Writing my principal

I am beginning to write on this blog about my experiences in high school.  I've received some gentle, powerful, thoughtful responses, both in comments and privately.  Thank you.  It's helping me do more work on this. 

Before reading this post, I invite you to read the two I've written so far.  While you can absolutely read this one free-standing, the prior two provide some good background:

• Another cost of bigotry, classism, bullying, homophobia, and heterosexism
• Reactions to "The Prep School Negro"

Today's post is a letter, one that was surprisingly scary to write.  Some part of me still feels like that scared high school froshling or sophomore who's being blamed for being bullied.  (And I was blamed for being bullied.)  Some part of me almost expects them to say, "Well, what do you expect?  You did
turn out to be a lesbian."  To which my grown-up self says, "That attitude is exactly why LGBTQ teens have an even-higher risk of being bullied and of committing suicide than their straight and cisgender peers.  That needs to stop." 

Why this post, now? http://www.writeyourprincipal.com/, and the encouragement of my Garrison friends on Facebook and of Andre Robert Lee.  Thank you.

October 12, 2010

Melinda Bihn

Head of the Upper School

G. Peter O’Neill, Jr.

Head of School

Garrison Forest School

300 Garrison Forest Road

Owings Mills, MD  21117

Dear Ms. Bihn and Mr. O’Neill,

            I’m a 1986 alumna of Garrison Forest School.  Several things are prompting me to write to you today: the Write Your Principal Project (www.writeyourprincipal.com); conversations I had during this year’s National Coming Out Day; the increased attention currently being paid to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer teenagers who have recently committed suicide; and the heartbreaking fact that even after those deaths, more LGBTQ teenagers are committing suicide every day. 

But what’s prompting me most of all to write are the conversations I am starting to have with other Garrison alumnae about our experiences of bullying when we were at Garrison – and in particular, the pain from anti-lesbian bullying I experienced when I was a Garrison girl.  That pain remains with me to this day, poisoning the legacy of what was in so many other ways a wonderful education, and poisoning my present-day relationship with GFS. 

            When I was at Garrison, great care was paid to the issue of teen suicide.  However, no care at all was paid to the fact that LGBTQ teens were at a much higher risk of suicide than their straight and cisgender peers. 

What’s more, bullying against perceived lesbians and against girls and women who didn’t conform to gender stereotypes was rampant during my four years in Garrison’s Upper School.  Both students and adults were targets, and both students and faculty perpetrated this kind of bullying.  This created an unsafe climate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, faculty, and staff, as well as for members of the Garrison community who were straight and cisgender allies. 

            Nationally, LGBTQ teens are still at a higher risk of suicide and at a higher risk of experiencing bullying than are their straight and cisgender peers. 

·       According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, LGBTQ youth are 3-4 times as likely to attempt suicide as straight and cisgender youth – not as a result of being LGBTQ, but as a result of bullying and harassment. 

·       The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network’s 2009 National School Climate Survey found that, due to perceived sexual orientation or to gender expression:

o      85% of LGBT students experienced school harassment within the last year

o      61% felt unsafe at school

o      30% had stayed away from school for at least a day within the last month due to safety concerns

o      LGBT students who experienced increased rates of harassment and victimization experienced increased levels of depression

o      GLSEN also reported on positive steps schools can take to enhance students’ safety. 

            I graduated in 1986; it’s now 2010.  So I ask you:

1)    What has changed in the nearly 25 years since I graduated from Garrison? 

2)    How is Garrison safer now for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally students, faculty, and staff? 

3)    How does Garrison prevent – and when prevention fails, how does it stop – bullying against LGBTQ and ally members of the Garrison community? 

4)    How does Garrison support LGBTQ and ally students, faculty, and staff? 

I very much look forward to hearing from you. 

Yours truly,

Staśa Morgan-Appel

Class of 1986

Reactions to "The Prep School Negro"

At the end of March, I went to see the movie "The Prep School Negro."

I'd wanted to see it for a while, for a couple of different reasons.

One is that I was a white charity kid at a prestigious girls' prep school.

One is that Andre Robert Lee grew up in Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia area is where I've lived most of my adult life and which I identify as home. His prep school is in "my" part of town, literally within walking distance of where I most recently lived in Philly. I used to work in the part of town where he grew up, and so did Beloved Wife.

Another is that I have found myself doing a lot of professional work around issues of poor African-Americans and education, and around issues of the "culture" of class. The movie trailer talks both about Lee's "golden ticket," and his sister's sense of losing him to another culture -- powerful stuff, with familiar echoes for me personally and professionally.

Yet another is that I'm now a Quaker, the school that Lee went to is a Quaker school, and I have this "thing" about talking about class issues in Quakerism. Class is present all the time in, and is an important part of, my experience as a Friend; I am determined to keep talking about class issues in our Religious Society; and work we do as Friends about class and race in general is not about "other people" -- it's about us, and it's about me specifically, not just my past life, but my here and now life.

So, there were lots of threads that drew me.

But most of all, what drew me was the intersection of class and race. I knew Lee's experience would have been different from mine. But I also wanted to know what might be the same.

I think I wanted to know, what might I see in Lee's experience that would help me make sense of mine?

I don't talk about my high school much. I don't feel any school pride. Until about a year and a half ago, I kept in touch with exactly one person I'd gone to high school with. I got an excellent education there, and it stood me in good stead, and I'm grateful for that. But I had a horrible time in so many ways, and in so many ways I hated it.

Some of that was about class. Some of that was about homophobia, although I didn't know it then. A lot of it was about girl-on-girl bullying.

So I had hoped that watching Lee's movie would help me figure some stuff out -- about my high school experience, about talking with Friends about class and race and education.

What did I find out?

Yes, there's a lot in this movie that resonates with my teen self. I didn't talk right, either, and I sure didn't dress/look right. I had to figure out where to sit for lunch, in a way completely different from and yet eerily similar to the way the kids of color in this movie did. I was both ashamed of and proud of my parents. I didn't know who the other kids were who might be "like me"/"community scholars." There are other things that were completely different for me, other things that were so much the same.

I realize this was already blindingly obvious, but I never realized it until I saw the PSN and talked with folks there, including Andre Robert Lee: I discovered that I'm ashamed. Ashamed that I went to a privileged prep school, and ashamed that I never fit in there. Both at the same time.

But I also discovered this movie is a lot more tender and gentle, and about a ton less bitter, than I feel about my own experience. Lee, and the other folks in PSN, are a lot more open and honest about how mixed their experience is/was. The good and the bad. Me, I try to hide both.

So what I walked away with is something one of the women there said to Lee during discussion: "We didn't talk about this [then], and this is our experience, and we need to."

We need to talk about it.

I need to talk about high school. I need to talk about being a charity kid going to a prep school. (We didn't have open euphemisms for charity kids like "community scholars"; it was a big secret if you were on financial aid, although you could certainly guess about some of us -- my family's car, for example, was a dead giveaway.) I need to talk about my class background, and about my life as a mixed-class person, and what that's like and how it plays out in my life now. I need to talk more openly about my teenage years and my high school experience.

But here's the big thing:

It's certainly occurred to me a number of times over the years to go back to my high school and talk about homophobia and the particular challenges facing LGBTQ teens.

But never once, until I saw PSN and heard folks talk there, did it occur to me to go back to my high school and talk about class.

Not once.

I mentioned this to Andre, in part because I was so shocked at myself.

Meeting and talking with Andre was like meeting a long-lost cousin in some ways. We had a brief, but really good, talk. Our experience is not the same, but there's some important stuff we share. And Andre's one of the only people I've ever talked to who I know gets it about my high school experience.

It's really, really important for white kids who went to prep schools on charity to start talking about our experiences. This is part of who we are. The good, the bad, the mixed. The stuff that was horrible. The joys we never would have had otherwise. All of the ordinary, everyday stuff that was neither here nor there.

Race and class are intertwined in US society, but they're not 100% the same. We can't expect our sisters and brothers of color to be the only ones who do the work of unpacking the class issues around this, and we can't ride their coat-tails, either. We can partner with them, and I'm pretty excited about that. And I'm thrilled that Andre thinks it's a good idea for white folks to use "The Prep School Negro" as a springboard to talk about our own experiences with our own "golden tickets."

Lee asked us a couple of things before we saw the film. One was, What did you think when you first heard the title, "The Prep School Negro"? How about now, after? Two was, the same with the content -- what did you see? Third was, what's one word that describes your reaction?

My word: Big-hearted.

If you're not sure you want to see this movie because you think it might make you too uncomfortable, I urge you to go see it. You might laugh, you might cry, you will very likely appreciate it, and I'm 90% sure your heart will be glad you went.


Click here for "The Prep School Negro" website.
Click here for "The Prep School Negro" on Facebook.

Another cost of bigotry, classism, bullying, homophobia, and heterosexism

I spent the weekend in Molalla, OR, at the Mid-Winter Gathering for Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns. And I've been thinking about something that came up the last day in my worship-sharing group.

I recently became Facebook friends with someone I'd been friends with in high school. I sought her out and "friended" her; she accepted, with a note that she'd been wondering when I'd turn up, since it seemed like just about everyone else had.

This gave me pause.

I've kept in touch with almost no one I went to high school with. The two notable exceptions are my best friend from those days -- who is also on Facebook -- and someone else I barely knew, who'd gone to the same college but whom I'd easily avoided there, but whom I discovered many years later is also a lesbian and a also feminist Jew.

I hated high school. I was a charity kid at an all-girls' private college-prep day and boarding school. I got an excellent education and had a terrible time. I had a panic attack the first time I went back on campus after graduation.

There were so many ways I didn't fit in. The most obvious was class. Everybody knew I was one of the charity kids. I wore the wrong clothes. My parents drove me back and forth to school every day in the wrong kind of car -- a beat-up old jalopy, not a shiny BMW or Mercedes. We didn't vacation in the right places (we didn't go on vacation at all). I'd never been out of the US, or even on an airplane. I'd never ridden a horse, except for ponies at the occasional fair, and one summer when I got financial aid to the archdiocesan day camp, both of which definitely didn't count. I was also two or three years younger than most of my classmates, most of whom had been together through middle school, some since elementary school, although there was always an influx of new girls in 9th grade. Being "the smart one" was no help.

I developed a small group of friends -- 6 of us from different grades who hung out together and, for the most part, kept each other sane.

In 9th or 10th grade, the guidance counselor called my then-mother to alert her that she was going to call me in for a conference. Because some of the other girls had come to her saying that I was a lesbian and that my best friend and I were lovers.

I didn't entirely understand this when I was told about it, but I knew it was a terrible thing. I didn't even know what lesbians were. When I asked, I was told they were women who liked to sleep with other women, and I was really puzzled: Why? And besides, I wasn't having sex with anybody. And besides again, what could two girls do in bed together? (I have to snicker at this one, because by senior year, I knew -- thanks to my boyfriend -- just how much sex, and fun, two consenting teenagers can have without ever technically meeting the definition of "sex" I held back then.)

What it boiled down to was this: my best friend and I were too physically affectionnate with each other, and it had to stop. And our friendship was too intense, too, so we'd better scale that back.

Except it's not like the harassment stopped.

I couldn't win.

I realized the confrontation with the school counselor -- and a right nasty confrontation it was, with me in hysterical tears -- was related to a whole bunch of outright harassment from a particular group of girls, and more covert harassment from others. And that harassment only got worse. I was so tired of being afraid to be alone with my classmates.

Fast forward fifteen or so years. I was reading my college's alumnae magazine, and in the news about the class who'd been seniors my first year, read about someone spending the millenium in Paris with her girlfriend. And then I realized, this was someone who'd also gone to my high school. I wasn't the only one. I'd known that statistically I probably wasn't... but now I knew. And it was even someone I'd liked, even if I'd barely known her. When I "friended" her on our college alumnae networking site a few years later, I thanked her for sending that in, and she talked about how she'd made the decision.

Fast forward more years. My best friend from high school and I had been to each other's weddings, we'd gotten together briefly when I was in CA recently for a work trip with Beloved Wife, we'd "friended" each other on Facebook. My high school best friend was Facebook friends with a couple of other girls from high school, but I wasn't interested: we weren't friends then, we're not friends now.

And then something made me search for one of the other upperclasswomen from our little group, and send her a friend request.

But when I realized she's Facebook friends with other women I went to high school with, I realized didn't want to post anything they could see that would identify me as a lesbian.

Ouch.

I was mulling on this in worship-sharing this weekend at FLGBTQC Mid-Winter. In a recent retreat at my Meeting here in Seattle, we had identified shame as a marker of not being centered in the Divine, of not being in right relation. In worship-sharing this weekend, I thought, I am out in almost every aspect of my life. Why would I be ashamed if women who knew me in high school know I'm a lesbian?

Well, because I was still stuck feeling like a terrified and ashamed fourteen-year-old who wasn't safe at school or at home.

What if I turned it around?

What if it was no longer, Oh, yeah, Stasa turned out to be a lesbian (*snicker*)?

What if no one remembered? What if nobody actually remembered the harassment, me nearly getting pulled out of school, my being afraid to be alone with my classmates; what if no one remembered they'd thought I might be a lesbian? After all, I'd had a boyfriend and been all but engaged when I graduated, and the best friend whom I was supposedly being a lesbian with is happily married to a man, so it's possible.

That possibility opened up some space inside my head. Opened up twenty-plus years' worth of space in my head.

What if the story now was:

My high school was a horribly homophobic place where I didn't feel safe. The bullying of my schoolmates, and the lack of protection from the faculty, made my life and my coming out that much harder, increased my risk of suicide, and increased the danger I faced in dating violence as a young adult.

What if I am no longer ashamed -- no longer afraid -- but am now, rightly so, angry?

What if I say to my former schoolmates, "I am a lesbian, there's no excuse for the homophobic bullying that happened to me in high school"?

Well, that's what I'm saying now: I am a lesbian, and there was no excuse for the homophobic bullying that I went through in high school.