Unique School Helps Youths With No Place to Go

At first glance, it seems like any other high school classroom.

Students are scribbling notes in science workbooks and a teacher hovers over them, correcting mistakes. Blackboards list assignments, and posters on the wall mark the achievements of blacks and Latinos.

Suddenly, one pupil clutches his stomach and complains about nausea from a dose of AZT, a drug used to combat AIDS. A friend nods sympathetically across the room, and the teacher inquires gently about the boy’s condition.

“It’s just one more problem we face here,” says the instructor, Fred Goldhaber, after the teen-ager has left the room. “When you run a school like this, you’re dealing with a very special group of folks.”

At the Harvey Milk alternative school, a three-story building on the fringes of Greenwich Village, the phrase “teen-age years” takes on a new meaning. Founded in 1985, it is the nation’s only public school for gay, lesbian and transsexual students.

For most American adolescents, high school is a time of social growth, sexual awakening and intellectual blossoming. But it can be a traumatic experience for gays and lesbians, some of whom are harassed by students and teachers and drop out of mainstream schools.

The Harvey Milk School, named after the gay San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated in 1978, is a refuge for such teen-agers. A recent survey of the student body showed that more than 58% of them had been beaten up by their peers and feared that they would never be able to complete their education.

“We’re talking about kids who have been humiliated and ostracized, and for whom there is no other place to go,” says Joyce Hunter, a licensed social worker with the Hetrick-Martin Institute for Lesbian and Gay Youth, which set up the school with the cooperation of New York City officials.

Hunter tells of a 15-year-old boy who dropped out of a New York City high school after a physical-education instructor berated him in front of other students and ordered him to sit in the girl’s gymnasium. A 14-year-old lesbian, weary of being harassed by her peers, stopped going to school and told counselors that she felt safer hanging out on street corners than spending time in the schoolyard.

On a typical day at the Harvey Milk School, 15 to 20 students attend classes, out of a total yearly enrollment of 40. Attendance is erratic, given the pupils’ histories and their fears about rejoining a school routine. Potential students are referred by a variety of social agencies, and administrators decide who will be admitted.

Instruction takes place in two small, unheated rooms, which can get quite cold on a winter’s day. Students climb the stairs to a third-story landing, some dressed in black leather, others wearing more conventional clothes. Although pupils of all sexual orientations are welcome, only a few heterosexuals have ever enrolled.

For most of the teen-agers, the overriding problems are not algebra or physics, but isolation and self-doubt. During a recent creative-writing class, one Harvey Milk student wondered whether he would ever be able to fully express his gay identity in straight society.

“I don’t think I fit in anywhere,” he said. “I don’t know where the line is that I shouldn’t cross. Maybe I’ll always be alone.”

Another student, wearing a bright red bandanna, answered him, saying: “If you wanted to fit in, you’d be wearing a three-piece suit and going to work on Wall Street every day for a stockbroker. But that’s not who you are.”

Beth Bomzey, a special-education teacher, listened approvingly and encouraged her students to “have the courage to be who you are every day.”

She and Goldhaber, the school’s only instructors, are certified by the New York City Board of Education. In a normal week, they offer instruction in English, history, mathematics, physics, languages, biology and other subjects.

The teaching is geared to individual students, so many courses are taught at once in the same room. Pupils receive one-on-one counseling and are encouraged to socialize with one another at an after-school meeting center.

Although the city pays the teachers’ salaries through its alternative schools program, most of the funding comes from the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which sponsors other projects for gay and lesbian teen-agers. The institute receives public funds as well as private contributions.

The Harvey Milk School was criticized on moral grounds when it first opened, but city officials said it was a valid program that deserved to continue. If addicted or handicapped children are eligible for special schools, they said, why not troubled gay adolescents?

“I think people have come to realize that these kids would fall through the cracks if it weren’t for a place like this,” says Hunter, who helped found the institute.

“They’ve grown up in a world that says they’re less than other people, and that they’re committing a sin, so they don’t feel good about who they are.”

Administrators say their goal is to build up the students’ confidence and help them reenroll in a mainstream school. If pupils complete a full course of instruction, however, they can qualify for a diploma. So far, eight students have graduated and 15 to 20 have gone back to regular high schools.

Several alumni have gone on to college, says Goldhaber. But there are also grim stories: One student who graduated died of AIDS shortly thereafter.

The Hetrick-Martin Institute was founded by Drs. Emery S. Hetrick and A. Damien Martin in 1979, after the brutal gang rape of a teen-age boy in a New York City bar. Similar incidents in later years prompted gay and lesbian activists to establish the Harvey Milk School.

Although the school has a small number of students, administrators believe they are dealing with the tip of the iceberg when it comes to troubled homosexual adolescents in New York. Nearly a third of the pupils have tried to commit suicide, and more than 20% of the youngsters served by the institute are now infected with the HIV virus, according to Hunter.

Not surprisingly, “safe sex” is a key part of the curriculum. During her creative-writing class, for example, Bomzey urges students to write poems for a gay poet with AIDS who has been hospitalized. She later praises the poems--but also delivers an important message.

“If you send him these poems, he’s going to smile,” she says. “And do you remember what smiling is good for? It’s good for the immune system, it makes you strong, and that’s important.”

When the boy who spoke earlier about not “fitting in” raises the issue again, she reminds him that he’s not alone.

“You’re always going to be a member of one group,” Bomzey says. “You’re a member of the human race, and I don’t want you ever to forget that.”