Teen years' new drama: coming out of the closet

Like any teenager going to her first homecoming dance, Sarah Stich was nervous.

The Marysville-Pilchuck High School senior hadn't been able to find anything at the mall to wear and wasn't sure whether a dress or pants would be right. A friend lent her a black calf-length dress with spaghetti straps, and she was amazed how good she looked.

The 17-year-old senior bought a white rose for her date, Jamesine Hillaire, 18, and Hillaire's favorite candy bar, a Twix.

No one at the Marysville-Pilchuck High School gym hassled the two young women.

Principal Tracy Suchan Toothaker and English teacher Anna Kruse, the adviser to the school's Gay-Straight Alliance, had paved the way. Before the dance, they talked to the student-activity coordinator and chaperones, hoping to avoid a repeat of last year's homecoming, where a well-meaning adult broke up girls dancing with each other and told them to go find boys.

Even the straight girls were incensed then by the assumption that everyone should pair off boy-girl, boy-girl.

Resources

GLOBE: youth program that meets from 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesdays in Everett. Information: 425-339-5251 or http://globeyouth.org.

PFLAG Everett-Snohomish: for parents, families and friends of lesbians and gays. Meets at 7 p.m. on the third Monday of the month at First Congressional Church, 2624 Rockefeller Ave., Everett. Information: 360-863-8222 (ask for Tom) or e-thosb@earthlink.net.

GLSEN: Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. For information on forming school Gay-Straight Alliances, call 206-330-2099 or visit www.glsenpugetsound.org.

Safe Schools Coalition: lists other Snohomish County resources for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students, and their teachers and families. Visit www.safeschoolscoalition.org.

So the most awkward thing about the evening may have been Stich herself, who had never been to a prom or a homecoming and who is more comfortable in jeans and Converse sneakers.

"It felt weird. I'd never danced before," Stich said.

A decade ago, gay students often waited until college, or later, to announce their homosexuality, uncertain of the reaction of their friends and parents, afraid of being isolated or ostracized at school.

Today, more teens are coming out in Snohomish County high schools, and in many cases they're finding support among teachers and students who have grown up with images of gays on television and discussions of gay rights in classes and in the news.

Kruse's daughter, a Marysville-Pilchuck graduate, came out in college. Toothaker has a brother and other family members who are gay.

"To me, it's an issue of respect, plain and simple," Toothaker said of her support for the school's gay students.

Most high schools in the county now have gay-straight alliances, clubs where homosexual, bisexual or gender-questioning youths plan activities to raise awareness about sexual identity or simply get together in an atmosphere of acceptance and trust.

At some high schools, including Meadowdale in Lynnwood and Kamiak in Mukilteo, gay-straight alliances have evolved into broader-based diversity clubs that attract students of different races, cultures and sexual orientations, and friends who support their rights.

Some of the county's most rural school districts, including Stanwood, Arlington and Darrington, do not have clubs for gay students. But change is headed their way, too.

"More teenagers are coming out in high school, and more and more are coming out in rural areas, and they're strong," said Shane Windmeyer, 32, a gay activist and author who spoke at Everett Community College last week.

Windmeyer noted that not all of the change is the result of liberal-minded educators. Schools may face lawsuits for not providing all students with a safe environment. Courts also have ruled that schools must provide equal access to gay student groups if other clubs are allowed to meet on campus.

In addition, Washington state adopted anti-bullying and anti-harassment legislation in 2002, and though sexual orientation is not specifically included in the law, 94 percent of the state's school districts have extended protections to gay, lesbian and bisexual students, according to a 2003 survey conducted by the Washington PTA and the Safe Schools Coalition, an advocacy group for gay youths.

But increasingly, Windmeyer said, it is the gay teenagers themselves who are willing to stand up in the conforming and sometimes-hostile environment that is high school and say to classmates and teachers, "This is who I am."

Insight through drama

At Stanwood High School last week, R.J. Barnett, 17, rehearsed the lead part in Shakespeare's "Macbeth," the school play that opens Friday.

Drama club has often been a refuge for gay youths, a place where inhabiting new roles is a creative challenge and a release from narrow definitions of character.

The play is, on some levels, a critique of gender issues. Masculinity becomes equated with murderous ambition and the suppression of feeling and conscience, what Barnett wryly calls "the testosterone" of warring soldiers and bloody deeds.

In his sophomore year, Barnett told two close friends he was gay. For a while, he had gone along when other students jabbed him in the arm and asked whether he thought a particular girl was "hot." But his discomfort with his own hypocrisy, as well as the distress that he was misleading close friends, led him to break his silence.

He also had a role model at school, an older student active in the drama club.

"He was the shock of Stanwood. He was out and unapologetic," Barnett said.

Barnett said the prevailing attitude toward gay and lesbian students at the high school is "don't ask, don't tell." To him, that means others don't want his homosexuality "in their face."

That has its own hypocrisy, Barnett said before rehearsals last week. Flagrant heterosexuality, in the form of bare midriffs, barely hanging pants and make-out scenes in the halls, is a staple of high schools these days, even in small towns.

Some of Barnett's straight friends in the drama club aren't content with the "don't ask, don't tell" approach, and they're talking to teachers and administrators at Stanwood about forming a gay-straight alliance so other gay or questioning students can find support at school.

"Sexual identity is a huge part of who someone is," said MacKenzie Gregg, who plays Lady Macbeth in the play and is helping organize the group. Some teachers have warned her there may be opposition to forming a club. But those same teachers told her it will ultimately be approved "because it needs to be here," Gregg said.

"A lot of macho guys"

Jake Clark is a 2003 Everett High School graduate who came out his junior year. Now the president of Everett Community College's gay student group, the Triangle Alliance, Clark said he tried to form a gay-straight alliance in high school. Administrators told him he could but that they wouldn't provide any support.

Clark, a soft-spoken education major, said he had a close group of friends at the high school and wasn't willing to risk his tentative security to take on the whole school over starting a club. He described Everett High as a working-class school with "a lot of macho guys."

But in 2002, Everett students elected an outspoken, openly bisexual girl as student-body president, and the memory of her success and popularity still makes Clark smile.

Another source of support for Clark has been weekly meetings of GLOBE, a teen group. Sponsored by the Snohomish Health District and supported by state HIV/AIDS-prevention funding, the group attracts about 40 to 50 teenagers each week to a conference room in downtown Everett.

Brenda Newell, a program manager for the health district who runs the support group, said that despite progress in winning acceptance, many gay youths are at a higher risk for depression, suicide, drug use and unsafe sex. Many who have been rejected by their families end up in homeless shelters or on the streets, she said. Like the gay-straight alliances in high schools, the weekly GLOBE meetings break the isolation many of these young people feel.

"Over and over again, youth come into our program and say, 'I thought I was the only one. I didn't know there were other gay youth in my school or community,' " Newell said.

Newell said one of the biggest changes she's seen over the past 10 years is the increased awareness among teachers and school administrators that they need to make schools a safe environment for gay youths.

She said there are also more schools where at least one adult will openly support and serve as a resource for these teens, although she said many gay teachers still fear being open about their own sexual orientation at school.

"It makes a significant difference to these kids if there are teachers who have the courage to come out and be visible adult role models," she said.

The teenagers attending a recent GLOBE meeting had a litany of stories about verbal abuse and threats at their high schools. Some students are even finishing high school at local community colleges through the Running Start program because of discomfort and harassment in high school.

Nova Clawson, 20, said she helped start a gay-straight alliance at Monroe High School several years ago, but she said the club's signs were routinely ripped down, and meeting notices had to be labeled that they were "not a school-sponsored event." No teacher stepped forward to act as adviser, she said, so their adviser was a school nurse.

A former Lynnwood High School student said a group of "jocks" repeatedly tried to beat up him and his boyfriend at school three years ago. He said administrators told him to stop filing complaints unless he could prove he was being harassed.

Another Everett High student said that although he is straight, he is routinely accused of being gay because he is not the athletic or macho type. He thinks more people would reject what he calls "the culture of intolerance" if they knew it doesn't affect just gay kids.

But some of the younger high-school students at the GLOBE meeting said the atmosphere at local schools is beginning to change quickly. A Lake Stevens High School student said the school's gay-straight alliance was "awesome" and provided support for openly gay students, who now number almost a dozen, she said.

Decision to leave

Elliott Robinson, 19, another GLOBE participant, was encouraged by the progress at Lake Stevens. He left the high school three years ago and enrolled in Running Start at Everett Community College because he said the high school was not a supportive place to come out.

"When I was there, there was one gay kid," he said. "I didn't want to be the other one."

Robinson's mother, Caroline, said Elliott was first called a derogatory term for homosexual in elementary school. A principal intervened to stop the taunts, but the boy was harassed again in junior high, and she watched as her son — bright, sensitive and expressive — became moody and dark.

Caroline Robinson also had her own journey to acceptance once Elliott came out at 16. A devoted Lutheran, she sent her children to private Christian schools for part of their education and had to deal with her fears that being a homosexual meant a lifestyle that included casual sex, AIDS and drug abuse.

Elliott said he has no interest in that lifestyle.

"What I'm looking for is a relationship, someone I can spend my life with," he told the other young people at the GLOBE meeting. "I consider myself very religious. I grew up with it."

First-date jitters

Youth advocates say the teen years are an important developmental stage for learning about whom you're attracted to and how to approach and get to know someone you like. That's true for gay as well as straight youths. At Marysville-Pilchuck last week, Sarah Stich sought out the principal for advice.

She wanted to invite Jamesine Hillaire out to dinner but wasn't sure how it was done.

"She didn't have any experience with dating," said Principal Toothaker.

Stich said she worries about whether her parents — one a Catholic, the other a Mormon — will ultimately accept her. They're having a hard time with it, she said. Her mother, Merrilyn Stich, questions whether her daughter can be certain of her sexual orientation at such a young age and whether she is closing herself off to future options.

At school, Sarah Stich hears taunts when she and Hillaire walk through the halls.

But she said she was tired of being alone with her sexual identity. So though she has the "confused, hard feelings" of being newly openly gay, she's also got the confused, happy feelings of a first romance.

She carries her homecoming picture in her wallet, the one of her and Hillaire standing close together, and looks at it sometimes with wonder.

"I'm myself," she says.

Lynn Thompson: 425-745-7807 or lthompson@seattletimes.com