ETHS Gay-Straight Alliance Searches For Identity

The final installment of a three-part report on LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) issues at Evanston Township High School.

It was a cold Monday in mid-December and the winds were whipping snow drifts around the Evanston Township High School building at face-numbing speeds. Almost no one wanted to go outside.

Ten minutes after the school day’s final bell, a small group of students began shuffling into chemistry teacher Bill Farmer’s spacious third floor classroom, chatting, gossiping and giggling as they entered about who did what, how much homework they had and anything else that a high school teen idly talks over.

But as they crossed the threshold into Farmer’s classroom, they were also entering a space where, if they wanted, they could speak just as openly about thoughts and feelings they had never shared with anyone before. For the next two hours this room would act as a safe space, created to be a judgment-free zone, welcoming to students tired of drifting through their days with a stiff upper lip and a tight clamp on their innermost thoughts.

This was the weekly meeting space of the Gay-Straight Alliance.

The ETHS website describes the GSA as, “a group interested in discussing, learning about, and educating others about issues concerning gays, lesbians, transgenders and bisexuals” and “[focused] on making a difference.” But pinning down a more precise understanding of the organization’s mission and the group’s significance to students is much more complex.

More than most student organizations, the GSA is the sum of the students it comprises.

While the group has a teacher sponsor, there is no adult planning or directing the course of meetings. There are no competitions to be scheduled. No productions to be staged. No singular stated goal to achieve and no mandatory timeframe to complete such an aim, if there were one.

Students attend GSA meetings for their own various reasons and each year these personal drivers meld to redefine the club.

Eric Brown, an openly-gay ETHS biology teacher and former faculty sponsor of the GSA, said that since the time when the organization was founded in the early 90s, the character and ambitions of the group has changed frequently. One year, club members might be activist minded, looking to further LGBTQ rights. The next year, students might be most interested in organizing social events to mingle with GSAs from New Trier or Main West. And some years, the group seemed content with using meeting times as a forum to discuss whatever may come up, be it someone coming out, LGBTQ issues in the news or the latest fall television lineup.

Farmer, the current GSA faculty sponsor, said that the organization’s dynamic can depend largely on the presence or absence of strong leaders, as well as the objectives those students might have.

“It really depends on the student leadership of the group,” Farmer said, “because it’s supposed to be a student lead group…We really try to encourage the students to make it their own group and make it what they want it to be, in terms of how they want it to function.”

But sometimes, different organization members have contrasting expectations or what the club should be, and at the December meeting, it was unclear where the current GSA fell on that spectrum.

Throughout the meeting, Emma Milliken, the first-ever GSA president elected by organization members , routinely expressed her desire for the group to participate in more LGBTQ activism , to perform more outreach and to either create more school-sponsored events.

When group members began discussing the “It Gets Better” project, an internet-based campaign created last year by Seattle-based writer Dan Savage to give hope to bullied or despairing LGBTQ teens, Milliken blasted the program, saying that while it was well intentioned, she refused to wait around for things to somehow get better for herself and other LGBTQ youth. She wanted to make it better.

But making it better often requires unified, decisive, public action, and while that sort of rallying may be easy for some groups, it is not so simple for a high school GSA.

For one, compared to many other organizations, the ETHS GSA is minuscule.

While the organization can attract as many as 20 students at the beginning of the year, that number soon drops off. At the December meeting, only nine students were in attendance.

One commonality that most GSA members have, Farmer said, is that they are not athletes, not actors, not debaters and not marching band members. To be a GSA member who frequently attends meeting, a student has to have an afterschool schedule void of activities.

One male student present at the December meeting said he didn’t even care much about the GSA, and that he only came because it was too cold to go outside and he didn’t have bus fare to get home.

That is not to say that some students don’t make a conscious choice to attend GSA meetings rather than participate in a different extracurricular activity. But the group loses out on potential members, LGBTQ or straight, who pursue different interests.

According to Emma Milliken, president of the GSA, ETHS’s theater program is likely responsible for drawing a sizeable crowd away from the organization. What’s more, she said, is that she sometimes feels like there is an expectation for LGBTQ students to go that route.

“Sometimes it feels like to be gay and accepted, I have to like theater,” Milliken said.

According to Mr. Brown, another reason why the GSA might have trouble mustering support from the student body, is that many students would avoid associating with the organization at all costs.

In fact, he said, at ETHS it takes some courage to join the GSA.

According to Farmer, not all members of the GSA are open LGBTQ students. Some are straight. Some are closeted. Some are simply questioning their sexual identity. And while the GSA advertises itself as a club that is “open to all”, that is not necessarily how the student body views it.

According to students interviewed, at ETHS there is a general assumption that if a student attends a GSA meeting, he or she is gay.

Brown said that this can act as a deterrent for some students who either don’t want to be open with classmates about their sexuality or would not want to take the risk to explore what the organization had to offer.

“In the past I definitely think that it was one of those things that you didn’t go to the GSA because you would be targeted as GLBT,” Brown said. “And that was not an acceptable thing to be in this school yet. And it still isn’t, but it was certainly not back then.”

Brown said that the decision to attend a GSA meeting can be even more difficult for males and minorities, who he said are more likely to face discrimination from fellow students if they were openly LGBTQ.

“Those kids who were strong enough to be in the GSA typically didn’t have too many bad experiences in the school,” Brown said. “What was really striking, though, were the kids that I knew about, who weren’t in the GSA but they knew I was the faculty advisor, so they would come to me anyway and share stories about things that the kids would say to them and things that were happening in their lives. Usually those were the minority students who would come and talk to me directly and say, “Well, my family doesn’t want me to do this, or I can’t talk to my mom about this.” Or they had friends that they were going to lose if their friends found out about them.”

Brown said that in the past, this has lead to the GSA comprising mostly white females. However, since then the group has diversified, and at the December meeting the room was more varied. Of the nine students in attendance, five were female, four male, seven white and two black.

But even some of the students who regularly participate in the club don’t want others to know that they are there, Farmer said. Occasionally, it is a secret hidden from friends, but more often, according to both Brown and Farmer, something hidden from their parents.

“I’ve had parents forbid students coming to GSA once they find out,” Farmer said. “Or they’ll come to check out a meeting to see what it’s about. So in that aspect it’s difficult to navigate too, because parents, to some extent, have the right to know what their children are doing.”

Farmer said that even organizational field trips can be difficult to manage and that he sometimes has had to alter the club’s name on parental permission slips.

Even while researching this article, one student abruptly broke off correspondence, citing his fear that his parents might discover what he was talking about.

But the group might be losing members by remaining inactive, as well.

Eric Linder, a 2011 ETHS graduate currently studying communications at Boston University who came out of the closet for the first time at a GSA meeting his freshman year, said that while he was grateful for the club existence and that he even made some friends there, he eventually left because it was “kind of dormant.”

“I went there and went to a couple meetings, and it ended up being a bunch of nothing so I stopped going,” Linder said. “I would drop by only occasionally because I like the teacher that sponsors it.”

The GSA has sponsored some events in past years to spread the word on LGBTQ issues. The group organizes and prints shirts for the annual Day of Silence and hands out rainbow colored bracelets on National Coming Out Day.

But Linder said these actions were minimal, and though he considers himself someone who tries not to let his open homosexuality “rule [his] life”, even he felt the GSA was more of a social club than an activist organization.

With the December meeting nearing an end, a group vote on what events the organization should sponsor ended with the decision to have an afterschool screen of The Birdcage, a 1996 film containing LGBTQ themes.

More than 10 months later, while little has changed in the group’s dynamic, the GSA scored a huge accomplishment by successfully campaigning ETHS to hold the first mandatory LGBTQ-sensitivity training for faculty in over decade.

Additionally, Milliken has been working with the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, a Chicago-based group that promotes safety and healthy development for LGBTQ you in Illinois schools. Milliken said she hopes ETHS will partner will the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance for future programming.

Though the GSA still has many hurdles to overcome to successfully advocate for LGBTQ students at ETHS, during last school year Farmer said that the key to making change within the school would be strong leadership and a strong start to a school year.

With both currently under its belt, the GSA is on roll toward "making it better" at ETHS. What the group's identity becomes in the future, only time will tell.