April 20, 2005
BATTLE OF THE T'S:
Students tell of tension on gay tolerance day: 'Gay shirts' outnumbered by those with 'God shirts' at Homewood-Flossmoor (Kati Phillips, April 20, 2005, Daily Southtown)
A student-led effort to oppose homophobia at Homewood-Flossmoor High School may have backfired Tuesday when hundreds of students donned shirts with Christian and anti-gay slogans.Student activists who wore shirts emblazoned with the words "gay? fine by me" said they were outnumbered by peers wearing hateful messages and were targeted for harassment.
The T-shirt drive was intended to create a safe place for gay students and to put a human face on gays, lesbians and their allies.
But student journalists covering the event described the atmosphere as "tense."
"It was crazy. There were all these students with gay shirts and God shirts," said student newspaper reporter Joe Maloney. "In my first-period class, debate class, there were way more God shirts."
Chelsea Lavin, a broadcast student, was more pragmatic."People that you normally would say 'Hi' to in the halls were wearing shirts opposite of you, so you looked in the opposite direction," she said.
Alissa Norby, one of the T-shirt day's organizers, said she didn't know whether to define the project as a success or failure.
"If I was still in the closet and came to school (Tuesday) and saw hundreds of kids wearing anti-gay shirts, I'd probably go home crying and begging my parents to let me transfer," she said.
Students estimated more than 100 students wore anti-homophobia shirts, and more than 200 students wore shirts that listed "Crimes committed against God."
Failure. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 20, 2005 8:21 PM
Sounds like the spirit of Nancy Hopkins is alive and well at Homewood-Flossmoor High.
But the math faculty should do these kids a favor and let them know what several deviations from the mean is all about, and how rare it is.
Posted by: ratbert at April 20, 2005 9:07 PMHumm. The article never actually quotes what was written on the allegedly hateful T-shirts. Except at the end it mentions "Crimes against God" -- taken out of context.
I wonder what the T-shirts actually said. The way the single alleged example of hate speech is quoted, in an offhand way almost in passing, is how NYT and other MSM papers normally try to scoot past an inconvenient fact.
It does sayt that none of the Crime against God shirts refer to homosexuality itself but to other issues.
Posted by: oj at April 20, 2005 11:59 PMI went to high school at Homewood-Flossmoor. When I attended school there it was lily whitle though now it's a relatively affluent community with about 40% black enrollment. The HF suburbs are where a lot of the upper and middle class black families have moved from Chicago's south side to flee the public schools there. I'd bet anything you'd like that a number of the students wearing God slogan t-shirts were members of the black Evangelical churches that have sprouted up in the last twenty years in Homewood, Flossmoor and Glenwood.
Posted by: Ray Clutts at April 21, 2005 7:09 AM