After School Special: Sex Clubs!

Parents, it’s 4:00 p.m. Do you know where your children are?

That seems to be the main theme of a recent article in WorldNetDaily, “How Homosexual School Clubs Offer Sex to Students,” by Linda Harvey. (Ms. Harvey is president of an organization that “monitors homosexual activism, the occult and New Age influence on American youth,” although it doesn’t appear she “monitors” these disparate topics so much as rails against them.) Despite the juicy headline, she doesn’t have any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that school-based GSA clubs or youth-oriented LGBTQ community centers “offer sex” to anyone.

Today, April 26, is the “Day of Silence,” an annual event sponsored by GLSEN in schools and colleges where students protest discriminatory treatment against people who are gay or perceived to be gay or people who do not conform to traditional gender roles by maintaining silence. Ms. Harvey advocates instead for April 27, “Day of Truth,” sponsored by the conservative legal group Alliance Defense Fund.

Her main concern is that youth, especially very young children, are being indoctrinated by these clubs and community centers into a lifestyle of sexual irresponsibility and near-certain HIV infection. Her particular outrage focuses on the idea that explicit discussion of sexual behavior is made available to underage youth, and that participation in these groups requires no parental consent, notification, or participation. As evidence that such organizations “target” young children, she writes that many centers “are located conveniently on bus lines to accommodate kids under driving age.” Oh, those cunning homosexuals!

Ms. Harvey also clearly believes in sexual preference, not orientation, a distinction she makes by always using quotation marks around words like gay or acronyms such as LGBTQ. One imagines her speaking a la Dr. Evil, using “quotation fingers” every time she finds herself needing to say “lesbian.” Because of this misunderstanding, she assumes a principal function of such groups is recruitment.

She can’t be faulted for being concerned about spreading HIV, but she should be roundly condemned for her association of HIV with homosexuality. One of the reasons that the rates of transmission are highest among heterosexuals is the belief that AIDS is a gay disease. She also has fallen prey to the bizarre notion that people who are well informed about the risks of sexual behavior and actions they can take to avoid or minimize those risks are more likely to engage in risky behavior than those who remain uneducated. She doesn’t realize that an educated teen (or adult) can still make a moral choice for abstinence.

Look at the programs she criticizes: a youth group in Boston describes a seminar by saying they provide “sexy new ways to use condoms and barriers,” with “honest, judgment-free conversations about…how to keep it safe and advocate for yourself.” Yes, the language includes mention of behaviors such as group sex, mixing sex and drugs and unprotected sex. But that’s not promotion of these behaviors: it’s educating young people about the risks involved and ways to avoid them. It empowers youths to make informed decisions about sexual behavior. Similarly, she warns about an Ohio program called K.I.S.S., which stands for “Keep It Smart and Safe.”

She’s living in La-La-Land if she thinks heterosexual teenagers aren’t also having unprotected, risky sex. This is not a gay phenomenon. It wasn’t gay students having oral sex in the backseats of the weekend ski bus in my junior high.

My senior year in high school I attended a few meetings of the Gay-Straight Alliance. I don’t recall that we ever talked about sex, nor were we “encouraged” to participate in sexual behaviors. There certainly wasn’t any sex going on during the meetings, as Harvey seems to allege is commonplace. We talked about issues relating to safety and self esteem, and mostly it was just a fantastic relief to show up and find out that I wasn’t alone at my school. It was comforting to know that other people I’d known for years were struggling with the same issues – including the bully who’d kicked my ass in the locker room in eighth grade. (The day he showed up I nearly fell out of my chair.)

She is inordinately worried that these kinds of meetings do not typically involve parents.

“Parents are, by and large, not a problem for kids, but the primary people in the world who care most about a kid’s welfare,” writes Harvey. Well, duh. But these programs aren’t necessarily for kids with great parents who are involved in their children’s lives and emotionally available for these kinds of intimate discussions. One only needs to open the local paper to read stories about parents who abuse their children physically, emotionally and sexually. Some kids can’t talk to their parents about issues of sexual orientation, because they risk abuse or being thrown out on the street. That’s not the fault of the gay community, that’s the fault of people like Ms. Harvey who continue to advocate for ignorance, and against what she terms “the beasts of tolerance and acceptance.”