Opposition to Curriculum Guide Is Exploding in N.Y.

Neil Lodato, a construction worker in Queens, was waving his arms and shouting outside his daughter’s school, P.S. 13. “They should stick to teaching these babies that 1 plus 1 equals 2, instead of what daddy and his boyfriend are doing in the bedroom.

“I learned about (homosexual couples) on the street, that’s where she should, too,” Lodato yelled, threatening to pull his 5-year-old daughter out of school if Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez gets his way. The superintendent wants all city children to be taught respect for homosexuals, as early as the first grade.

Diane Kristen, the mother of a second-grader, was one of the few parents not nodding in agreement with Lodato last week in the icy afternoon air outside one of the schools resisting Fernandez’s plan. “It’s fear and anger and homophobia like that,” Kristen said, that is whipping New York into near hysteria.

More than a year after the 443-page multicultural curriculum guide called “Children of the Rainbow” was released, opposition to the three pages mentioning homosexuals continues to explode. In delis and dentist offices, in paneled Wall Street chambers and graffiti-sprayed subway cars, on televised talk shows and at crowded PTA meetings, parents are fighting about the teaching guidelines that are paving the way for similar plans in school districts nationwide.

Educators across the country are struggling not only with how to teach children about AIDS and condoms but also about sexual orientation.

New York’s guidelines recommend that as early as the first grade, students should learn that there are varied family structures, including “two-parent or single-parent households, gay or lesbian parents, divorced parents, adoptive parents, and guardians or foster parents.” It also says children should be instructed on “the positive aspects of each type of household.”

Among a suggested teachers’ bibliography of hundreds of books are two, “Daddy’s Roommate” and “Heather has Two Mommies,” which show pictures of gay couples.

While misinformation has been rampant and feelings strong all over the city, nowhere has there been a greater upheaval than in working-class Queens, setting for TV’s fictional arch-conservative Archie Bunker. Some New Yorkers say the anti-gay rantings now going on in Queens sound like lines directly lifted from an “All in the Family” script.

Of the 32 school boards citywide, only District 24 in Queens flatly refused to mention gays or lesbians to any of its students from kindergarten through sixth grade. This district governs 25 schools in the working- and middle-class area including Corona and Elmhurst, where P.S. 13 is located.

Some of the other school boards accepted the guidelines. But the majority modified Fernandez’s recommendation so that the instruction would not begin until the fifth or sixth grade.

Fernandez said in an interview that the earlier students learn about alternative lifestyles--and if they do so in an appropriate way--the less likely they are to grow up with harmful biases. But he gave school boards the option of introducing the controversial curriculum at any time between the first and sixth grades.