Consent Issue Fuels Debate Over School Gay Groups

A proposal by local school officials that students obtain their parents’ consent before joining campus clubs has turned into the latest flare-up of a heated national debate over the growing number of teenage gay and lesbian groups.

District officials insist their only aim is to enhance parents’ awareness of their children’s extracurricular activities, and that the new rule would apply to all clubs. But gay and lesbian students maintain that they are the real targets of a plan that would undermine one of their most important sources of support as they discover and come to terms with their homosexuality.

The controversy in this hilly, somewhat staid suburb not only mirrors others across the country but brings into focus the tricky balance between parents’ right to know what their children are doing and teenagers’ right to privacy--especially when grappling with “coming out” to their families and friends.

“When you put together the issue of sexual orientation and children, there are a lot of people who freak out,” said Jon Davidson, an attorney with Lambda, a nonprofit legal foundation that specializes in gay and lesbian issues.

Lambda, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women and other groups, has threatened to file a civil-rights suit against the Glendale Unified School District if the parental-consent rule is adopted.

High school gay and lesbian clubs, Davidson continued, often create “something approaching panic on the part of school authorities, and it leads to actions that are not well thought out and can end up hurting a lot of kids who need help.”

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Like its counterparts elsewhere, Hoover High School’s Project 10 group in Glendale is a mixture of gay, lesbian and straight students who organized two years ago to discuss their feelings about sexuality in a confidential and sympathetic setting. So far, Glendale’s three other high schools have yet to establish similar groups, and it was largely Hoover students who decried the parental-consent plan at a raucous school board meeting last week.

Project 10, which borrowed its name from a successful program in the Los Angeles Unified School District, kept a low profile and attracted no controversy until the start of the current school year, when it applied for official club status in hopes that greater visibility would help it reach more students.

That, members and supporters say, is when the trouble started.

“Once the students brought up the idea of becoming a club, all of a sudden the school district came up with this plan that the kids were going to need permission slips, signed by their parents, to join,” said Carl Halverson, 30, an openly gay Hoover math teacher who supervises the group’s weekly lunchtime meetings.

“It’s absolutely reactionary,” Halverson said.

But Glendale Board of Education member Jane Whitaker said the impetus for the proposed consent rule was far more mundane: not concern over a gay teen club, but parents’ complaints about club expenses that they weren’t notified about ahead of time.

“When we first discussed this issue a few months ago, I didn’t even know this club existed, or that it was so controversial,” she said, denying that gay and lesbian students were the target.

Whitaker also predicted a compromise plan that would satisfy everyone when the board votes on the matter in May.

“There are valid points on all sides of this, and I think you’re going to see something coming out of the school board that’s in the middle ground,” Whitaker said.

Several other school board members also said alternatives to the proposed consent rule are already being suggested. One idea is to give parents a list of all clubs that meet at school, indicating which involve a fee and other costs to join--such as the ski club, which schedules several trips during the year. Another option would be to allow parents to check off a list of clubs they will allow their children to join.

Under the 1984 federal Equal Access Act, whenever a student group is allowed to meet on campus, others must be afforded the same privilege. That makes it hard for school districts to single out gay and lesbian clubs, and accounts for the variety of responses to their presence.

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In a drastic move that made national headlines in February, the Salt Lake City Board of Education quashed the formation of a high school gay and lesbian club by issuing a blanket ban on all non-curricular school clubs--including the traditional ski, chess, Frisbee and Bible clubs.

The controversy reached the Nevada Legislature, where conservative lawmakers were so opposed to the idea of a gay and lesbian club that at one point they considered banning all school clubs statewide, but did not do so. They also discussed a measure that, like the Glendale proposal, would have restricted gay school clubs statewide by requiring parental permission to join them. But the issue never reached a vote.

In 1994, when a gay/straight student support group at Fountain Valley High School in Orange County petitioned for official club status, it sparked anti-gay student protests and an avalanche of opposition from parents and religious groups.

In response, the school district reached a compromise that stopped short of naming the group a “club,” but allowed it and all other non-curricular groups such as Christian clubs to continue meeting on campus as “equal access organizations.”

Two years later, the group at Fountain Valley High continues to meet, and the controversy is just a memory, said John Meyers, assistant superintendent of the Huntington Beach Union High School District.

“The fears of the groups opposing the alliance were basically that they thought this was a way for the group to indoctrinate and recruit members to their way of life,” Meyers said. “But the proponents of the alliance said, ‘We’re not recruiting anybody. We just need a place to talk.’

“It was a very difficult decision for the school board because it is a national debate. We dealt with it as best we could and it seems to be working.”

Similar controversies have arisen as gays and lesbians across the country have lobbied for programs catering to gay teens or fostering understanding of homosexuality in schools.

But in some communities, such programs are allowed to flourish. The best known is the original Project 10, a peer-support and counseling service for gays and lesbians founded at Fairfax High School in 1985. Others have made similar strides without making headlines.

Steve Kornfeld, dean of students at San Gabriel High School in Alhambra, still considers it “unbelievable” that his Project 10 knockoff group, started 10 years ago and going strong, never had to battle with administrators or parents to survive.

Kornfeld said he wanted to help gay students at his school after his son, now 29, “came out” to him after graduating high school. It was then, Kornfeld said, that he began to realize how serious an identity crisis the boy had suffered while in school.

“When you are involved with these kids, when you hear what they are saying, that’s when it becomes a serious issue to you,” Kornfeld said. “That’s why I am concerned about the kids on the Hoover campus, or on any campus, not having a place to meet. Not giving them a place to go and talk to one another in privacy about their fears, their feelings, is allowing them to suffer in silence, pushing them further and faster toward suicide.

“It is a life-and-death situation, and we have a moral obligation to do something,” he said.

Yet a moral obligation to positively intervene in the lives of youngsters is also the justification of those who oppose teenage gay and lesbian groups.

Much of the support for the parent-consent rule in Glendale has come from parents and conservative religious groups who believe gay clubs at school are part of a larger plan to “legitimize” homosexuality and even to influence teens to adopt gay and lesbian lifestyles.

“This is a major issue that we’ve been talking about for years,” said Lou Sheldon, a spokesman for the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition.

“The issue is that homosexuality is very much a dysfunctional behavior. It is gender identity conflict,” Sheldon said. “The last thing we want to do is politicize it. But by having the club on campus it becomes a political issue, and they think they will become socialized into the process. What these kids really need is repairative therapy. They need help.”

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Glendale’s consent rule, if adopted, would adhere to federal law by applying to all campus clubs. But gay and lesbian students say they would be affected in a unique and disastrous way, forcing them to either “come out” before they are ready or give up their network of support.

“My parents are Roman Catholics, from a very traditional background, and it took me a long time before I could tell them,” said 18-year-old Javier Hernandez, a Hoover High School senior. He added that there was “no way” he could have revealed his homosexuality to his parents two years ago, when he first struggled with his identity.

“Today I am very comfortable with my sexuality and I have very high self-esteem. But it has taken a long healing process for me to reach this stage,” Hernandez said. “Many of the kids in our group are still struggling with who they are, and if they had to get a permission slip, this group would be finished. They would be alone.”