Cover Story: http://www.newsweek.com/id/147790

BEING OPENLY GAY AS A CHILD RAISES A NEW SET OF ISSUES THAT

PARENTS, TEACHERS AND STUDENTS MAY NOT BE PREPARED FOR

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OXNARD SHOOTING LEADS TO QUESTIONS OVER HOW TO HELP

YOUNG STUDENTS COPE WITH SEXUAL ORIENTATION

COVER: MURDER IN THE 8TH GRADE

New York— The lives of the students at Oxnard, Calif.’s E.O. Green Junior High School were shaken earlier this year when fellow student Brandon McInerney killed openly gay student Larry King. Now the community is working to piece together what went so terribly wrong and McInerney is waiting to be arraigned this week, charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime. In the July 28 Newsweek cover, “Murder in the 8th Grade,” (on newsstands Monday, July 21) Associate Editor Ramin Setoodeh recounts the Larry King shooting, which became the most prominent gay-bias crime since the murder of Matthew Shepard 10 years ago, and examines whether schools are prepared to help younger kids cope with issues of identity and sexuality. 

Kids like King are so comfortable with the concept of being openly gay that they are coming out younger and younger. One study found that the average age when kids self-identify as gay has tumbled to 13.4, and their parents usually find out a year later. Even as homosexuality has become more accepted, the prospect of being openly gay in middle school raises a troubling set of issues. Kids may want to express who they are, but they are playing grown-up without fully knowing what that means. At the same time, teachers and parents are often uncomfortable dealing with sexual issues in children so young. Schools are caught in between. How do you protect legitimate, personal expression while preventing inappropriate, sometimes harmful, behavior? King was, admittedly, a problematical test case: he was a troubled child who flaunted his sexuality and wielded it like a weapon—it was often his first line of defense. But his story sheds light on the difficulty of defining the limits of tolerance.

At 15, King was small—5 feet 1 inch—but very hard to miss. In January, he started to show up for class decked out in women’s accessories. On some days, he would slick up his curly hair in a Prince-like bouffant. Sometimes he’d paint his fingernails hot pink and dab glitter or white foundation on his cheeks, would proudly wear stiletto heels and thought nothing of chasing the boys around the school in them. The staff at E. O. Green was struggling with finding a balance between his right to self-expression and preventing it from disrupting others. Legally, they couldn’t stop him from wearing girls’ clothes, according to the California Attorney General’s Office, because of a state hate-crime law that prevents gender discrimination. King pushed his rights as far as he could. During lunch, he’d sidle up to the popular boys’ table and say in a high-pitched voice, “Mind if I sit here?” In the locker room, where he was often ridiculed, he got even by telling the boys, “You look hot,” while they were changing, according to the mother of a student.

King was eventually moved out of the P.E. class, though the school didn’t seem to know the extent to which he was clashing with other boys. One teacher describes the gym transfer as more of a “preventative measure,” since King complained that one student wouldn’t stop looking at him. In other classes, teachers were baffled that King was allowed to draw so much attention to himself. Some teachers thought King was clearly in violation of the dress code, which prevents students from wearing articles of clothing considered distracting.

King’s coming out proved to be a fraught process, as it can often be. For tweens, talking about being gay isn’t really about sex. They may be aware of their own sexual attraction by the time they’re 10, according to Caitlin Ryan, a researcher at San Francisco State University, but those feelings are too vague and unfamiliar to be their primary motivation. These kids are actually concerned with exploring their identity. ‘When you’re a baby, you cry when you’re hungry because you don’t know the word for it,” says Allan Acevedo, 19, of San Diego, who came out when he was in eighth grade. “Part of the reason why people are coming out earlier is they have the word ‘gay,’ and they know it explains the feeling.” Like older teenagers, tweens tend to tell their friends first, because they think they’ll be more accepting. But kids that age often aren’t equipped to deal with highly personal information, and middle-school staffs are almost never trained in handling kids who question their sexuality. More than 3,600 high schools sponsor gay-straight alliances designed to foster acceptance of gay students, but only 110 middle schools have them. Often the entire school finds out before either the student or the faculty is prepared for the attention and the backlash. “My name became a punch line very fast,” says Grady Keefe, 19, of Branford, Conn., who came out in the eighth grade. “The guidance counselors told me I should not have come out because I was being hurt.”

The obvious question now is whether King’s death could have been prevented. “Absolutely,” says Superintendent Jerry Dannenberg. “Why do we have youngsters that have access to guns? Why don’t we have adequate funding to pay for social workers at the school to make sure students have resources? We have societal issues.” Many teachers and parents aren’t content with that answer. For them, the issue isn’t whether Larry was gay or straight—his father still isn’t convinced his son was gay—

but whether he was allowed to push the boundaries so far that he put himself and others in danger. They’re not blaming Larry for his own death—as if anything could justify his murder—but their attitude toward his assailant is not unsympathetic. “We failed Brandon,” a teacher says. “We didn’t know the bullying was coming from the other side—Larry was pushing as hard as he could, because he liked the attention.”

            What happened to King and McInerney was certainly extreme, but it has implications for schools across the country. “If we’re going to be absolutely sure this isn’t going to happen again,” says Elaine Garber, 81, who has served on the school’s board for 48 years, “this has got to be discussed some more.”

# # # (Read cover story at www.Newsweek.com.)