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'We are who we are'

Brandon High's popular Gay-Straight Alliance ruffles no feathers. Newsome High's startup club did - parental ones. Could it survive on campus?

By S.I. ROSENBAUM
Published October 7, 2005

BRANDON - On a rainy Wednesday, all the kids go bowling.

They camp out across two lanes, spilling over linoleum seats in a puppy pile of denim and sneakers, "LIVESTRONG" bracelets and band T-shirts, slurping down sodas.

In lane one, pins scatter. Stephon Franklin turns to his friends, and they fly into his arms.

"I guess I keep getting strikes," he crows. "I love me!"

Stephon is 15, a lean sophomore in oversized jeans. He's not the only gay student here.

Some of the kids are straight; some are gay. Some say they don't want to wear a label. They're all members of the Brandon High Gay-Straight Alliance.

The club was formed three years ago to promote tolerance of gays and lesbians.

Since then, no irate parents have challenged the club. No students have protested it. There have been no confrontations between club members and other students.

Instead, the club has melted into the background of Brandon High - another piece of the puzzle in a school of 2,000 students.

Nine miles away, students at Newsome High School started their own GSA last month. Before they held their first meeting, parents were already upset.

Don't let this club form, they told Newsome's principal. Our kids don't need a club promoting sexual behavior. They're not ready. It's not right.

Members of the Brandon GSA say they don't understand what has the Newsome parents so scared.

"We're not going out and getting drunk or getting high," said Nikki Gates, 16. "We're just hanging out, being kids."

Michael Freincle, 18, is the captain of the swim team. Easygoing and softspoken, he wears cargo shorts and plain T-shirts. He gels his hair.

At the bowling alley, the fashions span the spectrum, from Goth to Gap. Michael blends into the mix as much as his 6-foot frame allows him to. Mostly he stays quiet, letting the others make the wisecracks.

"Michael, this is not basketball!" one of his friends calls as he winds up to bowl.

Michael just smiles.

Here, he's popular. After all, he founded the club. He made this community.

"Out of everyone here, I don't think I knew anybody when I started (the GSA)," he says.

Michael was a freshman when he came out. It was by accident. Over winter break, he told a few friends that he was gay. They weren't as good friends as he thought they were. When he came back to school, it seemed everyone knew.

In the hallways, he endured slurs.

"People would just come up to me and say, "So, are you really? Are you like that?"' he said. "My face would get really red."

At the time, Michael had never heard of a gay-straight alliance. But the next fall, he ran into some kids from another high school at a movie theater. They told him about the gay-straight alliance at their school.

Michael went to the Brandon administration the next week and asked what he had to do to start a club.

At this year's first GSA meeting, there were so many new members that they couldn't fit into a classroom.

They met in the cafeteria instead, said club vice president Shanna Turner, 17.

Shanna sometimes introduces herself as the GSA's "straight vice president." If Michael is the quiet one, she's the talker: eloquent, passionate, poised.

At that first meeting, it was Shanna who called the group to order. Since there were so many new members, she started off by reading the ground rules.

No talking over each other - "one microphone, one diva."

If you're telling a personal story, you're not allowed to name names - no gossipping in the club.

And most important: If your parents don't want you in the club, you can't be in the club.

In the club's history, Shanna said, only one parent has asked that a child be removed.

But she says she sometimes finds herself explaining the club to concerned parents.

"I like to calm them down a bit," she said. "I understand that parents might be worried about the sexuality of their child and who might influence them.

"I think everyone expects that every GSA that starts up has a huge controversy and all these problems, when a lot of them just exist quietly," she said. "I guess it's kind of boring."

Newsome High School is only 3 years old, and it shows. The sprawling campus shines as if it's been freshly scrubbed - no scuff marks, no graffiti.

Michael Dorris' daughter is a sophomore there. When she told her father that some kids were starting a gay-straight alliance, he was appalled.

"Any club meeting at a high school that is sexually oriented is inappropriate," he said in an interview last month. "It would be a lot better if the emphasis was off sexual orientation and more on tolerance building."

Other parents said the same thing.

"Yes, we need a tolerance club to teach some students about diversity, but I don't feel sorry for kids who want to discuss their sexual differences," one mother, Sandy Davis, wrote to Newsome's principal.

"Our youth need leaders," Davis wrote. "They are able to do anything in our schools. They are allowed to "make out' in the hallways. ... They are allowed to change clothes on the buses in front of each other, male and females. Who's running our schools? The students or the adults?"

Davis, Dorris and other parents asked principal Rebecca Anderson to either change the club into an all-purpose "tolerance club" or require the students to meet off campus on their own.

In all, Anderson said she received 107 e-mails protesting the club and 19 supporting it.

Anderson stood her ground. The club would be an official school club, and it would be called the Gay-Straight Alliance. She did make one concession: Students would need written parental permission to join.

No other club has such a requirement. Michael Pheneger, chairman of the local American Civil Liberties Union, has said the school may be violating the federal Equal Access Act.

But the club's founders said they agreed to the requirement.

"It was a compromise," junior Onalee Smith, 16, said last week. "It made it a lot easier for all the parties involved."

"It's better to have a club with permission slips than no club at all," said Alaina Waagner, 16.

They're chanting her name. "Go, Fifi! Go, Fifi!"

She whips the ball down the lane. Pins tumble. The Brandon Gay-Straight Alliance cheers.

Amanda "Fifi" Fife is 15. She joined the GSA just this year.

A lot of her friends were joining, she says. And besides, she wanted to stand up against the kids who call people names.

"It annoys me," she says. "When people say they're gay, bi, whatever they are, that's their business."

The kids in the Brandon GSA have all heard about the problems faced by the Newsome GSA.

By coincidence, the faculty sponsor for the Newsome club, history teacher Andrew Hughey, is married to Erin Hughey, the Brandon drama teacher who was the first sponsor for the Brandon club.

The two groups have been in touch, exchanging advice and support.

But some of the Newsome parents' objections have confused the Brandon kids.

"You have a Christian club at school. Why not a GSA?" asks Lexie Townsend, taking a break from bowling. "It's not different."

"The GSA supports people who get made fun of a lot," Fifi says.

"Just because you're 15 years old and you go hang out with someone who's gay, you're not going to turn gay," Nikki Gates says.

"I have a lot of gay friends, and I'm still straight," adds Brittany Martin, 15.

"We are who we are," Nikki says. "If you're gay, you're gay. If you're straight, you're straight. We're not going to change for nobody."

They go back to bowling. The alley echoes with the rumble of bowling balls and the sound of pins scattering.

Stephon, however, is listening to the music piped into the room - it's the Electric Slide, that staple of weddings and bar mitzvahs. Grinning, long arms moving to the beat, he begins to dance: clap, step, to the right, to the left, touch the floor, step back.

As if they'd rehearsed it, four or five other kids fall into step with him. They dance in the middle of the bowling alley, gracefully, smiling, as if there's nothing wrong in the world.

S.I. Rosenbaum can be reached at 661-2442 or srosenbaum@sptimes.com

[Last modified October 6, 2005, 08:26:07]