I just left my sleeping son, whose only disappointment today was that he would not see cross-dressing boys singing “Buddy Beware” at the rehearsal of his mother’s youth theater company rehearsal of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. He was sleeping peacefully, wrist outstretched ’til the backs of his fingers touched his sister’s shoulder.  They’ve been sharing a pull-out futon bed in their mom’s office for the past month’s final stage of  house remodel displacement. He’s years away from an adolescence which, to way too many of his peers, is not just punishing, but life-threatening. I’m glad this part of his life is so far away, since right now, it’s what I dread the most.

Many of you know that a memorial service for Seth Walsh is going to be held today. You know his name because he was the third young man to commit suicide this month following unremitting, unchecked harrassment by “peers” for being or seeming to be gay. He died Wednesday after ten days on life support, having been found after hanging himself from his back yard tree following another incident of harassment after school.  Seth was 13.

Billy Lucas was 15; he hanged himself earlier this month, in a barn on his grandmother’s property in Indiana, after years of harassment over the perception of his being gay.  Asher Brown shot himself in his family home in Cypress, TX on September 23.  He had come out to his stepfather just that morning; he was 13.  Services for him are on Saturday.

Tyler Clementi was the fourth gay (or perceived to be gay) teenage boy to commit suicide this month. Last Wednesday he jumped off the George Washington bridge connecting upper Manhattan to New Jersey (he was a freshman at Rutgers).  It was following the public video streaming, by his dorm roommate, of a date with a guy.  He was shy, he was an accomplished violinist, he was not publicly out; he was 18.

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I’m passing along a note that those of us who are members of Our Family Coalition, Northern California’s LGBT Family organization, received on Saturday. It’s huge news.

We’re painfully aware of the resistance to LGBT family- and gender- diversity in K-12 curricula elsewhere, even locally.  Alameda Unified School District is 10 short miles south of here, and in a whole different ball park.  (Last year I reported on their fight here; though the anti-bias anti-bullying curriculum was passed, it’s continued to encounter resistance, now at the law suit level.)  But those of us who know the Berkeley Unified School District would expect it to recognize and support this sort of social justice-minded, community-minded curriculum, what with its storied history as the first school district of its size in the nation to voluntarily desegregate, in 1968.  Forty years later, it’s still as committed.

Regardless of political pedigree, however, any school board can only be as forward-thinking as the community it sits in, and all of us with kids in the schools here owe a huge an incalculable debt of gratitude to those at OFC and in the school district whose long, hard work made this happen.

Much more to say about this in the future, but for the moment, just the good news:

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