Encouraging gay-straight groups not enough says teen
CBC
A man who ran for the New Democratic Party in last fall’s provincial election says a plan to make schools in Newfoundland and Labrador more welcoming for gay students doesn’t go far enough.
Thursday the provincial education department confirmed that this spring it will encourage schools from grade 7 to 12 to set up gay-straight alliances.
Friday Noah Davis-Power, a gay 18-year-old, said the province should go further.
“I think it needs to be mandated, needs to be there. The resources are there now but if you’re too scared to use those resources, it doesn’t matter,” he said.
Davis-Power was afraid to reveal he is gay when he was in high school. Someone ‘outed’ him, but he said that what he feared would happen didn’t.
“No one cared, they saw me as Noah. People still don’t believe I’m gay,” he said.
But he did have to deal with some abuse.
“I’d hear ‘faggot’ as I walked down the corridor, not to my face, never to my face, just behind my back,” said Davis-Power.
He survived it but he’s concerned that some people don’t.
“We’ve seen in the past year, the past few weeks, even more suicides that are directly linked to homophobic bullying,” said Davis-Power.
After he was outed, Noah started a gay-straight alliance group at his school. An idea that wasn’t embraced at first.
“Mostly they didn’t want parental publicity, we didn’t want to look like we were training gays.”
He said the group was tolerated, but not really accepted.
“We need to go from saying ‘It’s all right to be gay, but you’re still over there.’ That’s what tolerance is, it’s the worst word ever. ‘You have a problem but you can stay.’ You have to work from that to acceptance,” he said.
