[blindlgbtpride] One town's war on LGBT Teens

[Sean Moore]

this made me cry, really hard! People just don’t see what’s happening to kids who at LGBT. Its sick!



From: dlb723 
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2012 9:54 PM
To: Blind LGBT Pride discussion list 
Subject: [blindlgbtpride] One town's war on LGBT Teens

This is a long read and worth the time.

Don

One Town's War on Gay Teens

By Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone

04 February 12　

In Michele Bachmann's home district, evangelicals have created an extreme 
anti-gay climate. After a rash of suicides, the kids are fighting back.

Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the 
double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, 
bracing

for the inevitable.

"Dyke."

Pretending not to hear, Brittany would walk briskly to her locker, past the 
sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who loitered in menacing packs.

"Whore."

Like many 13-year-olds, Brittany knew seventh grade was a living hell. But 
what she didn't know was that she was caught in the crossfire of a culture 
war

being waged by local evangelicals inspired by their high-profile 
congressional representative Michele Bachmann, who graduated from Anoka High 
School and,

until recently, was a member of one of the most conservative churches in the 
area. When Christian activists who considered gays an abomination forced a

measure through the school board forbidding the discussion of homosexuality 
in the district's public schools, kids like Brittany were unknowingly thrust

into the heart of a clash that was about to become intertwined with tragedy.

Brittany didn't look like most girls in blue-collar Anoka, Minnesota, a 
former logging town on the Rum River, a conventional place that takes pride 
in its

annual Halloween parade - it bills itself the "Halloween Capital of the 
World." Brittany was a low-voiced, stocky girl who dressed in baggy jeans 
and her

dad's Marine Corps sweatshirts. By age 13, she'd been taunted as a "cunt" 
and "cock muncher" long before such words had made much sense. When she told

administrators about the abuse, they were strangely unresponsive, even 
though bullying was a subject often discussed in school-board meetings. The 
district

maintained a comprehensive five-page anti-bullying policy, and held 
diversity trainings on racial and gender sensitivity. Yet when it came to 
Brittany's

harassment, school officials usually told her to ignore it, always glossing 
over the sexually charged insults. Like the time Brittany had complained 
about

being called a "fat dyke": The school's principal, looking pained, had 
suggested Brittany prepare herself for the next round of teasing with snappy 
comebacks

- "I can lose the weight, but you're stuck with your ugly face" - never 
acknowledging she had been called a "dyke." As though that part was OK. As 
though

the fact that Brittany was bisexual made her fair game.

So maybe she was a fat dyke, Brittany thought morosely; maybe she deserved 
the teasing. She would have been shocked to know the truth behind the 
adults'

inaction: No one would come to her aid for fear of violating the 
districtwide policy requiring school personnel to stay "neutral" on issues 
of homosexuality.

All Brittany knew was that she was on her own, vulnerable and ashamed, and 
needed to find her best friend, Samantha, fast.

Like Brittany, eighth-grader Samantha Johnson was a husky tomboy too, 
outgoing with a big smile and a silly streak to match Brittany's own. Sam 
was also

bullied for her look - short hair, dark clothing, lack of girly affect - but 
she merrily shrugged off the abuse. When Sam's volleyball teammates' 
taunting

got rough - barring her from the girls' locker room, yelling, "You're a 
guy!" - she simply stopped going to practice. After school, Sam would 
encourage

Brittany to join her in privately mocking their tormentors, and the girls 
would parade around Brittany's house speaking in Valley Girl squeals, 
wearing

bras over their shirts, collapsing in laughter. They'd become as close as 
sisters in the year since Sam had moved from North Dakota following her 
parents'

divorce, and Sam had quickly become Brittany's beacon. Sam was even helping 
to start a Gay Straight Alliance club, as a safe haven for misfits like 
them,

although the club's progress was stalled by the school district that, among 
other things, was queasy about the club's flagrant use of the word "gay." 
Religious

conservatives have called GSAs "sex clubs," and sure enough, the local 
religious right loudly objected to them. "This is an assault on moral 
standards,"

read one recent letter to the community paper. "Let's stop this dangerous 
nonsense before it's too late and more young boys and girls are encouraged 
to

'come out' and practice their 'gayness' right in their own school's 
homosexual club."

Brittany admired Sam's courage, and tried to mimic her insouciance and 
stoicism. So Brittany was bewildered when one day in November 2009, on the 
school

bus home, a sixth-grade boy slid in next to her and asked quaveringly, "Did 
you hear Sam said she's going to kill herself?"

Brittany considered the question. No way. How many times had she seen Sam 
roll her eyes and announce, "Ugh, I'm gonna kill myself" over some 
insignificant

thing? "Don't worry, you'll see Sam tomorrow," Brittany reassured her friend 
as they got off the bus. But as she trudged toward her house, she couldn't

stop turning it over in her mind. A boy in the district had already 
committed suicide just days into the school year - TJ Hayes, a 16-year-old 
at Blaine

High School - so she knew such things were possible. But Sam Johnson? 
Brittany tried to keep the thought at bay. Finally, she confided in her 
mother.

"This isn't something you kid about, Brittany," her mom scolded, snatching 
the kitchen cordless and taking it down the hall to call the Johnsons. A 
minute

later she returned, her face a mask of shock and terror. "Honey, I'm so 
sorry. We're too late," she said tonelessly as Brittany's knees buckled; 
13-year-old

Sam had climbed into the bathtub after school and shot herself in the mouth 
with her own hunting rifle. No one at school had seen her suicide coming.

No one saw the rest of them coming, either.

Sam's death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of 
nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child 
psychologist

Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness 
Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of

a "suicide cluster," adding that the crisis might hold an element of 
contagion; suicidal thoughts had become catchy, like a lethal virus. "Here 
you had

a large number of suicides that are really closely connected, all within one 
school district, in a small amount of time," explains Reidenberg. "Kids 
started

to feel that the normal response to stress was to take your life."

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or 
perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied. The tragedies 
come

at a national moment when bullying is on everyone's lips, and a devastating 
number of gay teens across the country are in the news for killing 
themselves.

Suicide rates among gay and lesbian kids are frighteningly high, with 
attempt rates four times that of their straight counterparts; studies show 
that one-third

of all gay youth have attempted suicide at some point (versus 13 percent of 
hetero kids), and that internalized homophobia contributes to suicide risk.

Against this supercharged backdrop, the Anoka-Hennepin school district finds 
itself in the spotlight not only for the sheer number of suicides but 
because

it is accused of having contributed to the death toll by cultivating an 
extreme anti-gay climate. "LGBTQ students don't feel safe at school," says 
Anoka

Middle School for the Arts teacher Jefferson Fietek, using the acronym for 
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning. "They're made to feel 
ashamed

of who they are. They're bullied. And there's no one to stand up for them, 
because teachers are afraid of being fired."

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights 
have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school 
district's

policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment 
of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil

rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to 
comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, 
maintaining

that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all students. "We 
are not a homophobic district, and to be vilified for this is very 
frustrating,"

says superintendent Dennis Carlson, who blames right-wingers and gay 
activists for choosing the area as a battleground, describing the district 
as the

victim in this fracas. "People are using kids as pawns in this political 
debate," he says. "I find that abhorrent."

Ironically, that's exactly the charge that students, teachers and grieving 
parents are hurling at the school district. "Samantha got caught up in a 
political

battle that I didn't know about," says Sam Johnson's mother, Michele. "And 
you know whose fault it is? The people who make their living off of saying 
they're

going to take care of our kids."

Located a half-hour north of Minneapolis, the 13 sprawling towns that make 
up the Anoka-Hennepin school district - Minnesota's largest, with 39,000 
kids

- seems an unlikely place for such a battle. It's a soothingly flat, 
172-square-mile expanse sliced by the Mississippi River, where woodlands 
abruptly

give way to strip malls and then fall back to placid woodlands again, and 
the landscape is dotted with churches. The district, which spans two 
counties,

is so geographically huge as to be a sort of cross section of America 
itself, with its small minority population clustered at its southern tip, 
white suburban

sprawl in its center and sparsely populated farmland in the north. It also 
offers a snapshot of America in economic crisis: In an area where just 20 
percent

of adults have college educations, the recession hit hard, and foreclosures 
and unemployment have become the norm.

For years, the area has also bred a deep strain of religious conservatism. 
At churches like First Baptist Church of Anoka, parishioners believe that 
homosexuality

is a form of mental illness caused by family dysfunction, childhood trauma 
and exposure to pornography - a perversion curable through intensive 
therapy.

It's a point of view shared by their congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who has 
called homosexuality a form of "sexual dysfunction" that amounts to 
"personal

enslavement." In 1993, Bachmann, a proponent of school prayer and 
creationism, co-founded the New Heights charter school in the town of 
Stillwater, only

to flee the board amid an outcry that the school was promoting a religious 
curriculum. Bachmann also is affiliated with the ultraright Minnesota Family

Council, headlining a fundraiser for them last spring alongside Newt 
Gingrich.

Though Bachmann doesn't live within Anoka-Hennepin's boundaries anymore, she 
has a dowdier doppelgänger there in the form of anti-gay crusader Barb 
Anderson.

A bespectacled grandmother with lemony-blond hair she curls in severely 
toward her face, Anderson is a former district Spanish teacher and a 
longtime researcher

for the MFC who's been fighting gay influence in local schools for two 
decades, ever since she discovered that her nephew's health class was 
teaching homosexuality

as normal. "That really got me on a journey," she said in a radio interview. 
When the Anoka-Hennepin district's sex-ed curriculum came up for 
re-evaluation

in 1994, Anderson and four like-minded parents managed to get on the review 
committee. They argued that any form of gay tolerance in school is actually

an insidious means of promoting homosexuality - that openly discussing the 
matter would encourage kids to try it, turning straight kids gay.

"Open your eyes, people," Anderson recently wrote to the local newspaper. 
"What if a 15-year-old is seduced into homosexual behavior and then 
contracts

AIDS?" Her agenda mimics that of Focus on the Family, the national 
evangelical Christian organization founded by James Dobson; Family Councils, 
though

technically independent of Focus on the Family, work on the state level to 
accomplish Focus' core goals, including promoting prayer in public spaces, 
"defending

marriage" by lobbying for anti-gay legislation, and fighting gay tolerance 
in public schools under the guise of preserving parental authority - 
reasoning

that government-mandated acceptance of gays undermines the traditional 
values taught in Christian homes.

At the close of the seven-month-long sex-ed review, Anderson and her 
colleagues wrote a memo to the Anoka-Hennepin school board, concluding, "The 
majority

of parents do not wish to have there [sic] children taught that the gay 
lifestyle is a normal acceptable alternative." Surprisingly, the six-member 
board

voted to adopt the measure by a four-to-two majority, even borrowing the 
memo's language to fashion the resulting districtwide policy, which 
pronounced

that within the health curriculum, "homosexuality not be taught/addressed as 
a normal, valid lifestyle."

The policy became unofficially known as "No Homo Promo" and passed 
unannounced to parents and unpublished in the policy handbooks; most 
teachers were told

about it by their principals. Teachers say it had a chilling effect and they 
became concerned about mentioning gays in any context. Discussion of 
homosexuality

gradually disappeared from classes. "If you can't talk about it in any 
context, which is how teachers interpret district policies, kids internalize 
that

to mean that being gay must be so shameful and wrong," says Anoka High 
School teacher Mary Jo Merrick-Lockett. "And that has created a climate of 
fear

and repression and harassment."

Suicide is a complex phenomenon; there's never any one pat reason to explain 
why anyone kills themselves. Michele Johnson acknowledges that her daughter,

Sam, likely had many issues that combined to push her over the edge, but 
feels strongly that bullying was one of those factors. "I'm sure that 
Samantha's

decision to take her life had a lot to do with what was going on in school," 
Johnson says tearfully. "I'm sure things weren't perfect in other areas, but

nothing was as bad as what was going on in that school."

The summer before Justin Aaberg started at Anoka High School, his mother 
asked, "So, are you sure you're gay?"

Justin, a slim, shy 14-year-old who carefully swept his blond bangs to the 
side like his namesake, Bieber, studied his mom's face. "I'm pretty sure I'm

gay," he answered softly, then abruptly changed his mind. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, 
wait!" he shouted - out of character for the quiet boy - "I'm positive. I

am gay," Justin proclaimed.

"OK." Tammy Aaberg nodded. "So. Just because you can't get him pregnant 
doesn't mean you don't use protection." She proceeded to lecture her son 
about safe

sex while Justin turned bright red and beamed. Embarrassing as it was to get 
a sex talk from his mom, her easy affirmation of Justin's orientation seemed

like a promising sign as he stood on the brink of high school. Justin was 
more than ready to turn the corner on the horrors of middle school - 
especially

on his just-finished eighth-grade year, when Justin had come out as gay to a 
few friends, yet word had instantly spread, making him a pariah. In the hall

one day, a popular jock had grabbed Justin by the balls and squeezed, 
sneering, "You like that, don't you?" That assault had so humiliated and 
frightened

Justin that he'd burst out crying, but he never reported any of his 
harassment. The last thing he wanted to do was draw more attention to his 
sexuality.

Plus, he didn't want his parents worrying. Justin's folks were already 
overwhelmed with stresses of their own: Swamped with debt, they'd declared 
bankruptcy

and lost their home to foreclosure. So Justin had kept his problems to 
himself; he felt hopeful things would get better in high school, where kids 
were

bound to be more mature.

"There'll always be bullies," he reasoned to a friend. "But we'll be older, 
so maybe they'll be better about it."

But Justin's start of ninth grade in 2009 began as a disappointment. In the 
halls of Anoka High School, he was bullied, called a "faggot" and shoved 
into

lockers. Then, a couple of months into the school year, he was stunned to 
hear about Sam Johnson's suicide. Though Justin hadn't known her personally,

he'd known of her, and of the way she'd been taunted for being butch. Justin 
tried to keep smiling. In his room at home, Justin made a brightly colored

paper banner and taped it to his wall: "Love the life you live, live the 
life you love."

Brittany couldn't stop thinking about Sam, a reel that looped endlessly in 
her head. Sam dancing to one of their favorite metal bands, Drowning Pool. 
Sam

dead in the tub with the back of her head blown off. Sam's ashes in an urn, 
her coffin empty at her wake.

She couldn't sleep. Her grades fell. Her daily harassment at school 
continued, but now without her best friend to help her cope. At home, 
Brittany played

the good daughter, cleaning the house and performing her brother's chores 
unasked, all in a valiant attempt to maintain some family peace after the 
bank

took their house, and both parents lost their jobs in quick succession. Then 
Brittany started cutting herself.

Just 11 days after Sam's death, on November 22nd, 2009, came yet another 
suicide: a Blaine High School student, 15-year-old Aaron Jurek - the 
district's

third suicide in just three months. After Christmas break, an Andover High 
School senior, Nick Lockwood, became the district's fourth casualty: a boy 
who

had never publicly identified as gay, but had nonetheless been teased as 
such. Suicide number five followed, that of recent Blaine High School grad 
Kevin

Buchman, who had no apparent LGBT connection. Before the end of the school 
year there would be a sixth suicide, 15-year-old July Barrick of Champlin 
Park

High School, who was also bullied for being perceived as gay, and who'd 
complained to her mother that classmates had started an "I Hate July 
Barrick" Facebook

page. As mental-health counselors were hurriedly dispatched to each affected 
school, the district was blanketed by a sense of mourning and frightened 
shock.

"It has taken a collective toll," says Northdale Middle School psychologist 
Colleen Cashen. "Everyone has just been reeling - students, teachers. 
There's

been just a profound sadness."

In the wake of Sam's suicide, Brittany couldn't seem to stop crying. She'd 
disappear for hours with her cellphone turned off, taking long walks by Elk 
Creek

or hiding in a nearby cemetery. "Promise me you won't take your life," her 
father begged. "Promise you'll come to me before anything." Brittany 
couldn't

promise. In March 2010, she was hospitalized for a week.

In April, Justin came home from school and found his mother at the top of 
the stairs, tending to the saltwater fish tank. "Mom," he said tentatively, 
"a

kid told me at school today I'm gonna go to hell because I'm gay."

"That's not true. God loves everybody," his mom replied. "That kid needs to 
go home and read his Bible."

Justin shrugged and smiled, then retreated to his room. It had been a hard 
day: the annual "Day of Truth" had been held at school, an evangelical event

then-sponsored by the anti-gay ministry Exodus International, whose mission 
is to usher gays back to wholeness and "victory in Christ" by converting 
them

to heterosexuality. Day of Truth has been a font of controversy that has 
bounced in and out of the courts; its legality was affirmed last March, when 
a

federal appeals court ruled that two Naperville, Illinois, high school 
students' Day of Truth T-shirts reading BE HAPPY, NOT GAY were protected by 
their

First Amendment rights. (However, the event, now sponsored by Focus on the 
Family, has been renamed "Day of Dialogue.") Local churches had been touting

the program, and students had obediently shown up at Anoka High School 
wearing day of truth T-shirts, preaching in the halls about the sin of 
homosexuality.

Justin wanted to brush them off, but was troubled by their proselytizing. 
Secretly, he had begun to worry that maybe he was an abomination, like the 
Bible

said.

Justin was trying not to care what anyone else thought and be true to 
himself. He surrounded himself with a bevy of girlfriends who cherished him 
for his

sweet, sunny disposition. He played cello in the orchestra, practicing for 
hours up in his room, where he'd covered one wall with mementos of good 
times:

taped-up movie-ticket stubs, gum wrappers, Christmas cards. Justin had even 
briefly dated a boy, a 17-year-old he'd met online who attended a nearby 
high

school. The relationship didn't end well: The boyfriend had cheated on him, 
and compounding Justin's hurt, his coming out had earned Justin hateful 
Facebook

messages from other teens - some from those he didn't even know - telling 
him he was a fag who didn't deserve to live. At least his freshman year of 
high

school was nearly done. Only three more years to go. He wondered how he 
would ever make it.

Though some members of the Anoka-Hennepin school board had been appalled by 
"No Homo Promo" since its passage 14 years earlier, it wasn't until 2009 
that

the board brought the policy up for review, after a student named Alex 
Merritt filed a complaint with the state Department of Human Rights claiming 
he'd

been gay-bashed by two of his teachers during high school; according to the 
complaint, the teachers had announced in front of students that Merritt, who

is straight, "swings both ways," speculated that he wore women's clothing, 
and compared him to a Wisconsin man who had sex with a dead deer. The 
teachers

denied the charges, but the school district paid $25,000 to settle the 
complaint. Soon representatives from the gay-rights group Outfront Minnesota 
began

making inquiries at board meetings. "No Homo Promo" was starting to look 
like a risky policy.

"The lawyers said, 'You'd have a hard time defending it,'" remembers Scott 
Wenzel, a board member who for years had pushed colleagues to abolish the 
policy.

"It was clear that it might risk a lawsuit." But while board members agreed 
that such an overtly anti-gay policy needed to be scrapped, they also agreed

that some guideline was needed to not only help teachers navigate a topic as 
inflammatory as homosexuality but to appease the area's evangelical 
activists.

So the legal department wrote a broad new course of action with language 
intended to give a respectful nod to the topic - but also an equal measure 
of

respect to the anti-gay contingent. The new policy was circulated to staff 
without a word of introduction. (Parents were not alerted at all, unless 
they

happened to be diligent online readers of board-meeting minutes.) And while 
"No Homo Promo" had at least been clear, the new Sexual Orientation 
Curriculum

Policy mostly just puzzled the teachers who'd be responsible for enforcing 
it. It read:

Anoka-Hennepin staff, in the course of their professional duties, shall 
remain neutral on matters regarding sexual orientation including but not 
limited

to student-led discussions.

It quickly became known as the "neutrality" policy. No one could figure out 
what it meant. "What is 'neutral'?" asks instructor Merrick-Lockett. 
"Teachers

are constantly asking, 'Do you think I could get in trouble for this? Could 
I get fired for that?' So a lot of teachers sidestep it. They don't want to

deal with district backlash."

English teachers worried they'd get in trouble for teaching books by gay 
authors, or books with gay characters. Social-studies teachers wondered what 
to

do if a student wrote a term paper on gay rights, or how to address current 
events like "don't ask, don't tell." Health teachers were faced with the 
impossible

task of teaching about AIDS awareness and safe sex without mentioning 
homosexuality. Many teachers decided once again to keep gay issues from the 
curriculum

altogether, rather than chance saying something that could be interpreted as 
anything other than neutral.

"There has been widespread confusion," says Anoka-Hennepin teachers' union 
president Julie Blaha. "You ask five people how to interpret the policy and 
you

get five different answers." Silenced by fear, gay teachers became more 
vigilant than ever to avoid mention of their personal lives, and in 
closeting themselves,

they inadvertently ensured that many students had no real-life gay role 
models. "I was told by teachers, 'You have to be careful, it's really not 
safe

for you to come out,'" says the psychologist Cashen, who is a lesbian. "I 
felt like I couldn't have a picture of my family on my desk." When teacher 
Jefferson

Fietek was outed in the community paper, which referred to him as an "open 
homosexual," he didn't feel he could address the situation with his students

even as they passed the newspaper around, tittering. When one finally asked, 
"Are you gay?" he panicked. "I was terrified to answer that question," 
Fietek

says. "I thought, 'If I violate the policy, what's going to happen to me?'"

The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin 
Anderson, "I would hear people calling people 'fags' all the time without it

being addressed. Teachers just didn't respond." In Andover High School, when 
10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him

a "faggot," he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At 
Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a 
"lesbo"

and a "sinner" - in earshot of teachers - that she complained to an 
associate principal, who counseled her to "lay low"; the girl would later 
attempt suicide.

At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon 
from above in a boys' bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, "It 
was

probably water." Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed 
notes saying, "Get out of this town, fag"; when a teacher intercepted one 
such

note, she simply threw it away.

"You feel horrible about yourself," remembers Dylon. "Like, why do these 
kids hate me so much? And why won't anybody help me?" The following year, 
after

Dylon was hit in the head with a binder and called "fag," the associate 
principal told Dylon that since there was no proof of the incident she could 
take

no action. By contrast, Dylon and others saw how the same teachers who 
ignored anti-gay insults were quick to reprimand kids who uttered racial 
slurs.

It further reinforced the message resonating throughout the district: Gay 
kids simply didn't deserve protection.

"Justin?" Tammy Aaberg rapped on her son's locked bedroom door again. It was 
past noon, and not a peep from inside, unusual for Justin.

"Justin?" She could hear her own voice rising as she pounded harder, 
suddenly overtaken by a wild terror she couldn't name. "Justin!" she yelled. 
Tammy

grabbed a screwdriver and loosened the doorknob. She pushed open the door. 
He was wearing his Anoka High School sweatpants and an old soccer shirt. His

feet were dangling off the ground. Justin was hanging from the frame of his 
futon, which he'd taken out from under his mattress and stood upright in the

corner of his room. Screaming, Tammy ran to hold him and recoiled at his 
cold skin. His limp body was grotesquely bloated - her baby - eyes closed, 
head

lolling to the right, a dried smear of saliva trailing from the corner of 
his mouth. His cheeks were strafed with scratch marks, as though in his 
final

moments he'd tried to claw his noose loose. He'd cinched the woven belt so 
tight that the mortician would have a hard time masking the imprint it left

in the flesh above Justin's collar.

Still screaming, Tammy ran to call 911. She didn't notice the cellphone on 
the floor below Justin's feet, containing his last words, a text in the wee 
hours:

:-( he had typed to a girlfriend.

What's wrong

Nothing

I can come over

No I'm fine

Are you sure you'll be ok

No it's ok I'll be fine, I promise

Seeking relief from bullying, Brittany transferred to Jackson Middle School. 
Her very first day of eighth grade, eight boys crowded around her on the bus

home. "Hey, Brittany, I heard your friend Sam shot herself," one began.

"Did you see her blow her brains out?"

"Did you pull the trigger for her?"

"What did it look like?"

"Was there brain all over the wall?"

"You should do it too. You should go blow your head off."

Sobbing, Brittany ran from the bus stop and into her mother's arms. Her mom 
called Jackson's guidance office to report the incident, but as before, 
nothing

ever seemed to come of their complaints. Not after the Gelderts' Halloween 
lawn decorations were destroyed, and the boys on the bus asked, "How was the

mess last night?" Not after Brittany told the associate principal about the 
mob of kids who pushed her down the hall and nearly into a trash can. Her 
name

became Dyke, Queer, Faggot, Guy, Freak, Transvestite, Bitch, Cunt, Slut, 
Whore, Skank, Prostitute, Hooker. Brittany felt worn to a nub, exhausted 
from

scanning for threat, stripped of emotional armor. In her journal, she wrote, 
"Brittany is dead."

As Brittany vainly cried out for help, the school board was busy trying to 
figure out how to continue tactfully ignoring the existence of LGBT kids 
like

her. Justin Aaberg's suicide, Anoka-Hennepin's seventh, had sent the 
district into damage-control mode. "Everything changed after Justin," 
remembers teacher

Fietek. "The rage at his funeral, students were storming up to me saying, 
'Why the hell did the school let this happen? They let it happen to Sam and 
they

let it happen to Justin!'" Individual teachers quietly began taking small 
risks, overstepping the bounds of neutrality to offer solace to gay students

in crisis. "My job is just a job; these children are losing their lives," 
says Fietek. "The story I hear repeatedly is 'Nobody else is like me, nobody

else is going through what I'm going through.' That's the lie they've been 
fed, but they're buying into it based on the fear we have about open and 
honest

conversations about sexual orientation."

LGBT students were stunned to be told for the first time about the existence 
of the neutrality policy that had been responsible for their teachers' 
behavior.

But no one was more outraged to hear of it than Tammy Aaberg. Six weeks 
after her son's death, Aaberg became the first to publicly confront the 
Anoka-Hennepin

school board about the link between the policy, anti-gay bullying and 
suicide. She demanded the policy be revoked. "What about my parental rights 
to have

my gay son go to school and learn without being bullied?" Aaberg asked, 
weeping, as the board stared back impassively from behind a raised dais.

Anti-gay backlash was instant. Minnesota Family Council president Tom 
Prichard blogged that Justin's suicide could only be blamed upon one thing: 
his gayness.

"Youth who embrace homosexuality are at greater risk [of suicide], because 
they've embraced an unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle," Prichard 
wrote.

Anoka-Hennepin conservatives formally organized into the Parents Action 
League, declaring opposition to the "radical homosexual" agenda in schools. 
Its

stated goals, advertised on its website, included promoting Day of Truth, 
providing resources for students "seeking to leave the homosexual 
lifestyle,"

supporting the neutrality policy and targeting "pro-gay activist teachers 
who fail to abide by district policies."

Asked on a radio program whether the anti-gay agenda of her ilk bore any 
responsibility for the bullying and suicides, Barb Anderson, co-author of 
the original

"No Homo Promo," held fast to her principles, blaming pro-gay groups for the 
tragedies. She explained that such "child corruption" agencies allow 
"quote-unquote

gay kids" to wrongly feel legitimized. "And then these kids are locked into 
a lifestyle with their choices limited, and many times this can be 
disastrous

to them as they get into the behavior which leads to disease and death," 
Anderson said. She added that if LGBT kids weren't encouraged to come out of 
the

closet in the first place, they wouldn't be in a position to be bullied.

Yet while everyone in the district was buzzing about the neutrality policy, 
the board simply refused to discuss it, not even when students began 
appearing

before them to detail their experiences with LGBT harassment. "The board 
stated quite clearly that they were standing behind that policy and were not 
willing

to take another look," recalls board member Wenzel. Further insulating 
itself from reality, the district launched an investigation into the 
suicides and

unsurprisingly, absolved itself of any responsibility. "Based on all the 
information we've been able to gather," read a statement from the 
superintendent's

office, "none of the suicides were connected to incidents of bullying or 
harassment."

Just to be on the safe side, however, the district held PowerPoint 
presentations in a handful of schools to train teachers how to defend gay 
students from

harassment while also remaining neutral on homosexuality. One slide 
instructed teachers that if they hear gay slurs - say, the word "fag" - the 
best response

is a tepid "That language is unacceptable in this school." ("If a more 
authoritative response is needed," the slide added, the teacher could 
continue with

the stilted, almost apologetic explanation, "In this school we are required 
to welcome all people and to make them feel safe.") But teachers were, of 
course,

reminded to never show "personal support for GLBT people" in the classroom.

Teachers left the training sessions more confused than ever about how to 
interpret the rules. And the board, it turned out, was equally confused. 
When a

local advocacy group, Gay Equity Team, met with the school board, the 
vice-chair thought the policy applied only to health classes, while the 
chair asserted

it applied to all curricula; and when the district legal counsel commented 
that some discussions about homosexuality were allowed, yet another board 
member

expressed surprise, saying he thought any discussion on the topic was 
forbidden. "How can the district ever train on a policy they do not 
understand themselves?"

GET officials asked in a follow-up letter. "Is there any doubt that teachers 
and staff are confused? The board is confused!"

With the adults thus distracted by endless policy discussions, the entire 
district became a place of dread for students. Every time a loudspeaker 
crackled

in class, kids braced themselves for the feared preamble, "We've had a 
tragic loss." Students spoke in hushed tones; some wept openly in the halls. 
"It

had that feeling of a horror movie - everyone was talking about death," says 
one 16-year-old student who broke down at Anoka High School one day and was

carted off to a psychiatric hospital for suicidal ideation. Over the course 
of the 2010-2011 school year, 700 students were evaluated for serious 
mental-health

issues, including hospitalizations for depression and suicide attempts. Kids 
flooded school counselors' offices, which reported an explosion of children

engaging in dangerous behaviors like cutting or asphyxiating each other in 
the "choking game."

Amid the pandemonium, the district's eighth suicide landed like a bomb: Cole 
Wilson, an Anoka High School senior with no apparent LGBT connection. The 
news

was frightening, but also horrifyingly familiar. "People were dying one 
after another," remembers former district student Katie MacDonald, 16, who 
struggled

with suicidal thoughts. "Every time you said goodbye to a friend, you felt 
like, 'Is this the last time I'm going to see you?'"

As a late-afternoon storm beats against the windows, 15-year-old Brittany 
Geldert sits in her living room. Her layered auburn hair falls into her 
face.

Her ears are lined with piercings; her nail polish is black. "They said I 
had anger, depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, an eating disorder," she 
recites,

speaking of the month she spent at a psychiatric hospital last year, at the 
end of eighth grade. "Mentally being degraded like that, I translated that

to 'I don't deserve to be happy,'" she says, barely holding back tears, as 
both parents look on with wet eyes. "Like I deserved the punishment - I've 
been

earning the punishment I've been getting."

She's fighting hard to rebuild her decimated sense of self. It's a far 
darker self than before, a guarded, distant teenager who bears little 
resemblance

to the openhearted young girl she was not long ago. But Brittany is also 
finding a reserve of strength she never realized she had, having stepped up 
as

one of five plaintiffs in the civil rights lawsuit against her school 
district. The road to the federal lawsuit was paved shortly after Justin 
Aaberg's

suicide, when a district teacher contacted the Southern Poverty Law Center 
to report the anti-gay climate, and the startling proportion of LGBT-related

suicide victims. After months of fact-finding, lawyers built a case based on 
the harrowing stories of anti-gay harassment in order to legally dispute 
Anoka-Hennepin's

neutrality policy. The lawsuit accuses the district of violating the kids' 
constitutional rights to equal access to education. In addition to making 
financial

demands, the lawsuit seeks to repeal the neutrality policy, implement 
LGBT-sensitivity training for students and staff, and provide guidance for 
teachers

on how to respond to anti-gay bullying.

The school district hasn't been anxious for a legal brawl, and the two 
parties have been in settlement talks practically since the papers were 
filed. Yet

the district still stubbornly clung to the neutrality policy until, at a 
mid-December school-board meeting, it proposed finally eliminating the 
policy

- claiming the move has nothing to do with the discrimination lawsuit - and, 
bizarrely, replacing it with the Controversial Topics Curriculum Policy, 
which

requires teachers to not reveal their personal opinions when discussing 
"controversial topics." The proposal was loudly rejected both by 
conservatives,

who blasted the board for retreating ("The gay activists now have it all," 
proclaimed one Parents Action League member) and by LGBT advocates, who 
understood

"controversial topics" to mean gays. Faced with such overwhelming 
disapproval, the board withdrew its proposed policy in January - and 
suggested a new

policy in its place: the Respectful Learning Environment Curriculum Policy, 
which the board is expected to swiftly approve.

The school district insists it has been portrayed unfairly. Superintendent 
Carlson points out it has been working hard to address the mental-health 
needs

of its students by hiring more counselors and staff - everything, it seems, 
but admit that its policy has created problems for its LGBT community. "We

understand that gay kids are bullied and harassed on a daily basis," and 
that that can lead to suicide, Carlson says. "But that was not the case 
here.

If you're looking for a cause, look in the area of mental health." In that 
sense, the district is in step with PAL. "How could not discussing 
homosexuality

in the public-school classrooms cause a teen to take his or her own life?" 
PAL asked Rolling Stone in an e-mail, calling the idea "absurd," going on to

say, "Because homosexual activists have hijacked and exploited teen suicides 
for their moral and political utility, much of society seems not to be 
looking

closely and openly at all the possible causes of the tragedies," including 
mental illness. Arguably, however, it is members of PAL who have hijacked 
this

entire discussion from the very start: Though they've claimed to represent 
the "majority" opinion on gay issues, and say they have 1,200 supporters, 
one

PAL parent reported that they have less than two dozen members.

Teachers' union president Blaha, who calls the district's behavior 
throughout this ordeal "irrational," speculates that the district's 
stupefying denial

is a reaction to the terrible notion that they might have played a part in 
children's suffering, or even their deaths: "I think your mind just reels in

the face of that stress and that horror. They just lost their way."

That denial reaches right up to the pinnacle of the local political food 
chain: Michele Bachmann, who stayed silent on the suicide cluster in her 
congressional

district for months - until Justin's mom, Tammy Aaberg, forced her to 
comment. In September, while Bachmann was running for the GOP presidential 
nomination,

Aaberg delivered a petition of 141,000 signatures to Bachmann's office, 
asking her to address the Anoka-Hennepin suicides and publicly denounce 
anti-gay

bullying. Bachmann has publicly stated her opposition to anti-bullying 
legislation, asking in a 2006 state Senate committee hearing, "What will be 
our

definition of bullying? Will it get to the point where we are completely 
stifling free speech and expression?... Will we be expecting boys to be 
girls?"

Bachmann responded to the petition with a generic letter to constituents 
telling them that "bullying is wrong," and "all human lives have undeniable 
value."

Tammy Aaberg found out about the letter secondhand. "I never got a letter," 
says Tammy, seated in the finished basement of the Aabergs' new home in 
Champlin;

the family couldn't bear to remain in the old house where Justin hanged 
himself. "My kid died in her district. And I'm the one that presented the 
dang

petition!" In a closed room a few feet away are Justin's remaining 
possessions: his cello, in a closet; his soccer equipment, still packed in 
his Adidas

bag. Tammy's suffering hasn't ended. In mid-December, her nine-year-old son 
was hospitalized for suicidal tendencies; he'd tried to drown himself in the

bathtub, wanting to see his big brother again.

Justin's suicide has left Tammy on a mission, transforming her into an LGBT 
activist and a den mother for gay teens, intent upon turning her own tragedy

into others' salvation. She knows too well the price of indifference, or 
hostility, or denial. Because there's one group of kids who can't afford to 
live

in denial, a group for whom the usual raw teenage struggles over identity, 
peer acceptance and controlling one's own impulsivity are matters of extreme

urgency - quite possibly matters of life or death.

Which brings us to Anoka Middle School for the Arts' first Gay Straight 
Alliance meeting of the school year, where 19 kids seated on the linoleum 
floor

try to explain to me what the GSA has meant to them. "It's a place of 
freedom, where I can just be myself," a preppy boy in basketball shorts 
says. This

GSA, Sam Johnson's legacy, held its first meeting shortly after her death 
under the tutelage of teacher Fietek, and has been a crucial place for LGBT 
kids

and their friends to find support and learn coping skills. Though still a 
source of local controversy, there is now a student-initiated GSA in every 
Anoka-Hennepin

middle and high school. As three advisers look on, the kids gush about how 
affirming the club is - and how necessary, in light of how unsafe they 
continue

to feel at school. "I'll still get bullied to the point where-" begins a 
skinny eighth-grade girl, then takes a breath. "I actually had to go to the 
hospital

for suicide," she continues, looking at the floor. "I just recently stopped 
cutting because of bullying."

I ask for a show of hands: How many of you feel safe at school? Of the 19 
kids assembled, two raise their hands. The feeling of insecurity continues 
to

reverberate particularly through the Anoka-Hennepin middle schools these 
days, in the wake of the district's ninth suicide. In May, Northdale Middle 
School's

Jordan Yenor, a 14-year-old with no evident LGBT connection, took his life. 
Psychologist Cashen says that at Northdale Middle alone this school year, 
several

students have been hospitalized for mental-health issues, and at least 14 
more assessed for suicidal ideation; for a quarter of them, she says, 
"Sexual

orientation was in the mix."

A slight boy with an asymmetrical haircut speaks in a soft voice. "What this 
GSA means to me, is: In sixth grade my, my only friend here, committed 
suicide."

The room goes still. He's talking about Samantha. The boy starts to cry. 
"She was the one who reached out to me." He doubles over in tears, and 
everyone

collapses on top of him in a group hug. From somewhere in the pile, he 
continues to speak in a trembling voice: "I joined the GSA 'cause I wanted 
to be

just like her. I wanted to be nice and - loved."　

　

Not merely galactically stupid ignoramuses, Bachmann -- along with her 
fellow travelers -- are malevolent hate-filled bigots, sociopaths, 
misanthropes and

sadists; there is blood on their hands, a fact of which they take great 
pride.

That she -- and her ilk -- have the obscene temerity to call themselves 
"Christians" is out-and-out BLASPHEMY, for the word literally means 
"Christ-like,"

a quality NONE of them even remotely posses. THEY are the abominations.

Moreover, unable to distinguish personal subjective experience from the 
reality of the external world, these cretins satisfy the medical criteria 
for a

diagnosis of psychosis; that is, they are literally mentally ill.

Homosexuality is as much a part of nature and the natural world as are, 
alas, the cretins who claim otherwise.

The cruel irony is that many of these bible-beating bunko artists are 
perfectly described by a line from one of Shakespeare's better-known plays: 
"The

lady doth protest too much, methinks" (Hamlet: Act III, Scene II).

Finally, as a Lutheran pastor once said in a sermon, "How can those of you 
who have not the slightest notion of what goes on in the minds of your dogs

and cats presume to know what God is thinking?" In fact, they can't.　　　

　

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/one-towns-war-on-gay-teens-20120202

　



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