Students Require Explicit Acceptance

Throughout the year there are opportunities for school dances. It could be homecoming, Sadie Hawkins or even a Halloween costume party. Students spend hours discussing them. While many students view dances as a tremendous opportunity for fun, socializing and a great experience, others view them as potentially dangerous and anxiety-filled events. I am not thinking about the general stress induced by dating or the politics of popularity that often emerge here.

Rather, what concerns me is the anxiety for LGBT students.

This year, my students reminded me that unless schools make specific and explicit statements about accepting same-sex student couples, then students will assume that LGBT students are not allowed to bring their dates.

When the topic of segregation arose in class, the students were familiar with racially segregated proms, [2] which still occurred recently. However, when I referred to Constance McMillen, the gay student who successfully sued her school district to be allowed to bring a same-sex date to prom, my students quickly shared with me their beliefs about school policy.

"Yeah, but that's not allowed here either."

"No," I attempted to correct them, "we have had gay students bring same-sex dates to dances."

"But that's why it's not allowed now," they adamantly expressed their belief in a rule that didn’t exist.

"There has never been a rule prohibiting same-sex dates at dances in our student handbook,” I pressed on, "And we have a diversity statement that expressly forbids this kind of rule as a form of bias."

Students remained unconvinced. Their evidence was more substantial than rules in a handbook or a diversity statement on the school website. Quite simply, they had never heard an administrator announce that it was acceptable, or just all right, for a gay student to bring a same-sex date to a dance. Since no one had ever announced or discussed it, they assumed it was forbidden.

The danger of this assumption is not just in heightening the anxiety of school dances, but it is another reminder about how a lack of explicit acceptance creates an unsafe space for privilege and bias to breed unchallenged.

To be blunt, if our schools are not explicitly accepting, then we are tacitly intolerant.

Poet and thinker Adrienne Rich writes, “When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you, whether you are dark-skinned, old, disabled, female, or speak with a different accent or dialect than theirs, when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”

This psychic disequilibrium suggests that through omission, LGBT students do not exist at our schools, in our classrooms or at our dances.

Elliott is a high school English teacher in Texas.