At 13 I became a lesbian. Not by experience or lifestyle, but by reputation.

To give a little background, as a child I tried nearly every kind of school that we could find. My religious parents wanted their kids to go to private, religious schools although they couldn’t actually afford it so they scrimped on other things. Yet, when I was in third grade my dad lost his job and I attended a public school for a short time before my former school gave me a scholarship to return. In 7^th grade I went to a private alternative school that one of my teachers had created that consisted of one teacher and 29 students of all different ages and abilities. My parents stopped trusting this school to educate us when they found out my two best friends and I spent hours trading stickers or practicing our ballet moves instead of reading text books or studying algebra. We left at Christmas and they homeschooled myself and my brothers for the rest of the school year. In 8^th grade I attended a public alternative school for the arts, a school where all the kids who didn’t fit in anywhere else in the Seattle school system were sent. I met fascinating kids at this school who I still feel blessed to have met.

But eighth grade’s most fateful day occurred in the late autumn, and I’m not even certain where I was on campus. All I know is that kids in math class were fooling around in class and someone noticed that below, outside the portable classrooms, two girls sat on a grassy hill kissing. And hell broke loose.

From that day forward, kids began to taunt not only these girls, but anyone with access to their core group of friends. The strange thing looking back is why that particular issue stuck even in this school with a reputation for accepting all forms of difference. One of the girls involved had written six novels by that age and invented an alien planet with a role playing game so intense it involved several students planning to purchase a property in Oregon together to wait for these aliens to rescue them by U.F.O. But if this was known by many students, no one said much about it or found it interesting. I found many things more odd than two girls kissing, like the students who wore bondage gear to class, the three pretty and popular girls who had to be rushed to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped one day after they took handfuls of prescription pet medication “to see how it felt,” or the boy in our journalism class who killed himself with a shotgun. Yet these and other events passed and disappeared from view while the bullying and harassment over lesbianism continued daily for the rest of the school year.

I have to be more graphic here to get the point across that this wasn't small stuff but, socially, a form of murder. A boy came into math class and whispered to my best friend, “are you menstruating? I can smell your bloody cunt.” Once you have been thoroughly othered there is no line too low to cross, no insult too disgusting, no sex reference out of bounds.

Recently, I interviewed three of the girls involved who were targets of the harassment. One told me that the original math teacher of the class that had initiated the bullying had later been reprimanded by school officials for making lewd comments about the girls in front of his class. This was only after parents of the girls complained. And they remembered, as I did, that after the stomach pumping incident, a school assembly was called to address saying no to drugs. After the suicide, a school assembly to address suicides and teens. Not only was there no school assemblies to discuss harassment of gay teens, but I asked all three of them if they remembered a single teacher getting involved or asking students to stop the teasing. Not one of us remembers any teacher having anything at all to say about it.

Studies on the mental health of gay teenagers can be so grim that some suggest that people should be careful of misinterpreting these studies to read homosexuality as a form of pathology. Yet, according to a mental health website, most gay teens

hear anti-gay slurs such as “homo”, “faggot” and “sissy” about 26 times a day or once every 14 minutes. Even more troubling, a study found that thirty-one percent of gay youth had been threatened or injured at school in the last year alone!

This is nearly consistent with my memory of the pervasiveness of the teasing. And I have to be honest here and note that one of the most vocal and sexually graphic people involved with the harassment was a boy who I had gone to Christian schools with, who was raised like I was among evangelical Christians. A boy who also grew up, moved to New York, and now identifies himself as gay.

Frankie Schaeffer, a former organizer for the religious right, notes in an interview with Terry Gross that homosexuality was callously chosen by evangelical political leaders as an issue that revved up the big money donors more than other issues like poverty did. Yet I’ve also always found it a curious instance of projection the way that Jerry Falwell, among others, continually accuse gay people of evangelizing—but for homosexuality, as if the gay rights movement is not about self-protection from bigotry, but rather, a rival revival campaign.

I remember my friends and I putting on brave faces. One friend when asked if another girl were her girlfriend threw her arm around her and said, “as a matter of fact, she is. Do you have a problem with that??” He backed down. Gayness isn’t something that can be denied effectively anyway, any more than Obama’s U.S. birth certificate will ever prove to some that he was born inside the United States. Not to mention that in the eighth grade most of us didn’t have sexual lives to speak of, let alone a clearly defined sexual identity.

One of the girls I interviewed, who now has a daughter, a Ph.D, and who works as a teacher said that for a long time she described her experience at that school as the worst of her life. She said although it happened a long time ago, she’s in her thirties now, it’s still “on the short-list.” She writes, “I had no idea before that experience how radically different and horrible people could act under the influence of prejudice—it was a powerful experience that shaped my understanding of human rights.”

This weekend I walked through the streets of San Francisco during the gay pride festivities, feeling pride in the gay movement, and this city that has been home to Harvey Milk, Gavin Newsom, as well as countless unnamed agitators and demonstrators. Yet, even here, just over a month ago the California Supreme Court upheld the state-wide ban on the rights of gay people to marry. And on any given weekday, like this morning, as I came outside the Bart station and walked past an organizer with a clipboard and pen, reminders of the work for equal protection under the law that continues.