Children, Youth and Environments 17(2), 2007

This Is Political!
Negotiating the Legacies of the First School-Based
Gay Youth Group
Dominique Johnson

The Joseph Beam Youth Collaborative

Citation: Johnson, Dominique (2007). This Is Political! Negotiating the

Legacies of the First School-Based Gay Youth Group. Children, Youth and
Environments 17(2): 380-387. Retrieved [date] from
http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye.

Abstract

In 1972, a group of students of color at New York Citys George Washington High
Schools founded the first school-based gay group on record in the United States,
using their school as a site of activism by participating in both their schools student
government opportunities and in an emergent social movement. The group formed
by these Bronx students can be interpreted as the very first example of what is
known today as a gay-straight alliance (GSA) even though the conventional history
of the GSA begins in the late 1980s with a group of suburban private school
students. This exclusion from the history of student participation in activism for
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) civil rights suggests a significant
alternate reading of the racism, classism, and geographic biases of the greater
LGBT movement, its organization, direction, priorities, and narratives for/about
LGBTQ youth, especially urban youth of color. Considering alternate readings of
youth participation might better enable us to envision a political strategy that
accentuates shared values of social justice, the civil and human rights to an
equitable education, and the significance of building coalitions in order to ensure
safer schools for all.

Keywords: LGBTQ students, urban education, gay-straight alliances, social justice,

activism, safer schools, racism

2007 Children, Youth and Environments

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In 1972, a group of students at New York Citys George Washington High Schools
founded the first school-based gay group on record in the United States.
Predominantly comprised of gay students of color, the members of George
Washington High Schools student-initiated extracurricular gay group organized
boldly within their school, hoping to enact change using their school as a site of
activism by participating in both their schools student government opportunities
and in an emergent social movement. The group formed by these Bronx students
can be interpreted as the very first example of what is known today as a gaystraight alliance (GSA)extracurricular safe spaces for lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students and their allieseven though the
conventional history of the GSA begins in the late 1980s with a group of suburban
private school students (Blount 2004). With the exception of an article written by
Cohen (2005), no written record makes any reference to the work of the Bronx
students of the Stonewall era, 1 a glaring omission in the history of student
participation in activism for LGBT civil rights. These exclusions from both social
movement history and the conventional history of the GSA suggest a significant
alternate reading of the racism, classism, and geographic biases of the greater
LGBT movement, as well as its organization, direction, priorities, and narratives
for/about LGBTQ youth, especially urban youth of color. 2 This essay offers an
alternate reading of an area of LGBT history that drives educational policymaking
today by advocating a legacy that silences youth participation in political activism
within schools.
The work of the George Washington students brought what we would now consider
LGBTQ student activism within the boundaries of school for perhaps the very first
time in U.S. history. Their legacy as student activists reminds us that, at a very
early time in the modern LGBT liberation movement, gay youth were alive and well
and going to every high school (George Washington Goes Gay 1976, 23). The
precedent for youth participation set by George Washington students was crucial in
beginning the long road toward youth activism for LGBT justice in schools. These
students utilized a definitively political orientation in their activism for participation
in their school community and for safer schools where they could be free from both
physical and psychological harm. It is important to negotiate the legacy and agency
of these activist youth of the Stonewall era for todays youth. Price-Spratlen (1996)
explains this as a process of negotiating legacies, a method of introspection in
which we attempt to learn the lessons of history by seeking to understand the
contexts and contributions of our ancestors (216). By recovering and articulating
the histories of LGBTQ youth of color in educational contexts, they might be better
able to negotiate their own legacies and understand the historical contexts and
contributions of those who came before.
1

The Stonewall Riots ensued after a 1969 police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New
York Citys Greenwich Village. These riots were the catalyst for Gay Liberation and the
modern LGBT civil rights movement.
2
For a diverse and comprehensive body of research considering contexts of LGBTQ
sexualities such as race, ethnicity and social class, see: Chan 1995; Johnson 2006;
Kumashiro 2001; 2002; McCready 2001; 2003; 2005; Parks 2001; Rodrguez 2003; Russell
and Truong 2001; and Ryan 2002.

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Educational researchers should strive to recover history in a way that articulates

the problematic series of exclusions over time. Youth in our communities have been
instrumental in explicating the power of language and identity politics,
communicating their lived experiences of self-identification. For example, youth
before Stonewall were among the first to use the term gay as a political identity,
and some youth now use the term queer in a similar way. LGBTQ sexualities are
situated in the contexts of other identities such as race, ethnicity, dis/ability,
gender, geography, and social class despite the fact that social movements most
often require activists to privilege one identity over another. This essay considers
the possibilities that, as a result, history has been constructed in such a way that
white middle/upper class LGBTQ students who attended a suburban private school
and their experiences have been privileged over working/middle class LGBTQ
students of color who attended an urban public school.
The George Washington students shared the story of how their group began in a
pamphlet written by and for gay youth, Growing Up Gay (1976):
To maintain our rights and dignity, we must assert ourselves and our very
being! This is political! The very nature of coming out not only demands
that we become political, but there is no other choice. And since the high
school is a microcosm of society in general, gay students are expected to
keep their self-identity buried under the unfounded and senseless prejudices
of their authorities and prejudices which are based upon backward social,
political and economic ideas.
They describe how their first group meeting was on December 20, 1972, just one
week after Ms. Elle Lamadrid, an 18-year-old self-identified Third World [of color]
woman, thought of the idea for the club at another after-school encounter group
session. There were 20 student activist group members who were predominantly
self-identified as Third World, with 15 gay members, nine women and six men, and
six straight allies. The pamphlets article, George Washington Goes Gay, offered
the groups manifesto and their resolutions of student rights and demands to the
public high schools of the New York City Public School District. Their writing was
fundamentally political:
This present imbalance of student civil rights is political! To end this
discriminating abuse, political organizing becomes mandatory. [A]s usual,
we hold our future in our own hands.to be respected as any other human
being, and walk and live proudly in the communities where we work and play
(20-23).
The crucial turning point of Stonewall was made possible by the work of homophile
activists in political organizations such as the Mattachine Society, 3 and the volatile
climate of the late 1960s (Vaid 1995). The most radical activists espoused gay
Founded by Harry Hay in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, the Mattachine Society was the
earliest homophile organization. For more information see Behind the Mask of the
Mattachine by James T. Sears (2006).

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power, through which they sought a multi-issue, total transformation of society

(Armstrong 2002). At this decisive point in the movements history, a contentious
divergence emerged between those working for multi-issue, revolutionary social
change and those who decided to continue and/or adopt single-issue politics. It was
not until Gay Liberation in the late 1960s that the multi-issue, revolutionary political
tactics of radical gay liberationists galvanized gays to organize themselves in the
struggles against racism and sexism. Scholars such as Armstrong (2002),
however, describe the radicals work as ephemeral, lasting only until the end of
1971.
Most accounts of Gay Liberation fail to mention the work of gay youth liberationists
and other young people working for change in their schools and communities,
including the George Washington students. LGBT activism for reform in an
educational context is thought of as a recent phenomenon. To be young and gay
before Stonewall meant creating change from within the emerging gay youth
liberationists movement. Marginalized by the greater adult community, gay youth
worked together across identities of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation,
gender, and religion. Oppressed by those who should have been allies, they were
among the first to advocate for conscious reflection within the emerging movement.
The experiences of the George Washington students are offered here as crucial
moments in the continuing struggle for tolerance and a safer school climate for
LGBT youth. Since the founding of their gay student group in 1972, tolerance and a
safe school climate for LGBT students has achieved the status of a national, state,
and local policy issue. An early slogan of pre-Stonewall activists invoked the
importance of education in the struggle for gay liberation by insisting upon justice
through knowledge (Magnus Hirschfeld, as cited in Hogan and Hudson 1998, 235).
The Massachusetts Department of Educations nationally recognized initiative
(begun in 1993), the Safe Schools Program for Gay and Lesbian Students, is
perhaps the most widely recognized program concerning school safety and justice
for LGBTQ students. Massachusetts has over 150 GSAs, more than any other state.
This is likely related in part to a 1993 Governors statement encouraging, among
other interventions, the creation and support of GSAs in all Massachusetts high
schools. High school GSAs have been shown to have various goals, from eliminating
homophobia in schools, to raising peer awareness about homosexuality, to support
group members with their personal emotional needs. The establishment of GSAs is
controversial, and they are often central sites of cultural contention, particularly
with religious conservatives.
Many GSAs across the country follow the model of Uribes Project 10 (Uribe 1994)
developed in the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1984. Unlike the GSA at the
suburban private school in late 1980s, Project 10 provided a prototype for a GSA
that is considered by many to be the first formal GSA model. Project 10s model
centers on programming that is focused on preventing dropout and other at-risk
behavior interventions through fostering support groups for LGBTQ youth. It is
argued, however, that the Project 10 model is more of a precursor to the GSA,
more of a support group rather than a GSA by definition since it did not seek to

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include straight youth in any of its program activities, was predominantly a support
group facilitated by an adult, and did not identify as an alliance of gay and straight
students. When established in suburban Boston under the GSA name in the late
1980s, the private school group not only provided support, but also offered a space
where students could consider language as a means by which they constructed
their own identitiesan aspect of GSAs that continues to be one of their more
compelling components. While GSAs can play a vital role in making schools safer
and more inclusive places for all students, GSAs are only part of the bigger picture
(Griffin and Ouellett 2002, 2) in the modern struggle for a safer school climate.
The goal of the George Washington student group was to create a safer, more
tolerant climate for all students in their school. They point to the shared oppression
of all high school students and imply that they are organizing under a multi-issue
coalition politics framework. At the same time, they also specifically identified their
struggle with the Gay Liberation movement. They described how gay people all over
the world were no longer tolerating the oppression they endured as students, and
were rising up and demanding their just and true rights as human beings
(George Washington Goes Gay 1976, 21). Using the language of identity as
politicized by Stonewall (as influenced by the Civil Rights and Womens
Movements), the George Washington students resolution of student rights is the
first documented case of a group of students proclaiming: [W]e as gay students
demand the same rights (social and political) as straight students (George
Washington Goes Gay 1976, 21).
They situated their struggle in the larger political struggle of the Gay Liberation and
Gay Rights Movements by demanding that the city high schools of New York grant
them the
right to form gay groups of both a social and political nature[t]he right to
be included and to receive fair representation in any high school course
dealing with sexuality (as both sexual beings and as a political movement in
a changing society with changing cultural values), and if none exist, to have
them created[and t]he right to be treated as equal human beings, which
includes the removal of all textbooks and other educational media that treat
homosexuality as an aberration, rather than as an integral and important
part of human sexuality (George Washington Goes Gay 1976, 21).
We have only recently begun to address the borders that exist between sexual and
gender identity, and education. To do so is reformative, radical, and actionoriented. Furthermore, to configure youth as a political site, it becomes
impossible not to discuss as well the site of youth as pedagogical, which is to say
that politics and pedagogy are intertwined (Rodriguez 1998, 175). Student
activists in our schools are continually engaging in an enterprise of agency,
educating others through their participation in activism.
The racist, classist, and geographic biases of the greater LGBT movement,
reflections of society at large, are responsible for a great deal of the invisibility of
the George Washington students in LGBT educational history. Their omission is an

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385

unfortunate reminder of the organization, direction, priorities, and narratives

created, maintained, and lauded both for and about LGBTQ youth. One of the
tragedies of this incomplete collective history is that it seems as though the
legacies of these students have not been worth negotiating. This in particular
compels us to consider what these exclusions over time might mean for people
especially youthof color who are LGBTQ. Racism, classism, and ageism continue
to keep the LGBT community unable to represent and honor all of its members,
including some of its very first student activists. Those working for LGBT and allied
rights in education must envision a better political strategy that accentuates shared
values of social justice, the civil and human rights to an unbiased education free
from harm, and the significance of building coalitions in order to ensure safer
schools for all.

Dominique Johnson (BA, Bryn Mawr College; MA, Stanford University) is the
founding executive director of The Joseph Beam Youth Collaborative, focusing her
work on gender issues in education, social justice in schools, and educational policy.
She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education.

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