissed objections to the GSA; however, as
the controversy unfolded, flyers announcing GSA
activities were defaced and removed from the
school’s bulletin boards, the pressure on admin-
istration became too great and the GSA was
disbanded. Although the group was reinstated a
year later, Quinn noted that at this school,
lesbian students claimed both cultural and sex-
ual specificity by acting as loud black and often
masculine girls. They rejected conformity to
norms of leadership valued in the school and
society—both raced and gendered—when they
acted assertively and collectively to start the
GSA. (p. 42)
In this way, these girls challenged the notion that
GSAs are for White girls and troubled the idea
of what school leaders can look and be like.
We acknowledge the significant activist efforts
by LGBTQ youth in the forms of professional
development, official curricula, and GSAs, but
we are concerned about how GSAs, in particular,
seem to be inadequate for LGBTQ youth of color.
The importance of this shortcoming is under-
scored by the GLSEN finding that even though
LGBT students attending schools in cities were
less likely than those in schools in suburbs, small
towns, or rural areas to hear homophobic remarks
and to experience victimization based on sexual
orientation, they were more likely to experience
victimization based on race or ethnicity.
Conclusions and Implications
Overall, the experiences of queer youth in
urban schools seem both similar to and different
from queer youth in other locales. Ironically,
despite the visibility of queer people and re-
sources to support gay life in cities, queer youth
in urban schools experience homophobia, which
can both negatively affect academic performance
and spark activism. These findings parallel queer
youth in suburban and rural locales where there
are fewer economic, social, and cultural resources
devoted to queer communities. The voices of
queer youth in urban schools distinguish them-
selves, however, by their talk of coping with
the dynamics of racism and race, as discussed
above, and class stratification and immigration
227
Urban Youth’s Perspectives on School, Teachers, Pedagogy, and Curricula
in the city, as discussed below. These voices,
both loud and quiet, have important implications
for reimagining the lives of queer youth in urban
schools.
Queer youth in urban communities, who are
increasingly non-White, immigrant, and attend-
ing schools in lower-income, underresourced
communities, experience a multitude of oppres-
sive forces that stem from their social identities as
people of color, non-standard English speakers,
non-Christians, and gender nonconformists, to
name a few. If one takes these social, cultural,
and economic dynamics into account, it becomes
clear that, to work effectively with queer youth
in urban communities, one has to embrace the
complexities of their multiple identities and de-
velop the capacity to understand the intersections
among them. Quincy, a Caribbean student in
a New York City high school, described the
impact of embodying multiple stigmatized social
identities:
I really hated myself for quite some time. I
think because of just all the things that make,
make up who I am—my, my sexuality, I hated
that. My skin color, I guess being an immigrant.
Um, because from kindergarten until probably
like my third year in high school, people just
made fun of me : : : From all of that talking
and teasing my self-esteem was like, you know,
nil. (Spain, 2001, p. 106)
Here, Quincy underscored the importance of his
race, ethnicity, language, and immigrant status,
in addition to his sexuality. It seems Quincy’s
challenges, like many queer youth in the city,
parallel a larger set of developments in many
dimensions of urban life. The increasing diver-
sity of metropolitan centers due to immigration
suggests that in the 21st century many more
queer youth will identify as non-White, nonnative
speakers of English who understand their sexual
identity from a non-Western or, at the very least,
dual cultural frame of reference. The increased
visibility of non-White queer youth, however,
does not mean they are more readily accepted
within their neighborhoods and schools. Wright
(2008) provided several compelling portraits of
queer youth of color who live in New York City,
but remain isolated in terms of queer life in
the predominantly Black and Latino Brooklyn
neighborhood where they live.
Moreover, queer youth in urban communities
who grow up in non-Western countries may
understand their sexuality in vastly different
ways than Western youth. For example, in some
African and South Asian countries, homosexu-
ality is illegal. Non-Western languages may or
may not have specific words for nonheterosexual
identities that connote the same meanings as
the Western sense of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or
transgender. Urban LGBTQ youth who are non-
White and/or immigrants experience tremendous
isolation amidst the wealth of resources for
LGBTQ youth when they live in communities
that condemn homosexuality for cultural and re-
ligious reasons. These youth may also experience
isolation when they identify and/or express their
sexual identities in Western ways.
In addition to cultural barriers, queer youth in
US cities, specifically, are experiencing massive
resegregation of public schools due, in part,
to segregated housing patterns and the waning
commitment of the federal government to enforce
court-ordered desegregation in the 21st century.
Essentially, what this means is a return to neigh-
borhood schools in urban communities that are
racially segregated, and, in most cases, areas
of concentrated poverty, as well. Racially segre-
gated schools in communities where the median
family income is below average are less likely to
have programs specifically aimed at queer youth;
there simply are not enough economic resources
to support such efforts.
In keeping with the claim that the experiences
of queer youth in urban schools seem both similar
to and different from queer youth in other locales,
the implications for educators in urban schools
working with LGBTQ students are both similar
to and distinct from implications for educators
with these populations in nonspecified contexts.
Such implications include (a) developing policies
that support LGBTQ students, teachers, and staff
and penalize homophobia; (b) providing training
that teaches teachers, counselors, administrators,
and other support staff how to support LGBTQ
students and to prevent and intervene homopho-
228
Blackburn and McCready Voices of Queer Youth in Urban Schools
bic behaviors; (c) providing current resources
about LGBTQ people and the issues that impact
them in both public and private ways, through
counselors, nurses, social workers, psychologists,
and media specialists; and (d) ensuring access to
both curricular and extracurricular supports for
LGBTQ people (Human Rights Watch, 2001b).
Although these serve as a decent starting point,
they must be more nuanced to be useful in urban
contexts.
In short, urban educators working with queer
youth need to understand and be prepared to
address multiple social and cultural issues that
intersect with sexual and gender identities. This
necessitates an intersectional analysis. Intersec-
tionality can be defined as a theory to analyze
how social and cultural categories of identity and
oppression are interconnected. Moreover, Mc-
Cready (2007) reminds us that in-school efforts
such as those suggested above are often hindered
by urban educators’ ambivalence about the “rel-
evance of anti-homophobia to their social justice
work in urban schools” (p. 74). So, this obstacle
must be overcome and the opportunity to grapple
with the complicated notion of intersectionality
must be embraced.
In terms of policy-development, this may
mean, for example, ensuring confidentiality so
that students whose family values emphasize
heterosexuality and gender normativity are not
made more vulnerable by reporting abuse. Train-
ings should include education about particular
populations in the school and the stances taken
on homosexuality and gender expression within
these populations. In other words, notions of
right and wrong should be rejected and replaced
with complicated ideas that recognize multiplic-
ity and variability within the school community.
Resources should be available in the languages
spoken by the various student populations within
the school, and they should represent diverse
peoples and communities. Curricular materials
should be similarly representative, and extracur-
ricular efforts, such as GSAs, should be rec-
ognized both for what they do and do not ac-
complish in urban schools. When GSAs prove
to inadequately serve the school’s populations,
for example, alternatives should be generated
from students and facilitated, indeed nurtured, by
adults in the school. Rather than being seen as
a burden, intersectionality should be viewed as
opportunity-rich in terms of shaping policy and
providing training, resources, and curricular and
extracurricular supports.
One of the most exciting tasks for 21st century
urban educators who work with queer youth will
be to develop comprehensive approaches to their
work, approaches that take into account how the
social, cultural, and economic dynamics of the
city affect queer youth programs and services.
A good example of this work is the Respect
Campaign (RC) launched by Out for Equity in
eight Saint Paul, Minnesota, schools. RC was a
two-year project including 12 schools that served
to “identify obstacles to a respectful school cli-
mate, develop a vision for positive change, chart
and implement a course of action and evaluate
success” (Horowitz & Itzkowitz, 2007, p. 3). The
project reveals an understanding that students in
urban schools face multiple forms of oppres-
sion and discrimination that can make school
feel unsafe. Based on this understanding, RC
helped urban educators develop a multidimen-
sional framework of a healthy school climate,
one that addresses issues of homophobia and het-
erosexism, but also takes into account oppression
and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, class,
gender, and religion. Such work provides a model
for the kind of work that would better meet the
needs of queer youth in urban schools.
References
Blackburn, M. V. (2002–2003). Disrupting the (het-
ero)normative: Exploring literacy performances and
identity work with queer youth. Journal of Adoles-
cent & Adult Literacy, 46, 312–324.
Blackburn, M. V. (2003). Losing, finding, and making
space for activism through literacy performances
and identity work. Penn GSE Perspectives on
Urban Education, 2(1). Retrieved June 8, 2009
from http://www.urbanedjournal.org/articles/article
0008.html
Blackburn, M. V. (2004). Understanding agency be-
yond school-sanctioned activities. Theory Into
Practice, 43, 102–110.
229
Urban Youth’s Perspectives on School, Teachers, Pedagogy, and Curricula
Cohen, H. S. (Producer), & Chasnoff, D. (Producer
& Director). (1997). It’s elementary: Talking about
gay issues in school [film]. San Francisco, CA:
Women’s Educational Media.
Consolacion, T. (2001). Where I am today. In K.
Kumashiro (Ed.), Troubling intersections of race
and sexuality: Queer students of color and anti-
oppressive education (pp. 83–85). Lanham, MA:
Rowman and Littlefield.
Friedman, E. (2008, May 2). Principal allegedly outs
gay students. ABC News. Retrieved June 8, 2009
from http://abcnews.go.com/US/Story?idD477338
1&pageD1
Gay pair’s photo blacked out of yearbook. (2007,
June 22). The Star Ledger. Retrieved June 8, 2009
from http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2007/06/
gay_pairs_photo_blacked_out_of_1.html
Horowitz, A., & Itzkowitz, M. (2007, October). Out
for equity middle school project. Out for Equity
Newsletter, pp. 1, 3, 4, 10.
Human Rights Watch. (2001a). Hatred in the hallways:
Violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender students in U.S. schools.
New York: Author.
Human Rights Watch. (2001b). Hatred in the hallways:
Violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender students in U.S. schools.
American Journal of Health Education, 32, 302–
306.
Johnson, D. (2007). “This is political!” Negotiating the
legacies of the first school-based gay youth group.
Children, Youth and Environments, 17, 380–387.
Kosciw, J. G., Diaz, E. M., & Greytak, E. A. (2008).
The 2007 National School Climate Survey: The
experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-
gender youth in our nation’s schools. New York:
Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.
Lee, C. (2002). The impact of belonging to a high
school gay/straight alliance. High School Journal,
85(3), 13–26.
McCready, L. T. (2001). When fitting in isn’t an
option, or, Why Black queer males at a California
high school stay away from Project 10. In K.
Kumashiro (Ed.), Troubling intersections of race
and sexuality: Queer students of color and anti-
oppressive education (pp. 37–53). Lanham, MA:
Rowman and Littlefield.
McCready, L. (2004a). Some challenges facing queer
youth programs in urban high schools: Racial seg-
regation and de-normalizing Whiteness. Journal of
Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education, 1(3), 37–
51.
McCready, L. T. (2004b). Understanding the marginal-
ization of gay and gender non-conforming Black
male students. Theory Into Practice, 43, 136–143.
McCready, L. T. (2007). Queer urban education: Cur-
riculum and pedagogy for LGBTQI youth in the
city. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 4(2),
71–77.
Milwaukee to form gay-friendly middle school (2008,
December 17). U.S. news and world report.
Retrieved June 8, 2009 from http://www.usnews.
com/blogs/on-education/2008/12/17/milwaukee-to-
form-gay-friendly-middle-school.html
Ngo, B. (2003). Citing discourses: Making sense of ho-
mophobia and heteronormativity at Dynamic High
School. Equity and Excellence in Education, 36,
115–124.
Quinn, T. M. (2007). “You make me erect!”: Queer
girls of color negotiating heteronormative leader-
ship at an urban all-girls’ public school. Journal
of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education, 4(3), 31–
47.
Spain, C. R. (2001). An interview with Quincy Greene.
In K. Kumashiro (Ed.), Troubling intersections of
race and sexuality: Queer students of color and
anti-oppressive education (pp. 105–108). Lanham,
MA: Rowman and Littlefield.
Uribe, V. (1995). A school-based outreach to gay and
lesbian youth. In G. Unks (Ed.), The gay teenager
(pp. 203–210). New York: Routledge.
Wright, K. (2008). Drifting toward love: Black, brown,
gay, and coming of age on the streets of New York.
Boston: Beacon Press.
230
