Reflections of an Aids Activist on the Youth Movement for Curricular Inclusion

We’re living through war, but where they’re living it’s peacetime, and we’re all in the same country.

This moving quote from Larry Kramer’s play, The Normal Heart (1985), expressed how many of us felt throughout the early years of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s that amidst this crisis, officials and others in our country and throughout the world perpetuated a process of collective denial by refusing to acknowledge the mere existence of this war in their attempts to silence people with HIV and their allies.

Within each succeeding social movement throughout our history, individuals in consort with others chisel wide new openings by which people enter and become involved. Adherents to these movements pass through the entry points most consistent with their skills set, ideology, and comfort level.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass said in 1853, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” The point he was making was that individuals, institutions, and societies virtually never relinquish even a bit of power without challenge and conflict.

For example, within an adultist society, adults construct the rules, with little or no input from youth, which they force young people to follow in a process of domestication. Even the terminology our society employs to refer to youth betrays a hierarchical power dynamic.

For example, we refer to young people as “kids,” a term originally applying to young goats. By referring to youth as farm animals provides adults cover in controlling and maintaining unlimited power over humans. (We must treat and respect animals better than we do as well.)

Of course, parents and other adults have the inherent responsibility of protecting young people from harming themselves and being harmed by others, and of teaching them how to live and function in society within our ever-changing global community.

In Freudian terms, we must develop a balance between the individual’s unrestrained instinctual drives and restraints (repression) on these drives in the service of maintaining society (civilization), and to sustain the life of the individual.

We as a society, nonetheless, must set a line demarcating protection from control, teaching from propagandizing, minimal and fundamental repression from what Herbert Marcuse terms “surplus repression” (that which goes over and beyond what is necessary for the protection of the individual and the smooth functioning of society, and enters the realm of domination, control, and oppression).

Overarching themes of governmental and larger societal denial, deflection, inaction, recrimination, distraction, and erasure coupled with a dereliction of duty falling in the zone of criminality from the power structure have made it a moral imperative as well as a survival strategy to organize for progressive and political social change.

Political leaders today are forcing public school students to ride a tyrannical rollercoaster that takes gigantic numbing dips, turns, and loops at breakneck speeds within a divisive cultural issues theme park.

Since January 2021, Education Week has found that 32 states have either introduced bills in their legislatures or have taken other actions that would ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory or restrict how educators discuss racism, sexism, and LGBTQ issues in the classroom. Fifteen states have already imposed these restrictions.

Florida has positioned itself at the tip of the spear to cut and bleed to death school curricular materials on topics of race, gender, and sexual identity.

For example, the Florida House has imposed new restrictions on how race is discussed in schools, colleges and workplaces. The bill now goes to Governor Ron DeSantis desk for approval.

Voted 24-15 along party lines to approve a measure labeled “Individual Freedom,” it connects with DeSantis’ demand for a “Stop WOKE” Act, which diminishes what he terms liberal ideology that impacts the teaching of history in schools and circulating throughout corporate diversity training.

Currently as well, states are proposing legislation to restrict transgender rights in athletics or in accessing some health services and others to limit overall LGBTQ protections especially in schools.

Let us take Florida again as an example. Primarily passed by Republicans in the state legislature and signed in law, the new so-called “Parental Rights in Education” act, more appropriately referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, reads in part:

“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

Before signing the bill, DeSantis stated at a press conference that teaching kindergarten-aged kids that “they can be whatever they want to be” was “inappropriate” for children. “It’s not something that’s appropriate for any place,” he said, “but especially not in Florida.”

Like their counterparts in the MarchForOurLives movement following the horrific murders by a shooter at Marjorie Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a new youth movement has taken up the mantle of resistance and demand for progressive change.

Sparked by a charismatic senior and class president, Zander Moricz, at Pine View High School in Osprey, Florida, hundreds of students walked out of their 5^th period classes to show solidarity with their LGBTQ peers and to protest the state’s draconian “Don’t Say Gay” law.

Moricz stated to a reporter from the Sarasota Herald Tribune,

“I’m our school’s first openly-gay class president, and the queer students at Pine View are pretty vocal,” Moricz said. “I think we’re a perfect example of the support that exists for kids being who they are at school.”

In February, Moricz spoke along with some of his peers to the Florida Senate during the legislative hearings. He has also been working at his school to maintain a high school morale despite the oppressive Florida law targeting vulnerable LGTBQ+ youth.

Young people have been and continue to be at the heart of progressive social change movements. Sociologist Catherine J. Corrigall-Brown, in her study of youth participation in social movements, found that youth who enter work to improve campus climate and the larger society develop higher levels of self-esteem and self-efficacy, and this is also associated with verification and crystallization of their identity development.

The mass murder by a fully armed shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida seemed to have provoked a tipping point ushering in the next development in a continuing movement to promote firearms safety in the United States: direct action led by a new generation of justifiably frightened and angry passionate young people, many of whom have grown up since and during the tragic murders of students at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Possibly the “Don’t Say Gay” law and the “Stop WOKE” act in Florida will prove to be the tipping points when a torrent of youth activism will pour out of the classrooms and into the streets in protest and offer creative solutions to usher in an age of honest, age-appropriate discussions of curricular topics that will prepare students for the truth about the history of their country and of the world from multiple and inclusive perspectives.

Throughout those early years of the HIV/AIDS plague, we had concrete and inspirational support from visionaries of times past and then present, marginalized people and their allies who worked throughout their lives to ensure a just and free society. The generations each stand on the shoulders of those who have preceded.

These included German and British emancipation pioneers in the struggle for LGBTQ rights over a century ago; leaders from the Women’s Suffrage, Reproductive Freedoms, and Labor movements, and those who during past generations refused to accept the status quo – people challenging racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual inequalities; people standing up to protect the rights of women to control their bodies; people advocating for the health and working conditions of farmworkers, coal miners, seniors, people with disabilities, young people, and poor people; those fighting to halt the genocide of indigenous peoples, the exploitation of workers in developing nations, the advancing encroachment of a nuclear winter, and the gradual and irreversible destruction of our planet.

I’m reminded of the poignant words of Harry Hay, one of the founders of the Mattachine Society — an organization established first in Los Angeles during the 1950s – and the Radical Faeries – a queer spiritual movement.

Hay believed that those of us in the LGBTQ community possess a special “gay sensibility” giving us a unique vision, a creative spirit that, if allowed to thrive unimpeded, can bestow remarkable benefits on society. Unfortunately, because of the oppressive environment in which most of us are forced to live, he concluded,

“We pulled the ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity over us, and that’s how we got through high school with a full set of teeth. We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you’re going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you.”

I would go further than Harry, though, by asserting that each of us, from all backgrounds and identities, have within us a unique vision and creative spirit. So, in these challenging times, if you find yourself beginning to pull that ugly green frog skin of conformity and apathy over your head, look into the mirror and scrub it away.

In doing so, you will be pushing the boundaries ever further from the center. Your vision can create a new tomorrow, a safer and more just tomorrow, a tomorrow where we will see the end to the list of names on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and where we will cease inscribing names on the directory of people cut down by violence and oppression in all its forms, in a tomorrow that is truly better and more equitable than today.

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