Haven for Gay Teens : Education: Some people call Project 10 a bad idea, but the counseling program gives some homosexual students in L.A. the courage to stay in school.

Erik, a high school senior, had just finished working out at a West Hollywood gym when he heard the horrifying news. His former lover had AIDS.

“I thought my heart was going to pop out of my chest when he showed me the purple skin marks on his hands and arms,” the 18-year-old Fairfax High student says of the sidewalk encounter with his former boyfriend three weeks ago.

Though Erik (not his real name) has tested negative for the AIDS virus and appears to be in the best of health, he can’t concentrate on much else. He has been awakened by terrifying dreams in which he has purple blotches on his own body. He has grown so depressed that he has contemplated suicide.

But he has found some solace in discussing his situation with other Fairfax teen-agers, all participants in a precedent-setting, school-sponsored counseling program for homosexual students called Project 10.

For an hour, in a room without windows (to guarantee their privacy), the eight to 12 homosexual young men and women in Project 10 talk about topics such as the consequences of coming out, the importance of safe sex, AIDS, condoms, their parents, friends, feelings and frustrations.

They say Project 10 offers them a haven, a place where they can feel free to be themselves and to deal with their concerns about their sexual orientation, which, they say, often has caused them to be mocked, scorned, beaten, rejected--and worse.

Some of the students have been kicked out of their homes after telling their parents they were gay; some have ended up on Hollywood Boulevard as runaways, hustlers and drug abusers. Many of the students, frightened and isolated, say school is the least of their worries, and they often drop out.

But in Project 10, Los Angeles educators contend they have found a way to keep gay teen-agers in school. The program, officials say, has proved so worthwhile that it was expanded last year from Fairfax High to other schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

While it has won praise from educators and some community leaders, Project 10 has also been condemned by others, including Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony, who has called the program “a camouflaged method to legitimize homosexuality.”

Other critics have accused Project 10, which gets its name from the estimate that 10% of the nation’s population is gay, of recruiting teen-agers into a homosexual life style.

Virginia Uribe, a science teacher for 30 years and Project 10’s founder, dismisses the attacks. Instead, she says her program--in which she has involved almost 600 counselors, nurses, teachers and school psychologists via workshops she has conducted--is vital to help gay teen-agers survive to adulthood.

Gay young people, Uribe says, sabotage their own lives because they have no one to talk with about their homosexuality: “They have to monitor everything they say, play it straight with friends and parents,” and just when they need to talk to someone about their feelings, they “can’t turn to anyone.”

But in her classroom--Room 308--that’s not so.

Instead, there are for the taking, no questions asked, brochures about coping with homosexuality. Uribe has also created an attention-grabbing wall display of AIDS-related obituaries of men, women and children.

“Project 10,” she says, “is here to let kids express their feelings. We don’t push them to come out.”

But the program does try to discourage gay teens from being what she calls “the invisible students on campus,” leading “secret double lives--gay on the inside but on the surface faking heterosexuality.”

Ironically, it was a 1984 incident involving an openly gay and effeminate male Fairfax student that launched Project 10, Uribe recalls. The student suffered such harassment from other teen-agers that he quit school.

“I kept asking about that student, why he was no longer in school, why he was pushed out--other than the fact that he was gay,” Uribe says. “It just so upset me that I thought we ought to put our attentions to this under-served minority of youth in education. Our commitment to equality extends to all children.”

Uribe surveyed major school districts in the state and nationwide and found no services provided for homosexual students in public education.

“It was outright bigotry,” she says, adding that possibly hundreds, even thousands, of young people may have dropped out of school for that reason.

Soon after, Uribe started “a little informal rap group at lunchtime” for gay and lesbian students, she says. In a month’s time, about 25 teen-agers were showing up.

Uribe, who describes herself as a lesbian, spoke to her principal, Warren Steinberg, about starting an official program for gay students. She says, “he was and continues to be extremely supportive,” of her work, which includes teaching two science classes in the morning, counseling homosexual students part time and spending afternoons consulting with officials at other schools about Project 10.

Its cost, she notes, “is what the district gives me for (teaching) three periods a day. This program is very low budget but very cost-effective because we are reaching students who never before had someone teach them how to cope with low self-esteem, isolation and violence from verbal and physical abuse.”

The Los Angeles Board of Education has strongly backed Project 10, as have more than 20 city and statewide teacher associations and youth groups. Educators who have attended Uribe’s workshops on the program also praise it.

Gene Touchet, a Franklin High English teacher, says he and his peers are interested in Project 10’s goals of preventing suicide, substance abuse and the spread of AIDS among homosexual teen-agers: “I know students are scared to reveal their gayness to other students or to their parents. So the value of Project 10 at Franklin is that it is there and visible, and whatever a kid needs from it they can take it.”

Carolee Bogue, a Fairfax dean who also conducts rap sessions, says gay teen-agers should have the freedom “to search and seek out their own identity. They are kids crying out in crisis. They need the weekly consistency and structure of Project 10, not a little pep talk.”

But critics say Uribe and Project 10 are little more than a “recruitment program” for students to be homosexuals.

Republicans in the state Assembly have voted unanimously in the past to withhold taxpayers’ money for the Los Angeles Unified School District until it stops supporting Project 10. But Leonard Britton, the district superintendent, and school board members have refused to stop the program.

Project 10’s endorsement by the school board infuriates the Rev. Lou Sheldon, whom Uribe calls her staunchest critic.

Sheldon is chairman of the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition, which he claims has the statewide support of 6,500 churches. He also founded SHAPE (Stop Homosexual Advocacy in Public Education) soon after Uribe founded Project 10.

Sheldon and his coalition’s members oppose Project 10 because they say “parents are totally left out of the picture unless the student makes the decision” to reveal his or her sexual orientation and involve them.

He also asserts that the program condones homosexuality as an acceptable life style for other students, “because there is no alternative viewpoint.

“Project 10 is clearly a recruitment program,” Sheldon says. “It advocates for young people the homosexual life style. This is an absolute one-sided perspective. Why should taxpayers’ dollars support only one life style?”

He says studies indicate that 25% of all adolescents experiment with homosexuality, “but that doesn’t mean that they are homosexual. It means they need counseling.”

He objects, however, to Uribe’s approach, because, he says: “Project 10 says you are born this way (a homosexual) and this is the way you are. That’s false information. It’s not conclusive that (homosexuality) is genetic. Homosexuality is only an underdeveloped stage of heterosexuality.”

But Gary Remafedi, a nationally respected pediatrician who has researched gay and lesbian youth issues since 1983, disagrees with Sheldon: “As a physician and a researcher, I can tell you that all research indicates that efforts to change sexual orientation are unsuccessful (and) unethical. My own rule of thumb is ‘Don’t fix it, if it ain’t broke.’ ”

Remafedi, an assistant professor and medical coordinator for the adolescent health program at the University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic, cited a 1983 American Academy of Pediatrics position, acknowledging that gay and lesbian teen-agers do exist and that pediatricians have a responsibility to work with them and their families.

“What we understand is that there is no underlying psychiatric abnormality with these teen-agers,” he says, adding that the American Psychiatric Assn. removed homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders in 1973. “Their problems are a consequence of social stigma and any attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation only strengthens the stigma that causes the damage.”

By attacking programs such as Project 10, which has become a national model, Remafedi says opponents help to hand down death sentences to teen-agers considering suicide or on the verge of infection with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome or AIDS.

“The suicide attempt rate among the gay teens we work with is one out of three,” Remafedi says; federal health statistics indicate that gay teen-agers are three times more likely than other young people to commit suicide.

“As a consequence of being gay or lesbian, many teen-agers lose self-esteem and hope for the future,” Remafedi explains. “They lose support of family and community and see self-destruction as their only action.”

As for AIDS, Remafedi says, “teens who are gay or bisexual are the kids who are most in danger of getting AIDS and less likely to get help.” He says 70% of the 1,200 AIDS cases among 13- to 21-year-olds resulted from homosexual or bisexual activity. “Because AIDS is latent for so long,” it also poses a special danger to gay young people, many of whom engage in sex as early as their preteen years, when little or no AIDS education is offered, he says.

“People don’t want to acknowledge that gay and lesbian youth exist,” he says. “The conventional wisdom has been that these kids will grow out of it, that it’s just a passing phase or that they must be crazy and are in need of psychiatric help.”

That’s not true, say Remafedi and others, who argue that gay teen-agers, instead, need help from programs like Project 10.

It has been a lifesaver for Regina, 17, a lesbian student at Fairfax High, who says: “I just want to make it through my teen years.”

Six months ago, Regina (not her real name) disclosed to her mother that she was homosexual, “because I couldn’t live a lie anymore. I wanted to be up front and truthful and honest about my feelings, but it just made matters worse.”

The revelation that she was gay shattered her relationship with her mom, Regina says, adding that her mother, a single parent, responded by all but forcing her to read the Bible after school every day.

Other family problems soon contributed to Regina’s moving out of the home and into an apartment with a lesbian friend.

“I’ve known for a long time that I was gay,” she says. “I finally had to come to grips with a lot of things. I had to find out why I didn’t like men . . . why I’ve always been the way I am.”

Regina says that since she joined Project 10’s discussions about six months ago, she feels less “invisible and alone.”

She has told many of her heterosexual friends that she is a lesbian. A few have stopped befriending her, but she tries not to let that bother her. “I told them because we were friends,” she emphasizes. “I told them because I finally am proud about who and what I am. If I can accept them as my friends, why can’t they accept me?”

She says she wants her friends and the heterosexual world to know that “I am not a child molester, I am not sex crazy and that I do not look at other girls that way when we dress in the locker room.”

Still, Regina says what matters most right now is her well-being, especially since she left home.

Like Erik, she is struggling to stay in school.

Says Erik, while sitting in Room 308: “I wish there was a place like this room in all the schools to make it easier for other kids. I know now there is someone to talk to.”

He says that before he was in Project 10, he figured he was the only youngster in middle school who was gay. He didn’t know how to deal with his feelings, and he didn’t know anyone else who had similar feelings. He didn’t know where to turn.

In high school, he disguised his sexual orientation by pretending to be heterosexual and by dating girls. Now, his closest female friends know he is gay and cover for him by being his date at school dances.

He wanted to drop out and for a time smoked large amounts of marijuana to hide his problems. Until a year ago, he went through a period of sexual promiscuity, often spending weekends away from home with men he met at gay bars.

He says he wants to talk to his mother about his homosexuality, but there are too many other family problems to deal with, including his teen-age sister’s pregnancy.

But at least for now, Erik can find some understanding for his problems at Project 10 and especially from Uribe, who “didn’t think I was crazy or weird.

“She saved me from suicide,” Erik says.

But Uribe says Erik saved himself by joining the program: “I hope that’s why we are here--not only to keep kids in the classroom, but to keep them alive and claiming their right to be who they are.”