Johann Hari

The story of the Harvey Milk School begins with a gang-rape in an orphanage in 1979. One morning, a fifteen year-old gay teenager who was supposed to be in the care of New York State was shoved into the dingy shower rooms at the back of the dorm where he was temporarily housed. A pack of his fellow residents beat and raped him so severely he could not speak for days. When finally he could stammer the barest details of his ordeal, the orphanage explained firmly that he would not have been attacked if he had not been gay. They told him to leave that night.

When gay activists Emery Hetrick and Damien Martin found out about the case, they realized there was a huge gap in New York City for a group offering gay teenagers support and shelter. They founded the Hertick-Martin Institute. One of the Institute’s most successful initiatives was an after-school drop-in centre they set up in Grenwich Village. Bari J Mattes, the current chairman of the Institute, picks up the story: “Despite the fact the drop-in centre didn’t open officially until three in the afternoon, the staff who worked there began noticing that many of the young people were arriving well before then, when they should have been at school. When we asked about it, the kids admitted they had been the targets of repeated anti-gay violence in their schools, and they told us they felt safer on the streets than in the classroom. Despite our staff’s attempts to place the kids in new schools where we thought they would be safe, the harassment and violence continued. That’s when we decided to set up a school of our own.”

Today, the Harvey Milk School is the first school anywhere on earth dedicated to gay, transgender and ‘questioning’ students. Outside the tiny entrance in the Village – snuggled between a Starbuck’s and a Border’s bookstore – there are often hoardes of protestors. Anti-gay hate groups jab banners at students and teachers. ‘Death Penalty for Fags’ and ‘Sodomy - it’s to die for’, they read. Fred Phelps, an evangelical Christian best known for running the notorious ‘God Hates Fags’ website, leads this mob. They also picketed Matthew Shepherd’s funeral with signs reading ‘Fag Shepherd Burns in Hell.’ One of them, Ruben Israel, told a reporter, “This is a historic moment. This school is a blemish on our society and must be stopped.” Pro-gay protestors often oppose these lunatics, tossing rainbow confetti on students as they leave and waving ‘Safe Education For All’ placards.

The school is named after one of the great gay icons of the twentieth century. He was elected as an openly gay man to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors at a time - the early 1970s - when many psychiatrists still routinely referred to homosexuality as a mental illness, and the Supreme Court refused to overturn a prison sentence handed down for consensual gay sex. He was assassinated in 1978 when two bullets were fired directly into his skull. Anticipating his own murder the previous year, he said, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” When his killer was given a meagre five year prison sentence after claiming preposterously that too much junk food had altered his mental state, San Francisco rioted so violently that 160 people were hospitalized.

Is the school a fitting testament to him? Dino Portalatin, the class valedictorian at the school in 2002, believes it is. “Three years ago, when I was at a public school in Brooklyn, two of my closest friends outed me to the rest of the school,” explains the Hispanic twenty-year old from behind his lank hair and tight cheek-bones. “I got into fights just about every day from then on. School for me was terrifying. I’d run to class just as the bell rang to save myself. Often I didn’ t go to classes at all. One semester I had 85 absences, and when my mom saw the number ‘85’ on my report she thought it was a grade for a class and congratulated me. I started to become really depressed and began to feel I’d be better off dead than having to deal with constant harassment and fights. I started to see a counsellor for my depression, and she recommended Harvey Milk. It made sense. I knew I wanted to do something with my life. I knew I had potential and was a good kid, but it was all going to come to nothing if I kept on the way I was. I knew I wasn’t going to make it in a mainstream high school.”

His expression changes. “When I got in, my life totally changed. My grades went up immediately and I made friends. I knew I was going to be comfortable because there were people here who understood what I was dealing with. This school saved my life.” Most students echo Dino. Kim Howell, 18, explains, “I came here because I wanted to be around others who were like me. A lot of us were bullied and here we feel safe.” Harvey Milk has been in the headlines over the past year because New York City has decided to massively invest in the school. This year it is expanding from 50 students to 170, with a whopping $3.2 million funding package. Local senator Hillary Clinton paid a congratulatory visit this spring.

It’s hard to get a sense of what the school is like for everyday students. Understandably, Harvey Milk is trying to avoid press coverage and get on with ordinary schooling. We do know that the overwhelming majority of Harvey Milk’s students are African-American or Hispanic. 60% come from Brooklyn, the Bronx or Queen’s, New York’s poorest neighbourhoods, and 10% had been made homeless by their families. One journalist who was allowed to sit in on some lessons described a health class where male student in drag described the last time he got drunk. “A drunken butch queen was getting on my case, so I pulled a knife on her.” A fellow student demurred: “If you consider yourself a woman, you should act like a woman 24 hours a day.” The drag queen scoffed. “In this situation, you going to use your knife or not? You best believe I’m going to use my knife.” The kids from Fame this ain’t.

Each student has his or her own individualized study program, juggled between the school’s three teachers. The atmosphere has been described as chaotic, but teacher Fred Goldhaber defends this. He says, “There is a misconception that order means quiet, means sitting in your seat. We have control here under the guise of chaos. If someone comes in with a fab outfit or makes a guest appearance after weeks of absence, we have time to take notice. But kids don’t get away with not learning here.” The stats back him up: 95% of the school’s students graduate, compared to fewer than 50% for New York City’s state schools as a whole.

The schools’ teachers insist that they are also welcoming to straight kids who are “questioning” or just bullied, but in practice very few heterosexuals are on the school’s rolls. The freedom for exploring sexual identity permitted at Harvey Milk does have some unexpected consequences though. Damien Martin, co-founder of the Institute, explains, “Several young men in the school were molested by male relatives and thought they must be gay. It was apparent that these boys were heterosexual, but we had to let them find out for themselves.”

The need for Harvey Milk, its defenders say, is clear. One third of gay kids drop out of school each year - three times the national average. Gay teens are three times more likely to commit suicide than their straight brothers: the US Sexual Information and Education Council found that 40% of gay students attempted suicide at least once. The students at Harvey Milk have not been able to cope in mainstream education, they say; it is gay education or nop education. Stephen Phillips, superintendent of New York’s alternative schools programs, says, “If 100% of our youngsters are to get the education they are entitled to, we have to adapt to them - go to the kids rather than expecting them to come to us. Like the addicted or the handicapped, Harvey Milk kids couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in to the school system. Are they still entitled to an educated? Yes.” Nathan Quinones, the New York Schools Chancellor in 1985 when the school was first set up, put the question more bluntly: “What else are you going to do with a fifteen year old transvestite?”

Predictably, the school has been subject to some vile homophobic attacks. The leading magazine of the US right, the National Review, said that the school traps kids in an “aberrant stage of development”, and it condemned New York for spending money on a “literally perverse project.” There have been many accusations that the school is “promoting homosexuality” to “vulnerable teenagers”, an argument we are familiar with in Britain from the proponents of the late, unlamented Section 28.

These assaults are easily dismissed as pure, unashamed bigotry. But there is another – far more persuasive – range of criticisms. Andy Milk, nephew of Harvey, explains, “Harvey wanted integration, not just for gays and lesbians but for all minorities. This opens a loop-hole for every special-interest group. Where do we stop?” Norman Seigel of the Freedom legal Defence and Education Project says: “As a society, America has rejected segregation because we have decided that people should not be separated by gender or race or sexuality. The trouble with a program like the Harvey Milk school is that when a school gets a gay kid who’s being bullied, they’ll say, let’s just send him to Harvey Milk, rather than confronting the bullies in that school. It’s a way of avoiding the issue instead of dealing with it.”

Several high profile opponents of homophobia and prejudice have expressed their opposition to the school. Michael Meyers, executive of the New York City Civil Rights Coalition, says the school violates the city’s anti-discrimination laws. “This is a new formula for discriminating,” he says. “I call it ‘voluntary segregation.’ It throws a towel on integration and turns back the clock.” Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University Law School Professor, wrote in Newsweek, “This rings of a civil rights breakthrough when in fact it is an attack on civil rights. The city has not solved homophobic bullying by punishing its perpetrators but by removing the gay students, as if they were the source of the problem.”

Is it right for gay kids to seclude themselves away in educational ghettos? It is impossible for any decent person to deny sympathy to kids like Dino, but I can’t support gay seperatism. Like many gay teenagers, I would have leapt at the chance to flee from a homophobic (all male) school environment to a safe place where being gay was not freakish but actually the norm. But if I had, it would mean I had given up. The solution to homophobia is not to escape; it is to challenge it. One of the reasons homophobia is decreasing in Britain and across the West is that more and more gay people refuse to hide their sexuality away, or be ashamed of it. We demand to be accepted by straight people, not shunned. Once straight people know us as human beings, they are less likely to hate us. How will they get to know us if we hide away? What is Harvey Milk if not a gilded closet?

Supporters of these arguments may actually force Harvey Milk to close. New York state senator Reverend Rubin Diaz is bringing a law suit against the New York Department of Education, claiming the school violates the US prohibition on segregated schooling. “Back in the Deep South, the authorities said they were setting up segregated schools to protect black kids from white bullies, but that was just an excuse. It was a form of apartheid. Martin Luther King gave his life to help end segregation in this nation.”

David Mensah, the school’s executive director, tries to answer this criticism. He says plainly, “We all agree that it is important to move forward with efforts to ensure that our schools become safe and tolerant places for every student. In an ideal world the students we serve would be integrated into their local high school and there would be no need for us to exist. But until we achieve that goal, Harvey Milk is here for kids who need a safe place today.” But this could be an argument for shutting away all minorities until we live in a utopian paradise free of prejudice. Where there is anti-Semitism, carve off schools for Jews. Where there is racism, carve off schools for black children. Where fat kids are picked on, create fat schools. Soft-headed sympathy leads us to dyfunctional decisions: we would end up with ‘mainstream’ schools for only blonde, straight Aryan ubermensch.

The arguments about Harvey Milk raise an issue at the absolute core of the future of the gay rights movement. What is our goal: do we want messy, often harsh integration, or do we want safe spaces of our own? Back when gay people were universally persecuted and frequently jailed, the goal of gay politics was pretty obvious: decriminalisation of homosexuality. Now that many of the basic goals of that first wave of the gay rights movement have been achieved in the West – we will even have de facto gay marriage in Britain this year – our whole purpose is thrown into doubt.

Harvey Milk School represents one possible future goal for the gay rights movement. Seclude ourselves from straight people, define and create our own heroes, look out for ourselves and leave straight people to their bigotries. You can see this in your everyday life: the signs that have begun to crop up in gay bars saying ‘No straights’. The gay activists who attack ‘assimilationists’ who ‘want to make gay people just like straights’. The fact that many out gay people in Britain live in gay Meccas: Soho, Brighton, Manchester’s gay village.

These arguments are not new. The most extreme manifestation of gay seperatism emerged in the 1970s, when there was a vogue for lesbian seperatism. Communities of lesbians in the United States decided that the only way women could free themselves from the chains of male oppression was to retreat entirely from the straight and male world and live together. Kathy Rudy, a Professor at Duke University in the US, explains what this was like: “Captivated by the ideals of lesbian seperatist feminism, I moved to Durham in North Carolina in 1980 to live in the exclusively lesbian community there. There were lots of local lesbian communities in the US and Canada at that time. That period of my life provided me with dreams and politics that have lent a character to everything that followed. But I ended up in conflict with just about every person in that tight-knit, claustrophobic community.”

The women in the Durham community shopped at lesbian-owned businesses, met at the local women’s centre and, Rudy explains, “Most of us thought that by avoiding straights and building a parallel, alternative culture, we were changing the world.” Philosophers like Mary Daly and Sheila Jeffries provided the intellectual backing for this: they argued that lesbians had a superior political system freed of the inherent violence of men. They believed that the gay ghetto was not a regrettable necessity but actually a morally superior space.

The Durham community – and others like it – soon encountered problems. Turned in on itself, this exclusively gay culture became suffocating. “People dressed mostly the same, ate the same foods, cut their hair the same, had the same social activities. The strength of our community was built on the very vulnerable assumption that being lesbian was enough to hold us all together,” Rudy says now. Black lesbians and other ethnic minority groups began to claim that the others didn’t understand their unique identity. Fracture lines began to appear. “To us, it felt like the world was coming apart. We were not only losing our friends, we were losing the basis of our political existence as well.”

Looking back, Rudy believes that seperatism was a disaster. “For nine years I had lived in an exclusively lesbian world. Because we had little else in common besides the gender of our partners, conversations invariably circled around how and when we came out, how our parents were taking it and so forth. I had a constant pressing feeling that I was being left out, that I was missing something.” In the end, she decided that she “would rather be a lesbian in a bigger world”.

It is always tempting to run away from prejudice. Harvey Milk and the Durham lesbians’ community are different only in degree. Every homophobic remark makes seperatism a temptation. We live in a country where ‘gay’ is the main playground term of abuse, after all. But abandoning the straight world is a terrible concession of defeat, just as we are on the brink of victory. Our goal should not be the seperatist vision which makes our sexuality the most important thing in our lives, a membership card to a neon ghetto somewhere over the rainbow. No, the goal of the gay rights movement should be the opposite of Harvey Milk: an integrated world where sexuality is just another trivial thing about a person, no more important than whether they fancy blondes or brunettes. We will only get there if we stay out here, fighting bigotry. It can be scary out here in the real world - but if we seal ourselves away, sooner or later we’ll suffocate.