COLUMN ONE : A Painful Lesson for a Gay Teacher : L.A. district has support groups and a policy against discrimination. But student taunts drove him out.

He was walking downstairs with a crowd of students during an earthquake drill when he heard the word. Soon, the stairwell seemed to be filled with it. “Faggot! Faggot!” the teen-agers jeered, exulting in the taunt, encircling him with their scorn.

Afterward, when the drill was over and the students had filed back into the building, Martin Bridge sat alone at the edge of the football field, staring into space, not moving. He felt dazed, sure of only one thing--that he could not endure much more.

For weeks, ever since a favorite student flippantly asked him in class if he was gay, the slurs had haunted Bridge’s days at Los Angeles’ Crenshaw High School, where he taught English. He would hear them in class, in the hallways, from his own students and from kids he had never seen before. The epithets seemed to follow him everywhere, hurled at him in defiance and derision.

It had not always been so. Bridge arrived at Crenshaw two years ago, a former television game show producer spurred by the impending death of his partner to do something more meaningful with his life. Maybe, he thought, he could get teen-agers excited about literature, about drama.

Soon, he was popular. His students, particularly the girls, liked his classes. They called him Mr. B and confided in him. He was named teacher of the month. His evaluations were excellent.

“They loved him,” muses Toni Little, a fellow teacher and friend of Bridge. “That’s the sad part. They really did adore him. . . . They had a friend in him and they found out he was gay and they turned on him.”

Mr. Bridge is gone now. In April, not long after the stairwell scene, he went on sick leave, at half pay. He has since filed a discrimination complaint with the school district’s affirmative action office and a workers’ compensation claim.

As the days have slipped by to this, the final week of the school year, many of his colleagues and students have mourned his departure, saddened that they have lost a good teacher. Yet in dissecting his ordeal, they offer no single explanation, no simple solution.

The opinions swirl: It was an isolated case that exploded out of control because of Bridge’s inexperience. It could have happened anywhere in the chaotic Los Angeles school system, where teachers are in a daily battle for control of the classroom. Kids will seize on anything to torment their teachers--this time, homosexuality just happened to be the weapon. It was the administration’s fault. It was the fault of the faculty, of the school district. You can’t expect 16- and 17-year-olds to be tolerant when society signals so much hostility to gay men and lesbians.

“There is no way to explain this,” says Yvonne Noble, Crenshaw’s principal. “Most of (the students) liked him and yet they allowed him to be harmed.”

*

Compared to most school systems in the country, the Los Angeles Unified School District is decidedly gay-friendly.

The district has an official policy of non-discrimination against gays. Support groups for gay students are in place at about half of the system’s 49 high schools. Just a few weeks ago, the district sponsored its first gay student prom. The school board has designated June as Gay and Lesbian Pride Month and its “Educating for Diversity” policy calls for classroom discussions about homophobia as well as the contributions of gays in history and culture.

One only has to spend some time talking to students, however, to see that the reality on campus is in many ways out of step with official policy.

At Crenshaw, teen-agers describe “fag” as a favorite insult, used frequently and indiscriminately. Even those who say they don’t care if someone is homosexual indicate that anti-gay sentiment is widespread at the 2,300-pupil high school, which draws its student body from economically mixed communities, predominantly black and Latino. Many students come from homes where conservative religious views on homosexuality hold sway.

“It’s something to frown on, being gay. It’s just the way people around here are raised,” says a junior, attempting to explain, as he waits for his bus, why some of his schoolmates felt so free to deride Bridge.

He pauses, then adds, “It’s not a dislike. It’s a hate of gays.”

Yes, he heard classmates snicker in the halls as Bridge walked by. Girls would come to Bridge’s defense, scolding, “That’s not nice,” remembers the junior. “But not the boys. It goes against what people see as macho.”

Another junior--one of the girls who tried to hush the slurs--says Bridge was her favorite teacher. “We all liked him,” she says. “If we explained a problem to him, he’d listen.” She misses him.

Others are not so sorry to see him go. “I don’t like gay people because they’re gay,” declares a senior, a slight grin of bravado on his face. “I feel that being gay is not normal. . . . I feel threatened by gays.”

He had Bridge as a substitute teacher in one of his classes this year. He says he discussed Bridge’s “feminine voice” with his friends. “I think I may have verbally assaulted him. I don’t know if he heard me.”

“Why not?” boasts the teen-ager, who says he walked out of the class because Bridge is gay. “I insult everyone.”

Asked what they think of gay people, a couple of other students suggest that homosexuals be shipped off to an island or castrated.

A 10th-grader, overhearing the comments, chimes in: “I think gays have a right to be gay. You’re just acting out of ignorance!”

Retort the boys, “Are you gay?”

*

It is easy to see why many of Bridge’s students liked him. He is articulate and intense, as tightly wound as a teen-ager. He can talk for hours with barely a pause, skittering from subject to subject. His energy demands attention.

“I feel like the worst experiences I’ve had happen to me have been in public schools,” he says, standing in the doorway of his small apartment on the Westside of Los Angeles, savoring the breeze. Talking about his last months at Crenshaw makes him uneasy; he feels trapped again. The open door is a comfort of sorts.

Growing up in Rapid City, S.D., the son of an ironworker, he was often taunted in school. Sissy was the favorite word then.

In an odd way, his youthful experiences drew him back to the classroom. “High school was such a painful experience for me. I thought if I went back I could heal something in myself if I had a positive experience.”

For a while he did. Then the old wounds were torn open.

He is 35 now, no more immune to anti-gay invective then he was as a teen-ager.

“(Then) I just walked away ashamed. And I have to say it’s very similar to how I treated this. I just became ashamed again. . . .”

“I don’t know how you deal with it,” he says of the name-calling. “I can deal with it in myself and then at a certain point I say that’s enough. I’ve been called fag enough. I’ve been called it every day for 2 1/2 months.”

The harassment began to plague Bridge early this year, after one of his students--quoting another teacher--blurted out a question about Bridge’s sexuality in an American literature class. (The teacher denies making any remarks about Bridge.)

Bridge had always avoided questions about his personal life or answered them obliquely. If a student asked him if was married, he would say he had been for five years--the amount of time he had been with his partner, Ned Penney, who died of AIDS a year ago.

To his student, Bridge replied that the topic was inappropriate.

The next day another boy in the same class asked him in crude terms whether he engaged in anal sex. “Whatever I do, I do it with a condom,” Bridge shot back, trying to defuse the issue.

It didn’t work. The derisive comments and questions continued, gradually escalating.

Students he had never seen before would yank open his classroom door and shout epithets.

A strange girl in a softball uniform confronted him in the hall, mockingly striking a suggestive pose. “You want some?” she teased. “No, you wouldn’t.”

Although a relatively small number of students were involved, the incidents were occurring every day. He suspended several students from class. He confided in a few teachers at lunch.

But he kept much of it to himself. For one thing, he did not want to talk about being a homosexual. He was also embarrassed.

“I felt I was losing control and somehow once again it was my fault, right? . . . For being gay. Somehow again I had failed.”

Finally, after the stairwell episode, he went to Noble, the principal, telling her about some of the incidents. She offered to talk to his students. But he said no, thinking that a visit from the principal would signal that he could no longer run his classes without reinforcement.

He came to feel as though he were in a private nightmare from which he had only one escape: to leave.

Mulling it over now, he is not even sure he wants to continue teaching high school. He laments that the school system has not provided enough support for gay teachers, that it is too timid to challenge anti-gay attitudes and confront parents uneasy about having their children taught by open homosexuals.

“Gays and lesbians may have come a long way in the workplace outside of education. But in education, it’s still the 1950s,” he says. “We form our own little groups to pat each other on the back and say we’re OK and network. But the truth is, in the classroom we’re still scared to death of dealing with the homophobia.”

On another day he muses: “I don’t blame the kids. I used to blame their parents, and I’m not sure I do that anymore. I think I blame gays and lesbians because they have chosen to remain in the closet. They have chosen the path of least resistance and that has brought us to a crisis.”

*

Sometimes, says Noble, she doesn’t think it was so much that Bridge was gay as that the kids discovered how to get to him.

“Once they found a way to push his button, they pushed his button,” Noble observes. “Students who wanted to be mean were just mean.”

Mean they can be. These days, teachers say rudeness and profanity are routinely directed their way. Students make racial comments and threatening remarks. They stomp out of class and spew obscenities. They will zero in on a teacher’s soft spots like heat-seeking missiles.

All the same, Noble harbors no illusions about what it’s like to be gay at Crenshaw. She speaks of counseling gay kids who were harassed and points to the difficulty she has had trying to launch a Crenshaw branch of the school district’s support program for gay students, known as Project 10.

When she was assistant principal, Noble says, she approached various Crenshaw teachers about sponsoring a gay group. The teachers all declined, one by responding, “I’m not a faggot.”

Even putting up a display to observe the school district’s Gay and Lesbian Pride Month was problematic. As an exhibit--the school’s first--was being arranged last week, Noble says, students walked by muttering, “Why are you putting that mess up?”

“It is an issue that is very sensitive. I can’t just act according to my own personal acceptance,” Noble says. “It’s a matter of being sensitive without being in your face.”

After Bridge went on leave, Noble spoke to two of his classes. “I talked to them about how there were students who were verbally abusive and discounted his dignity and his value as a person. . . . They were very quiet and a lot of them came to apologize afterward.”

Partly because of what happened to Bridge, Noble thinks there may be a support group for gay students at Crenshaw next year. A “values” program for ninth-graders is also in the works and it will include acceptance of people’s differences--homosexuality among them.

Still, she confesses, “I don’t know what I can do to make sure it never happens again.”

Other faculty members grumble that not enough was done once the harassment came to light, that the issue was simply swept under the rug.

Remarks one teacher, “This problem has not been resolved. Nobody has educated (the students). Nobody has said, ‘This is not the way it should be.’ ”

*

For all the gay-friendly resolutions adopted by the Los Angeles school district, gay teachers say they remain mostly in the closet. And school officials acknowledge that the policies haven’t necessarily filtered down to the classroom.

“We’re making progress unevenly throughout the district,” said Jeff Horton, an openly gay school board member who spent most of his teaching career at Crenshaw. What happened to Bridge could have happened anywhere in the sprawling system, he says.

Of Crenshaw, he adds: “All along the school should have been more proactive in dealing with this issue. . . . And I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t. I was closeted when I was there.”

When Bridge called Horton about his troubles, Horton says he wasn’t really surprised.

“There are many things about teaching at Crenshaw, like most schools in Los Angeles, that are difficult,” Horton concedes. For many white teachers, such as him and Bridge, there are cultural gaps to be spanned with minority students.

Moreover, he says, high school students in general “will use anything to get to you. If it’s not homosexuality, it’s something else. I’ve seen teachers driven out for lots of reasons. . . . If you haven’t figured out a way to blunt their challenges and attempts to distract you from teaching, it’s going to be miserable.”

Virginia Uribe, a Fairfax High School teacher and the openly lesbian founder of Project 10, says she receives five to 10 calls a month from teachers all over the state complaining about being harassed.

Explains a closeted middle school teacher in the Los Angeles system:

“It’s the last acceptable prejudice. . . . Even at this young age, they really feel we don’t have any rights. That is why I don’t come out.”