A Safe Schools discussion must start with the past.

I’m going to wade, a little, into the Safe Schools debate that in my last post I dipped my toe into. For those who don’t know the Safe Schools Coalition initiative, it can be divided into two things; a series of lesson plans and resources for high school teachers to discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex student issues, and recommended high school policies to support those students (found amongst the resources).  To shrink the language of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex” I will be referring to this grouping as same-sex attracted and gender-diverse.

Although in my younger years some attempt was made to put all the letters of LGBTI under the reclaimed word “Queer” that never took off. For one thing the word Queer became attached to the image of a white wealthy gay male, an inevitability of any singular identity perhaps in a world of ads chasing pink dollars. Many Lesbians insisted on their own particular identity, rather than existing as Queer’s “other”. Queer politics also had agendas that were broader than the LGBTI movement – sex-positivity for example – and whereas Queer tended to embrace Drag, some feminists saw this type of performance as offensive as “black-face”.  Still Queer has an edgeyness that LGBTI lacks. Queer is a little more punk and post-normal. For this reason the term still finds favour today.

This old debate about the universality of Queer is an obscure element of history. If you lived through it and participated in it, it’s easy to imagine that everyone knows why Queer is not generally considered an acceptable umbrella term and why some people, despite this, still use it. I’m not showing off here. I never learnt this stuff. I was just involved in it. Ask me who won any of the Grand Finals through the 80’s and 90’s and I will have to guess because I wasn’t paying attention to that history.

This idea of niche and personal histories is crucial to understanding the debates and discussions around the Safe Schools initiative. Consider the example of the Tasty Raid in Melbourne in 1994. The proportion of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults in Australia who know of this event will be huge. In fact it will be much higher than people who know about why we do or don’t use the term Queer, a largely academic debate. The Tasty raid and the subsequent suing of the Victorian Police was a big deal, but the people who remember it don’t all remember it because they are better historians. Many just remember it because it was about their lives. They either were caught up in it or they learnt about at the time through their networks.

A more chilling example of separate history was reported in an article titled ‘Sydney’s Shame’  (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-shame ). This story reported on systematic gay bashings leading to deliberate murders around Sydney beats, and a culture of police reluctance to investigate. We’re talking here about people found dead at the bottom of cliffs with clear evidence of being assaulted first and the death being ruled as an accident. We’re talking about “fag-bashing” viewed as an ordinary activity to do with your mates. Again this is not necessarily something same-sex attracted and gender diverse people study in specialist classes. It is simply what some have lived through and many more have been aware of as they walk home. Even when these things are reported in mainstream media they become part of the consciousness of some readers and not so much of others.

Incidentally this is what women’s experience of the epidemic of violence against women is like. They hold their keys differently. Take out their phone. Stay close to the lights and avoid the alleys. Notice who is walking behind them. Of course therefore they remember more than men the history of this violence, including incidents of violence, poor political or police responses and community reactions. They will appreciate how every single Mardi Gras through the 80’s and 90’s came with a warning to keep yourself safe as you left venues because the gay bashers always stepped up their activities around that time. They will understand how that warning is a part of some peoples history of events. By the way, maybe they still give out that warning, but living in Bendigo with my family I don’t follow Mardi Gras news much anymore; again separate histories.

The relevance of all this to how Safe Schools is being discussed, is simple. Virtually every argument in support of the Safe Schools program refers to the history of same-sex attracted or gender diverse people, often incorporating the personal history of the author. The Safe Schools programs are seen as correcting for the systematic oppression that has been the life of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. My last blog did something similar – it drew upon my past. The past is very much present when supporters speak of the Safe Schools program. For them an ugly homophobic past is sitting square in the middle of the discussion.

Meanwhile the criticisms of the Safe Schools program are massively ahistorical. They may criticize the program based on its merits, or they may criticize what they have heard is the program based on the merits of that, but they are definitely not evaluating the program in a historical context. How was school for these critics when they were young? Irrelevant. How were workplaces or the media or the law as these critics were emerging into adulthood? They were fine, why would that matter?

Occasionally the past is brought into the conversation from some Safe Schools critics, but it is a fantasy past. It is in fact such a fantastic past as to make their criticisms even more ahistorical for mentioning it. In these pasts everyone is neighbourly and chaste, homosexuality is barely mentioned which one supposes means that same-sex attracted people barely existed, and children respect their parents because God is in the schools where He (sic) belongs. You don’t find this sort of fantasy past promoted by serious critics of the program, but it is there amongst the petition signers and the online angry. In this past there are no gay bashings or homophobia at all. This is why I consider it to be even more a denial of history than simply not mentioning history at all.

The tendency of the more serious Safe Schools critics is to blunt any historical special interest case by generalizing the focus from homophobic bullying to all bullying.  In this way they mirror other ahistorical criticisms of other historical movements. On Q&A recently the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Lyle Shelton responded to comments that same-sex attracted and gender-diverse kids are being bullied, with comments that all bullying is wrong for whatever reason. This is a copy of the white response to the hashtag Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter.  While technically true there is no knowledge of history in either response. It is as if presented with the Sydney’s Shame article the ACL would say “Well, all police corruption is wrong and nobody is condoning any violence here.”

This lack of recognizing their particular history frustrates same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. Weren’t they just sharing their painful pasts moments ago? Were the ACL and their followers listening? This only gets worse when organisations like the ACL claim to be bullied, harassed and silenced today. It was not long ago that being gay was compared to smoking by the then public face and continuing chair of the board of the ACL. The concern the ACL have always shown has been very much like a concern about the uptake of smoking, to thwart any improvement in gay lives lest it encourage more people to take up being gay. Many consider them a source of homophobia.

But it’s not even a question of whether the ACL and its current head Lyle Shelton directly spread homophobia or not. The reality is that all the time Shelton was growing up and when he was a newspaper journalist and editor, when he was a city councilor and a state candidate and when he moved to the ACL, same-sex attracted and gender diverse people have been being bullied, bashed and murdered, fired from their jobs, kicked out of their homes and turned away from services. Not a single element of this history was ever confronted by Shelton as a journalist, editor, politician or lobbyist. Shelton either never knew about this history or never cared. Most likely it simply passed him by like AFL did me. He didn’t have to decide not to take an interest in it – he simply wasn’t involved in it.

Does it seem unfair to you to judge him for this? Does it seem irrelevant to his evaluation of the Safe Schools program? Maybe so in both cases but this is what I suspect is a part of the feeling of the supporters of Safe Schools. For them Safe Schools exists within a history that entitles the voices of same-sex attracted and gender diverse people to speak and disqualifies the speech of people like Lyle Shelton and the ACL. This is a shared feeling, by the way, from supporters of the program who are as heterosexual and cis-gendered as Lyle Shelton. It’s not a Queer thing to privilege Queer voices in this discussion – it’s a historically aware thing. Many even feel it is a human thing – to allow themselves to be silenced by the testimony of the survivors of violence.

Having spoken of the frustration of the Safe School supporters, let’s consider the frustration of its critics. In their minds they are making what they feel are rational arguments. Some of their arguments are not rational at all and some of them are wildly misinformed but some of them raise legitimate areas for improvement. If the filter of personal history is driving how Safe Schools supporters feel about the program and its critics, then they can be easily hostile to any criticism being made, almost regardless of the program’s content.

The Safe Schools program has been developed with the input of numerous same-sex attracted and gender -diverse young people. It has been implemented successfully at a range of schools including a Catholic school, a tiny country school and many large state schools. This all speaks to how useful and positive a program it is, but it’s still just a program. There are bound to be ways it can improve and mistakes that have been made. It seems to me that by being engaged in historical battles Safe Schools supporters are in danger of viewing all criticisms of the initiative as attacks on LGBTI people.  That's not a healthy relationship to any program.

If this conversation about Safe Schools is to improve we are going to need people who can confront the history gap in our community. There are some examples of people who speak for conservative Christians who get the importance of history in this discussion and by that I don't mean a token nod to the problem of all bullying. Michael Jensen,  is someone I disagree with on Same-Sex marriage but he recently made a long Facebook post which indicated his understanding of LGBTI history. It has since been published by the Huffinton Post. What is important about this post was that it never tries to subsume homophobic bullying or racist bullying under the generic title of all bullying. Instead it recognized that homophobic bullying occupies a particular place in our history and delivers a particular harm that can only be imperfectly imagined by those who didn't experience it. That's humility.

John Sandeman provides another example. He is the editor of Eternity Magazine, a Christian non-denominational publication and one which has defended ACL and taken a conservative stance on LGBTI issues.  On the 25th of February this year he wrote an article for the Australian Bible Society website titled, ‘The SMH apologises to the Mardi Gras. What should Christians do?’ This was a genuine admission of the history of conservative Christians in denying basic freedoms to same-sex attracted people and in being involved in their systematic oppression.

Neither of these pieces of writing specifically mentioned the Safe Schools program although Jensen's piece comes close. Perhaps that enables their authors to be freer with their acceptance of the gains of the LGBTI movement for equality or perhaps even that it is to take their point too far. At least they start the conversation off on the right foot. We should all be able to acknowledge that Australian history is a brutally homophobic one and that this is not just more of the “general” bullying, violence or sinfulness of society. It is a specific problem with same-sex attraction and gender diversity that churches have fostered themselves.

From this point I think we should all be able to agree that some kind of program like the Safe Schools initiative is necessary and deserves the paltry eight million dollars that has gone into it. This will be a leap for some conservative Christians but I hope it is one they can make. As Stephanie Judd wrote for the ABC news site, addressing the ACL in particular:
“If you feel some Safe Schools content isn't age-appropriate, then isn't dialoguing with them for modifications to the program a better and more gracious approach than pitting yourself against them by calling for their wholesale defunding?”
Stephanie, whose byline indicates she attends an Anglican Church, goes on to say that  “In the absence of a a satisfactory alternative that addresses the problem that Safe Schools was created to fix, the ACL's statements are going to continue to be received as harsh and unconstructive.”

So long as the critics of the Safe Schools initiative come at Safe Schools with axes of outrage rather than ideas for improvement they will seem to have very little idea of lives outside their own. We can see this in their ahistorical approach to the issue. So long as they propose no alternative at all or a generalised alternative that hides the special historical case for justice of same-sex attracted and gender-diverse people, they will seem to have no idea there is even a problem to fix. On that basis they are not going to be listened to and despite what they might tell themselves it won’t be because they are being bullied now. On the other hand, a proper discussion might be had if the examples of John Sandeman and Michael Jensen, both conservatives, have a genuine influence on their peers.

They Always Keep the Minority in at Lunch.

Memory is connected to prophecy. We use our memories to tell the future and inform the present. What we remember, and how, is full of salience for the decisions we make and the causes we support. Stuff that we don’t think is relevant to our current situation we forget, and then a memory can come back loudly when it needs to speak its prophetic voice to us.

Our prophecies may be wrong. Memories are selective and unreliable. Politics is partly an exercise in competing prophecies. The world that Trump followers fear is different to the world Bernie Sanders followers fear. Those who want to stop the boats are predicting outcomes that are different to those who want to let the babies stay. But these prophecies are powerful to each of us.

For some time I have been haunted by a particular memory with a particular message about our time. Is it true? I think it speaks a certain truth.

When I was in high school, about year eight or nine, each student was required to give a short speech. One student in my class gave a speech which told us that all gay people should be shot. I kid you not. The speech was allowed to finish and the class, the whole rest of the class it seems to me in my memory, clapped.

As a high schooler I was already a leftie. The talk, my teacher’s lack of reaction, the class’s applause for the speaker, all incensed me.  Any protest I made was not received. Instead someone made a snide comment about me for dissenting.

Well, that meant it was on. For the rest of the class I winked and even blew kisses at the guy who had commented about me. He gradually grew angrier and angrier. He was smaller than me and that was probably why I focused on him. Finally he got up to hit me. I stayed calm but the teacher was no idiot and knew I’d been provoking the situation.

After class the teacher made me stay behind. I was in trouble and it was me who would be kept in at lunch. There was some sympathy from the teacher but there was also no doubt that she wouldn’t be taking any kind of recrimination against the student who gave the talk or the one who wanted to hit me. I was the one who needed to be brought into line.

The lesson is that rules are not designed, not in school at least, to be right or fair or to protect a loving view of the world from a hateful one. Rules are designed to minimize conflict. My teacher didn’t have to step in when a student said gay people should be shot because any gay people in the class were too in the closet for this to create immediate conflict. And when I made a conflict out of it, the teacher had a choice to try and affect the views of the whole class or to affect my behaviour. They chose the rational if perhaps cowardly choice to change the single student.

Today there are some religious people who believe that we live in an age of intolerance. We do, but as my memory reminds me it is an age without beginning and only an imaginary end. The intolerance these religious people claim is simply the force that I faced in high school – the desire of institutions to minimize conflict – a force they generally support when it is in their favour. As the world changes, the new minority, in many places, is the student in class who has a problem with homosexuality, who needs to make anti-gay jokes and who wants to make a point of a boy's effeminacy or a girl's machismo. The school fundamentally doesn’t care for who is right. The school will police that minority because they are easier to police than changing the rest of the school.

Now this may be unflattering to describe things this way but it shouldn’t be shocking to us. Consider a hypothetical program called “All kinds of families” In this program the notion of blended families, single-parent families, adoptive families, and families with divorced or separated parents are discussed. Does anyone think this program is interested in young Billy’s Roman Catholic views that divorce and remarriage is wrong? Is young Billy’s definition of family, with its problematising of assisted reproduction going to get a hearing? Of course not.

And here’s what the teachers are thinking. These teachers want to introduce this program for Sarah who has been sad ever since her parents divorced. These teachers note that every single piece of curriculum material from the picture books to the movies they show has two happily married people with their kids all born in wedlock. These teachers may have grasped this material with a real gratitude for it’s reflection of their own lives. For all these reasons and more, these teachers think “Billy can shut up.”

Now when “All kinds of families” was (hypothetically) introduced maybe someone wanted to include same-sex couple’s families. Maybe someone else wanted to include polyamorous partnerships and their families. Most likely if this hypothetical program was produced over a decade ago neither of those families would be included. Again this would not be because of what is right or wrong. This would be because of what stands inside or outside the majority acceptable culture. Excluding same-sex couples and their kids from the program's definition of 'all kinds of family' would minimize conflict up to recent times. Including them now might cause conflict in some places but not so much in others. That is the force that always controls school decisions. Polyamourous families are still out; Way too much conflict there.

To see how things have changed for same-sex families though we can look to Play School. The voice of those opposed to including a same-sex couple with kids on a show about diverse family types is firmly in the minority. What did the ABC think of the Australian Christian Lobby’s outrage about the issue? I reckon they thought “The ACL can shut up.”

In Victorian schools we now have the “Safe Schools” initiative. Some people are shocked that it will normalize homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism. In doing so they fear it will de-normalise their own ideas of sexuality in which non-heterosexuality is unnatural or just plain wrong. This, they claim, will simply shift who is ostracized from those who are gay to those opposed to gay rights. I suppose the answer to that is yes, it probably will. Can it do anything else?

Some people think it is possible for multiple competing ideas of what is sin and what should be celebrated to survive together in society. If we look at something like divorce and remarriage though I think we see that it isn’t particularly possible at all. Yes, conservative Catholics can choose not to recognize remarriages as legitimate. However nobody wants to hear it – at least not at school or in a workplace or on a publicly funded tv show for kids. Yes, the view is alive and well but is it tolerated? Outside of a personal view of how to live one’s own life it is barely tolerated at all.

This is the approach we can expect to take hold around gay marriage in the near future. That you will be required to recognize gay marriages is a reasonable prediction just as politeness requires you now to recognize remarried couples as married. Will you be permitted to add “I don’t agree with homosexuality” at the end of a toast in the staff room when two male co-workers tie the knot? You probably aren’t now. The reason is that conflict minimization is the priority in most workplaces as it is in schools.

This normalizing pressure is also the same reason that in many school environments today teachers still don’t mention homosexuality, and texts and films are all 100% heterosexual. In fact often there are no books in a high school library let alone a primary school one which include gay characters.  As a teacher I have stopped my students from using “gay” as an insult but in this regard I am atypical. This is not a reflection of what these teachers or schools believe is right or wrong. It is just the priority of minimizing conflict.

Conflict is a real concern at the moment because views have been polarised by the pending plebiscite on gay marriage.  We would expect the same polarization to be present if a plebiscite on anything else could materially affect that issue. We find this polarization present even in the religious communities which claim to be oppressed by a new intolerance from outside. If your church disapproves of gay marriage you might even be told you are not a Christian if you support it.  Meanwhile in a church supportive of gay marriage it will be hard to imagine someone opposed to it being welcomed on plebiscite night. This will probably die down once marriage reform is through.

All this might seem terribly depressing. We want to believe that changes in society are the result of enlightenment and reasoning not some force of normalization with a priority of minimizing conflict. Changes in popular opinion might well be the result of good argument. Changes in the hearts and minds of people can also occur through relationships and connections. But policies are not people. Policies change to suit public opinion, after the fact, and in doing so they are always intolerant. They will always keep the minority in at lunch. It’s time we stopped acting like this was something new.

I have my beliefs about what are rights and what are privileges and would rather step on privileges to secure every child's rights. As a human who has know the sting of feeling abnormal for same-sex attraction I hunger for a time when that sting is not delivered. As a man who has found my gender roles stupidly limiting and uncomfortable I enjoy seeing young people play with or reject gender entirely. I am generally favorable towards the Safer Schools materials as a result. But I am not going to be surprised if in some classrooms some of the conservative fears of the program come true and kids who disagree with the materials feel constrained in speaking out.

I think the best thing we can do is to be transparent about the forces we operate under. I think we can invite debate about school policies while being clear that there is actual learning to be done and every student no matter their sexuality or their views on sexuality has the right to the best environment for that learning to happen. As a teacher I try to stop any lynch mob even if they are rounding up someone who I believe has been a complete dick. But at the end of the day something is probably going to be normalised and something else is not.