Men as Lords of Creation and School Bullying

Good news: the bullying experienced by Billy Wolfe of Fayetteville, Arkansas, about which I blogged two days ago, is getting national attention. Yesterday’s Towleroad blog picked up a 26 March “Today” show interview of Matt Lauer with Billy Wolfe and his mother: www.towleroad.com/2008/03/towleroad-gu-12.html.

Bad news: this kind of school bullying continues, with no obvious end in sight. The bullying of Billy Wolfe is only the latest in a series of troubling incidents, all with a similar pattern, in Arkansas schools in the last decade or so. Though studies indicate this is a national phenomenon, and is hardly confined to Arkansas schools, I am concerned about the incidents in schools in the state in which I grew up and live, because they demand my attention. They are in my own back yard.

My blog posting of two days ago mentions the case of William Wagner. As the posting indicates, Willi Wagner experienced a brutal gay bashing over a decade ago while enrolled in a Fayetteville school. On 2 December 1996, as Willi and some friends left school to get lunch at a store near the school, six fellow students pulled up in a truck. They jumped out of the truck, shouting, ''C'mere you faggot.'' The students then surrounded Willi Wagner, knocking him to the ground, breaking his nose and kicking him with cowboy boots, bruising a kidney and leaving welts over his head and body.

A troubling aspect of this and similar stories is the failure or inability of the school system to address bullying of this sort, until it escalates into physical violence. Willi Wagner and his parents had reported incidents of harassment against Willi—who came to identify himself as gay during his adolescent years—for two years prior to the gay-bashing incident. The Wagners report that little was done to address the problem, and on one occasion, they were told by a school official that Willi Wagner was causing the bullying.

Blaming the victim—particularly the boy considered to be gender-inappopriate—is another troubling and recurrent pattern in these stories. In Wagner’s case, though the youths who participated in the gay-bashing incident were placed on probation after criminal charges were filed against them, bullying continued even after this horrific incident. When the school did not address the on-going harassment, Wagner and his parents filed an Office of Civil Rights (OCR) complaint in January 1997. The parents ultimately chose to remove Willi Wagner from his Fayetteville school because they feared his life was in danger.

In June 1998, OCR reached a “Commitment to Resolve” agreement with the Fayetteville Public School system, in which the Fayetteville schools agreed to recognize "sexual harassment directed at gay or lesbian students" and to implement procedures to train faculty, staff, and students in ways to deal with such harassment. As a result of her experiences with her son and the Fayetteville school system, Willi’s mother Carolyn Wagner helped found an organization, Families United Against Hate (FUAH), to address the problem of school bullying. She currently serves as vice-president of FUAH (see the links column for a link to FUAH—www.fuah.org).

Following the Willi Wagner story, another student in an Arkansas school made national news with a story of harassment he experienced as an openly gay youth. In March 2003, Thomas McLaughlin reported harassment by teachers and school officials at Jacksonville Junior High School north of Little Rock for a period over a year prior to this time. McLaughlin was fourteen when these incidents occurred. According to McLaughlin, when his science teacher overheard him refuse to deny to another boy that he was gay, the teacher notified his guidance counselor, who called his mother to inform her that her son was gay.

Prior to the call to his mother, the school’s assistant principal had threatened Thomas McLaughlin, giving him an ultimatum: either tell his parents he was gay, or the school would do so. McLaughlin’s science teacher then wrote him a lengthy letter informing him that the bible indicated he would go to hell if he was gay.

This story points to another troubling aspect of many cases of school bullying: not only do teachers and school officials sometimes admit acting on their own religiously based prejudices, but they actually defend harassment premised on those prejudices.

After these incidents, Thomas McLaughlin continued to experience harassment from teachers and administrators. Though it was teachers and school officials who had made the stir about Thomas’s sexual orientation, he was told that he might not discuss homosexuality in school, and would be punished if he brought the subject up. A new assistant principal brought Thomas McLaughlin to his office in the spring of 2003 and forced him to read aloud a Bible passage that, in the view of the principal, condemns homosexuality.

McLaughlin was informed by one teacher that homosexuality is “sickening,” and was suspended from school for telling other students that he had been forced to read Bible passages. When he and a female student were overheard talking about a boy both considered cute, he was disciplined. The female student was not.

In March 2003, the ACLU filed suit against the Pulaski County Special School District on behalf of the McLaughlin family, arguing that Thomas McLaughlin had a constitutional right to be openly gay in a public school. U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Eisele upheld this right, noting that under the First Amendment, schools cannot silence or restrict students' speech unless it is disruptive. Following the ruling, the school agreed not to proselytize or punish students on the basis of sexual orientation.

Though Billy Wolfe does not identify as gay, as my posting two days ago indicated, the bullying he is experienced is premised on charges that he is “a bitch” and “a homosexual.”** This is a recurrent pattern in incidents of school bullying across the U.S.: boys identified as gender-inappropriate are bullied solely and precisely on the basis of the gay tag. When such bullying occurs, the following are also all-too-common typical steps in the bullying process:

1. The victim is punished.
2. The bullies are protected and rewarded.
3. The school system turns a blind eye to the bullying, tacitly justifying it.
4. The school system sometimes actively participates in the bullying, if the boy identifies himself as gay.
5. Parents and the community at large are not only not outraged at such school violence: they sometimes condone and promote it, due to their prejudice against gay persons.
6. The violence escalates from verbal bullying to outright physical violence.
7. Its ultimate outcome in some cases is murder.
   

I grew up in Arkansas. I was schooled in Arkansas (with one year in a Louisiana school) through high school. As I have reported on this blog, I know the system of bullying of boys deemed gender-inappropriate at a personal level. I myself was bullied in junior high school. I experienced something of what all these boys have experienced, when coaches and school officials not only did not punish those who kicked me in the ribs, knocked me down in gym class, and groped and verbally taunted me, but encouraged them to behave this way.

I understand something of the mentality underlying this kind of school bullying. It occurs in a cultural context that puts a premium on belligerent masculinity. There is a tacit assumption in such cultures that men must prove they are men—by exhibiting traits of violence that demonstrate that they are at the top of the food chain. There is also a tacit assumption that men own everything—macho men, alpha men, that is, do so—and have a right to take what is theirs, even if the taking involves rapacity and brutality.

Those “beneath” the alpha men on the food chain—women and men regarded as feminine/weak—are objects. They are objects of violence that is excused and expected, because men are men. Men must be men. Being violent is what being a man is about. It is how a man proves he is an alpha male. Society hangs together because it adheres to a natural order: men are at top, women and feminized men are at bottom. Question that natural order or undermine it in any way, and you threaten to destabilize everything. Alpha men must be permitted to prove their alpha status in order to keep society stable and functioning.

Arkansas is a place in which schools place more emphasis on sports than academics. I imagine some of my fellow citizens will regard that statement as an overstatement. In response, I would point to the outlay of economic resources that goes, in all of our schools, to supporting athletic programs, as compared to the resources we place into academic pots. I would also ask if the citizens of the state are as avidly glued to their television sets when a science bowl is televised, as they are when the Hogs throw balls on the field.

We value men above all—men who can hunt, shoot, fish, play rough contact sports, demonstrate their machismo by lording it over “weaker” men. We will not succeed in preventing bullying in American schools, which reports indicate is much more often a pattern of male-on-male violence than female-on-female violence, until we address the culture of machismo underlying school bullying.

Machismo and hatred/fear of the feminine are deeply interwoven with homophobia. And school bullying, of the violent, sickening sort that took the life of Lawrence King early this year, arises out of homophobia. To address school bullying, we have to address homophobia.

No child needs to lose his life again in an American school. The churches must do something to address this problem and the homophobia that underlies it. If they do not do so soon, they will lose all credibility.

**I recall another incident in the past decade in an Arkansas school very similar to the incident involving Billy Wolfe. I have, however, been unable to retrieve information about it to include in this posting. This incident occurred in a junior high school in Sheridan, Arkansas, south of Little Rock. My recollection is that it involved a boy who did not identify as gay, but was tagged as gay by classmates, due to his interest in art and gardening. On that basis, he was mercilessly harassed.