Encircling half the students at one pioneering Wisconsin high college are gay, many of them dropouts from mainstream education. However is this just a fresh kind of sexual segregation?In the first graduating class at Milwaukee’s Alliance High College, the valedictorian – the year’s most distinguished student – scored a D+. “They were smart,” recalls Tina Owen, the college’s founder and lead teacher. “However a abundance of them had not been going to college since they were being bullied, and a abundance of them had problems at house. That year we had 15 kids. Five of them had lived with me at some mark during the year, for one cause or another.”Alliance is not a regular college. Its aim is to cater to a community that is at best ignored and, at worst, is actively denied its existence – lesbian and gay youth. Call it a gay college and you will be promptly corrected. There’s no entrance criteria on the grounds of sexual orientation or anything else. The college building, an unassuming brick block locate back from a main road, doesn’t glide rainbow flags or emblazon its walls with posters of pink triangles. Owen guesses about half the students are LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender). “If you are gay, no huge deal,” she says. “If you aren’t, no huge deal.”However the college, which is funded by the state of Wisconsin, is self-avowedly gay-friendly. “Here they can talk about a relationship or a break-up without worrying about how that’s going to be received,” clarifies Owen. The posts of Prom King and Prom Queen are open for anyone to run for, regardless of their gender. A mural at its entrance bears the words “knowledge, respect, peace”, and a sign saying Stonewall Inn. It’s a small college – just 165 students – where everybody knows each other. The corridors host more than the regular share of boys with shoulder-length hair or painted nails. All together it adds up to a critical mass of children who affirm they felt they didn’t fit in elsewhere – whether they are goths, punks or nerds – which makes being a non-conformist at Alliance the norm. The college’s art teacher affectionately described the college to Age magazine as “the island of misfit toys”.At a age when sexual diversity has never been more accepted in the US, the emergence of such schools – there are a hardly any encircling the nation – seems paradoxical. “What does it affirm about our nation that we have schools like this?” questions Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor of developmental psychology at Cornell university, and author of The Fresh Gay Teenager. They have come under fire from social conservatives, religious groups and some in the gay community.Owen admits it is not to everyone’s liking. One boy called house after his first hardly any days there and said: “Dad, get me outside of here, these kids are freaks.”However to others it’s literally a lifesaver. Dylan Huegerich’s extended hair and occasional employ of makeup made him the subject of frequent taunts in college in the small town of Saukville where he grew up. “It hurt so terrible,” he said. “I despised my lifetime. I despised everything. When his mother complained to the college she was told he should divide his hair and try to act “more manly”. Every morning, she told Age, “I knew I was driving him back to this place where he was hurting. Oh, they beat you up? Here, go there again. My heart broke every age he got outside of the automobile.”She chose not to enroll him for eighth grade. “I felt like if I turned in those forms, I was giving him some kind of a sentence.” So he went to Alliance, a 90-minute commute away.The college, founded in 2005, was modeled on Manhattan’s Harvey Milk High College, which was named after the late San Fransisco gay activist whose tale was the basis for the award-winning film Milk, and which became fully accredited in 2002. It started as a high college (ages 14-18), expanded to comprehend middle college-age children (11-14) as well, and is immediately about to revert to being just a high college again.Michael Freytes, 17, who is straight, says he likes Alliance since he doesn’t feel judged. “When I was in middle college I was being bullied a abundance. I tried to fit in however I couldn’t. However if there’s a difficulty like that at Alliance the other students don’t tolerate it and the teachers capture attention of it.” The students resolve conflict through what they call “restorative justice”, though a “justice circle”, governed by students, which Freytes says “tries to figure outside the difficulty and then fix it without things getting outside of control”.The primary justification for the existence of schools such as Alliance is safety – an institutional response to the pervasive bullying experienced by LGBT youth and others in mainstream schools.The difficulty seems severe. A 2009 survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) revealed that 9 outside of 10 LGBT students said they had experienced harassment or bullying. Nearly two-thirds claimed they felt unsafe in college, while one in five said they had been physically assaulted. A 2007 survey revealed that 39% reported physical assaults and, of those who told teachers or administrators about the bullying, only 29% said it resulted in effective intervention. The 2009 survey also found that the frequency with which LGBT students experienced more severe forms of bullying and harassment had held steady over the previous decade.At the end winter, 14-year-ancient Kenneth Weishuhn killed himself after he came outside at his Iowa high college. Anonymous threats on his voicemail were followed by yelling and physical harassment that got so terrible teachers had to stand guard in the hallways. Kenneth eventually hung himself in his parents’ garage.Much when parents aren’t prepared to accept their children are gay, says Owen, they know the demand to place their minor in a nurturing environment. “They desire their kid to be safe. They desire to know that their minor is not going to be spat on or kicked just since of who they are.”Attitudes towards homosexuality are changing radically in the US, much in midwestern states such as Wisconsin, and much if every age gay marriage has been place to the ballot at a state level, it has failed. President Obama recently came outside in favour of gay marriage, which is legal in six states and Washington DC, covering 12% of the nation. According to Gallup, today nearly two-thirds of human beings in the US believe lesbian and gay relationships should be legal, compared with fewer than half in 1977.Today more than half (54%) believe homosexuality is morally acceptable, compared with 40% in 1977. And the human beings most likely to be comfortable with homosexuality as a circumstance of lifetime that should delight in equal rights and protection are the young.Predictably, social conservatives are not enamoured with this trend or this educational response. The chairman of the Conservative party of Fresh York State, Michael Extended, said the establishment of the Harvey Milk College amounted to social engineering. “Is there a different path to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math? This is incorrect … there’s no cause these children should be treated separately.”Nonetheless, they are often treated differently, and Chad Weiden, who led efforts to locate up a gay-friendly college in Chicago, says that part of the skill in teaching is making sometimes abstract issues accessible to students. “It’s all about making it relevant to kids. If you’re doing probability in math, you could illustrate it by looking at GLBT suicides or stop-and-frisk or unemployment. A excellent curriculum would also deal with issues of sexual orientation when covering things like evolution, biodiversity, anthropology, history and literature. That should be fair of any college, not just one that considers itself gay-friendly.”However behind these conservative attacks lie two broader motivations. The first, underpinned by the notion that homosexuality is incorrect, is that any mention of homosexuality “normalises” gay identity, and might encourage impressionable young human beings to become gay who otherwise wouldn’t.”What about that girl who is a virgin, who is being harassed by lesbians and guys to have sex, and yet you’re going to build a gay college?” a Chicago minister, Wilfredo de Jesus, questioned the Chicago Journal. “It’s not honest.”Such accusations, says Savin-Williams, are absurd. “There is absolutely no evidence that gay or straight kids can be made in that path, let alone converted. It’s a nonsense.”Some would rather that gay youth were neither seen nor heard. A network of gay-straight alliance clubs have sprung up in schools encircling the US, to provide peer-collection support for lesbian and gay students. However their emergence has often been challenged by college authorities and conservative parents, forcing students to the courts to defend their fair to self-organise, as happened at the end year in West Bend, Wisconsin, just 45 minutes’ propel from Alliance.The fair calls efforts to recognise sexual diversity “pushing a gay agenda”. When Weiden was trying to locate up his college, conservatives tried to provoke them into saying they would promote gay lifestyles. “They were just goading us. ‘Affirm it, affirm it, will you teach gay lifestyles.’ I could have said: ‘I’m gay, the kids are going to be gay, it’s going to be the largest flaming college in the megalopolis.’ However we were just not going to affirm that.”The second motivation, however, is steeped in a far more pervasive belief that gay teens and pre-teens are simply not in a position to fully know and mark their sexual orientation: that like being a goth, punk or nerd, it might just be a phase they were going through. This partly resides in the anxiety most parents have about their adolescent children’s burgeoning sexuality.However it is also a function of associating an awareness of being gay with being sexually active, and holding gay identity to a different average to heterosexuals. A 12-year-ancient boy expressing a furtive interest in girls or vice versa would provoke small concern. Indeed, the issue of his straightness wouldn’t much come up. A 12-year-ancient boy who finds himself attracted to other boys, however, would not have that luxury. Since sexual identity is fluid there is, of direction, the possibility that preferences may alter. However that is no less fair for the straight boy than the gay one. And, the chances are that, whichever gender they are attracted to, both may well still be waiting for their first kiss.”No one says to [a straight teen or pre-teen boy]: ‘Are you certain? You’re also young to know if you like girls. It’s probably just a phase,’” Eileen Ross, a director of the Outlet Program, a support supply for gay youth in California told the Fresh York Times. “However that’s what we affirm also often to gay youth. We deny them their feelings and truth in a path we would never do with a heterosexual young person.”In previous generations young human beings would wait until college to come outside. Immediately they feel sufficiently emboldened to come outside in middle or high college – at an age and in a place characterised by teasing, bullying, sexual exploration and hormonal turbulence. “Kids are certainly coming outside earlier, and middle college is certainly the worst age for bullying, whether you’re straight or gay,” says Savin-Williams. There are distinct summer camps encircling the nation, that cater to transgender children as young as eight.”We always knew middle college was a age when kids struggle with their identity,” one middle-college counsellor told the Fresh York Times, confessing that her college was “really unprepared” for openly gay students, “however it was simple to let anti-gay language slide since it’s so imbedded in middle-college culture, and since we didn’t have students who were outside to us or their classmates. Immediately we do, so we’re playing catch up to try to keep them safe.”However gay-friendly schools have also met resistance from members of the gay community who believe that such schools amount to segregation, simply sheltering gay youth from the realities of homophobia while letting mainstream schools off the hook.Savin-Williams is skeptical about the purpose of gay-friendly schools. “Most of the kids who are at these schools are there not so much since they are gay, however since they are very gender atypical [not conforming to traditional stereotypes]. That’s not most gay kids. Where does it stop? Do you have a college for stout kids and annoying kids and all the others who just don’t fit in?”In Chicago the combined opposition of religious, conservative and gay opposition scuppered plans to build a alike college.”There was push back from the gay community,” says Weiden, who pioneered the effort. “The elders were against it. They thought it was segregation. ‘If you constitute this college,’ they said, ‘then you don’t constitute other schools accountable.’ However kids are frightened immediately. They’re hurting immediately. Making the schools accountable will capture years. I hope that in 10 years you wouldn’t demand our college anymore. However they demand it immediately.”Owen agrees. “As much as it should be being addressed in other schools, the circumstance is that it isn’t,” she says. “And it’s not as though our students were unaware of what was outside there. That’s why they’re here. They affirm: ‘We do the earth everyday. We know what the earth is like.’ And the reality is that the earth outside high college is much more like this. It’s much more gay-friendly than high schools are.”Gay youth and British schoolsMore than half of lesbian, gay and bisexual young human beings have experienced homophobic bullying at college in the UK, according to a survey published by Stonewall earlier this month. Nearly all of the 1,600 young human beings questioned said homophobic designation-calling is common, a finding backed up by a recent Ofsted report that found widespread employ of the term “gay” as an insult.Wes Streeting, Stonewall’s head of education, said: “We’ve found that homophobic bullying is lower in schools that explicitly state homophobic bullying is incorrect and where incidents are dealt with swiftly and seriously. The best schools are those that go beyond tackling bullying by celebrating difference and addressing gay issues in a positive path across the curriculum.”At one primary college that successfully countered bullying, Ofsted inspectors said pupils were comfortable about rejecting stereotypes – a six-year-ancient boy wore a tutu without comment from classmates, while a girl wrote a fairy tale that finished with the marriage of two princesses. Children in Year Six learned about gay role models such as the actor Ian McKellen and the rugby player Gareth Thomas (pictured).At another college where many pupils had anti-gay attitudes – children frequently used terms such as “batty male” and “queer” – the headteacher used the curriculum to explore gay topics; studying Alan Turing’s lifetime in technology lessons and the Nazi persecution of homosexuals in history. The college brought in external role models including a black lesbian rapper and a gay Muslim collection.Ofsted found a “significant decrease” in bullying in the college, while staff and pupils who were lesbian or gay were able to be more open about their sexuality without dread of harassment. Jeevan VasagarSexualityBullyingEducation policyGay marriageGay rightsSchoolsMarriageUnited StatesGary Youngeguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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