Making space for queer youth: adolescent and adult interactions in Toledo, Ohio

Research article by Christopher G. Shroeder about the impact of adult leadership on LGBTQ+ youth programs in Toledo, Ohio. Schoeder's research was conducted in Toledo from 2007-2010. The article was published in Gender, Place and Culture: a Journal of Feminist Geography, Volume 19, Issue 5, in 2012.Making space for queer youth: adolescent and adult interactions in Toledo, Ohio Christopher G. Schroeder* University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee – Geography, 2731 Robinwood Ave, Toledo, OH 43610, USA Queer youths and queer youth-related issues are under-researched in geography. I contribute to the existing literature by investigating how adultist practices can both constrain and empower queer youth within the context of schools. Issues involving adolescence and sexuality are complex, and these nuances become more pronounced with regard to nonnormative sexual identities and expressions. Using interviews with adult queer youth advocates in Toledo, Ohio, I look at the ways in which adults construct uncertain, anxious and contradictory ‘safe spaces’ that can work to constrain/restrict queer youth but also to empower and/or facilitate queer youths’ negotiation and navigation of other, predominantly heterosexist social spaces. Keywords: sexuality; queer youth; adultist practices; schools; heteronormativity Introduction While queer youth have largely been neglected in geography, the subdisciplines of children’s geographies and geographies of sexualities have grown in prominence in the last 20 years or so (Holloway and Valentine 2000; Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007; Ansell 2009; Johnston and Longhurst 2010). These subdisciplinary orientations offer a starting point for the discussion of queer youth lives and the adults who constrain, control, regulate, empower and/or work with them – in other words, the socio-spatial relations between (queer) adults and queer youth. Here, I seek to contribute to both children’s and sexuality geographies by paying attention to the geographies of queer youths’ lives, emphasizing the ways in which adults, namely teachers, administrators and volunteers, inhibit or facilitate the making of space for queer youth as well as how youth and adults interact within space. Through an empirical case study of Toledo, Ohio, I first look at the discursive and material spaces of the school and adults’ role in the (re)production of homophobia, heterosexism and heteronormativity. Then, I draw on interview data to analyze the formation and operation of three adult-led initiatives intended to create ‘safe space’ for queer youth: Rainbow Area Youth (RAY), a regional queer youth group; the Safe Schools Project (SSP), a political activist organization; and local gay-straight alliances (GSAs), which operate in schools. Adults and youth interact in each of these spaces. In order to situate my own work, I begin, however, with an overview of the literature from children’s and sexualities geographies, as well as a brief discussion of the school as a crucial socio-spatial site. ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online q 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011.625078 http://www.tandfonline.com *Email: [email protected] Gender, Place and Culture Vol. 19, No. 5, October 2012, 635–651 Making room for queer youth in geographies of children and sexualities Adults control public and private spaces such as the home, the school and religious spaces, making childhood a complex socio-spatial relationship between child(ren) and adult(s). Much of the geographic scholarship on adolescents focuses on their constraints, restrictions and marginalization by adults, their practices and their regulations (Thomas 2004). Some contend that all children are oppressed by adultist practices (Matthews et al. 2000). However, focusing attention on children or adolescents as oppressed by default obscures not only their agency but also other intersecting modes of oppression, such as race, ethnicity, nationality, class, disability, gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, geographies of childhood maintain that all children and adolescents are figured as adults-in-waiting (Matthews and Limb 1999). This informs how youths are studied, focusing less on their eventual entrance to adulthood and more on how youths’ everyday lives are impacted in the here and now (Caputo 1995). This becomes especially salient when discussing adolescent sexual lives since a dominant assumption associates sexuality with adulthood (Thomas 2004). Focusing on adults, geographies of sexualities have paid particular attention to the complicities of exclusion that variably arise from intersecting categories of subjectivity. Valentine, Skelton, and Butler (2003) and Andrew Gorman-Murray (2008) have investigated aspects of gays and lesbians coming out in the family home. Valentine et al. focused on young adults’ more negative consequences while still living in their family home. Gorman-Murray, on the other hand, draws attention to positive experiences of coming out to immediate family members, relying on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) adults’ written narratives of their memories of coming out as youths. Nonetheless, both emphasize the spatiality of coming out to family as young LGBT adults’ negotiate their level of disclosure, navigating the home and the closet (among other spaces). Indeed, navigating the closet has long been a defining element of LGBT experiences and struggles (Sedgwick 1990; M. Brown 2000, 2006). Children’s geographies, moreover, has largely focused on the everyday lives of children and adolescents at the local scale or the microgeographies of the home, mall or classroom. Some children’s geographers have, however, begun to critique this focus. Nicola Ansell (2009), for example, urges for more focus on the ways in which macrogeographic processes directly and indirectly affect children and, thereby, shape their everyday lives. Many areas exist where children are not invited or able to attend, such as local school boards; local, regional or national governments or international policy institutes. Children’s geographers have not ignored such contexts. Yet, a paucity of research directly investigates adults’ roles in interpreting and serving the needs of adolescents. To varying extents, geographers of childhood and sexualities have explored the ways in which neoliberalism has restructured childhood and sexual subjectivities, respectively. Geographers of sexualities have contributed, for example, to queer theorist Lisa Duggan’s (2002) conceptualization of the neoliberal sexual subject and the emergence of homonormativity – or what amounts to ‘a neoliberal politics of normalization’ (Richardson 2005) in the metropolises of the Global North (G. Brown 2008, 2009). In the process, sexual and gender identity risk becoming fixed (Duggan 2002), while issues of race, racism and patriarchy are sidelined (Nast 2002). In geography, issues of (hyper)consumption have focused on the affluent, white, gay male – who must also be adult. In these spaces of consumption, exclusions based on age and lookism also arise (Casey 2007), but the focus is the obsession and commodification of youthfulness rather than the valuing of or advocacy for queer youth. Queer geographers’ emphasis on adult gay men and lesbians’ spaces of 636 C.G. Schroeder domesticity and consumption within select cities, ‘place[s] several important limits on the scope of geographies of sexualities’ (G. Brown 2008, 1216), therefore making it difficult to make room for the study of queer youth. Outside of geography much of the research specifically on queer youth emphasizes their roles as victims and at risk, focusing on low self-esteem, depression, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity and suicide (Russell and Joyner 2001; Russell, Driscoll, and Truong 2002; Walls, Kane, and Wisneski 2009). A growing body of scholarship focuses on the ways in which queer youth exercise their agency (Raymond 1994; Friend 1998; Filax 2007) while critiquing representations of queer youth solely as victims (Rasmussen 2004; Rasmussen, Rofes, and Talburt 2004; Filax 2006; Driver 2008). Research on queer youth agency emphasizes its radical possibilities and may leave one wondering if queer youths can only exercise their agency through highly stylized or avant-garde transgressions: lesbian/queer punk groups (Halberstam 2005; Wilson 2008), anarchist engagements (Ritchie 2008) or identities that are ‘fluid as fuck’ (Regales 2008). Moreover, Halberstam (2005) expresses her suspicions of queer youth groups and even goes so far as to render them pernicious. Drawing on queer theory’s spirit of ‘indefatigable critique’ (M. Brown 2007), she and other queer theorists fear that queer youth groups encourage homonormativity. However, in the edited volume by Rasmussen, Rofes, and Talburt (2004), the authors take a more balanced look at the ways queer youths are constrained by both conservative discourses rooted in religious fundamentalism and liberalizing discourses that seek to speak for queer youth. The authors present a sort of quandary insofar as they lament queer youths’ being separated from their straight peers into so-called ‘safe’ spaces while they also set forth ‘a cautionary stance on the part of those who would endeavor to support queer youth’ (Rasmussen, Rofes, and Talburt 2004, 4). They fear that in the quest for ‘begging for inclusion,’ queer youths will have to assimilate to codes of normalcy that desexualize, rigidly fix gender and sexual identities, and exclude those who will not or cannot conform. Notwithstanding these dividing practices, other research points to the positive impacts of having GSAs in schools, alleviating for queer youth some of the pressures of having to ‘negotiate their everyday lives in heteronormative and homophobic schools and society’ (Filax 2007, 213). These benefits are received both by direct membership and by the mere presence of a GSA in a school (Fetner and Kush 2008; Valenti and Campbell 2009; Walls, Kane, and Wisneski 2009). The presence of a GSA indicates a level of tolerance and/or acceptance among at least some of the faculty, staff and students. However, the start-up of such organizations within schools can be met with varying levels of support or consternation that vary across space. Fetner and Kush (2008) contend that in the US suburban areas closely followed by urban areas are more likely to have GSAs than rural areas and small towns, and GSAs are more prevalent in the West and Northeast. They attribute these trends to higher levels of financial resources in suburban areas, a higher level of general diversity in urban areas, and the relative lower rate of religious fundamentalism in the West and Northeast (Fetner and Kush 2008). The nuances of local and subregional cultures are largely left unexplored. A major factor of how GSAs and other queer youth groups fail and thrive in myriad places is the balance of youth initiative and adult support (Valenti and Campbell 2009). This is emblematic of the power of adults to either constrain/erase or empower/encourage children’s and adolescents’ agency (Ansell 2009). Within this line of inquiry it is necessary, then, to explore further the ways adults perceive, interpret, provide and work for young people, especially in regard to more complex and controversial issues such as young people’s sexual lives. Gender, Place and Culture 637 School space While pedagogy is assumed to be the school’s major, if not sole, function, schools comprise, inter alia, academics, athletics, informal and formal social formations and groups, along with ideological and regulatory trainings. Like so many institutions created for the needs of young people, adults dominate the creation and maintenance of the school. In this section, I want to suggest how poststructural theorizations of the school, its pedagogy and its disciplining, and especially the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, are helpful in understanding the institutional contours within which queer youth and their adult advocates operate. Whether public or private, the school is a state apparatus mandated and constituted by a set of laws and sanctions. Relying upon a public bureaucracy for funding, maintenance and legitimacy, schools are a social institution upon whose space a host of social relations converge (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Foucault 1995). Notwithstanding the putatively held notion of the secular public school, public and private educational systems within the USA are heavily influenced by Christian ideology, if not outright by Christian dogma and doctrine. Here, the school as an institution of knowledge and power emanates from Victorian bourgeois mores of the nineteenth century, and as Foucault states, we are still under this regime that regulates sexuality while repressing it through a paradoxical discursive obsession (Weeks 1989, 1999; Foucault 1990, 1995). As Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) point out, the school operates with relative autonomy although it is firmly allied with the state apparatus and with discourses that enable its primary task of inculcating and maintaining the social order. Notwithstanding its relative autonomy, schools ‘serve the classes or groups from whom it derives its authority, even when it seems so utterly to fail the demands inherent in the performance of its essential function of inculcation’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, 114). One function of this inculcation is to reproduce dominant heteronormative behaviors and values that include a strict gender binary (Gagen 2000). However, the gender binary is so strict, the school routinely fails – for both male and female and gay and straight (Butler 1991). The result is an implicit hierarchy of normative behaviors that intertwine sexuality and gender. While any nonnormative sexual expressions (i.e. non-coital, non-penile-vaginal heterosexual intercourse) may be discouraged, nonconforming gender expressions, including same-sex sexual expression, are relegated to the bottom of hierarchy, excluded or outright maligned (Bay-Cheng 2003). As Foucault (1972) points out, the power structure (the school in this case) is not controlled by merely one powerful agent. Instead, power and the inculcation or exclusion of certain knowledge, ideas or experiences are constituted through a web of control that consists of more obvious forms of exclusion and, more often and less perceptible, little acts of exclusion and suppression (Sibley 1995). In the case of the school in the USA, we can see a general exclusion in the curricula of the experiences and cultural contributions of LGBT peoples (Filax 2007). This is evidenced in the recent situation in California where the state legislature attempted to include LGBT experiences within the general curriculum, but the bill was vetoed by ex-Governor Schwarzenegger (Marshall 2006). As such, fundamentalist Christians lauded the governor of California in his decision to veto the ‘pro-homosexuality bill’ (Foust 2008), using his power to exclude those experiences and contributions made by LGBT peoples. While this exclusion is present in all areas of the curriculum, it may be most pronounced in the area of sex education. As Bay-Cheng (2003) points out, sex education in junior and senior high schools consistently excludes information on nonnormative 638 C.G. Schroeder sexual practices. Sex education increasingly focuses on issues of abstinence, but with a perfunctory acknowledgement of reproductive, heterosexual sex – along with the expectation that this information is for use after marriage. This is doubly problematic for queer youth since same-sex marriage is not allowed in much of the USA (Fisher 2009). In addressing homophobia and heterosexism, LGBT/queer adult activists and their straight allies have often served as a voice for queer youth, providing varying levels of support and resources. These adults work at various scales: confronting individuals in the actual classroom, working to change a school’s climate, providing citywide safe spaces and/or working with local, state or federal governments. Andrucki and Elder (2007) have looked at the ways in which LGBT activist and organizations are tied to the state insofar as they fill in gaps from the erosion or omission of state resources and services that result from concomitant neoliberal restructuring and neoconservative discourses. While queer youth groups and the adults who organize them can be seen as an extension of the state, their ability to access the state and its apparatuses is nonetheless constrained. These constraints arise from homophobia and heterosexism in the school and in society at large. In the following section, I examine how queer youth and well-intentioned adults in Toledo, Ohio, navigate and negotiate these constraints in the schools and through the creation of sites outside of it. Researching queer youth geographies in Toledo, Ohio Part of a larger research project on queer cultural politics in Toledo, Ohio, this article draws on semi-structured, in-depth interviews I conducted, from mid-2007 to late-2008, with 15 queer youths and 12 adults who work for or with them. In the fall of 2008, I also conducted a focus group interview with 12 queer youth, six of whom had been previously interviewed. Focus group questions centered on issues they faced in school, home and public spaces. From September 2008 to August 2010, I served as an adult volunteer for the only out-of-school queer youth group in Toledo, RAY, in the first year of which I collected my primary participant observations. Here, I look specifically at the geographies of queer youth, and in particular how adultist practices can both constrain and empower queer youth within the context of schools. My interviews with adults include past and present adult volunteers for RAY, school teachers, administrators and LGBT activists. These roles were not mutually exclusive. I asked all youth and adults to self-identify socioeconomic characteristics. Youth participants were interviewed privately in a room adjacent to RAY’s meeting space. The length of interviews depended on the respondent, but most lasted one to two hours. I asked questions about their experiences in various spaces and about their interactions with family, friends, teachers and so on. Interviews with adults took place in a number of settings, including homes, coffeehouses and the room adjacent to RAY’s meeting space. I asked adults questions about their involvement with queer youth as well as their perception of queer youth needs. I also asked them about their own experiences in various spaces. I taped all interviews while taking detailed notes. Anonymity was assured to the extent possible and I gave pseudonyms to all respondents. Collectively, these interviews help illuminate the scope and work of, first, RAY, established in 1994; second, the SSP, which seeks to provide queer youths with a safe school space through the use of state law and legislature; and third, in-school GSAs. The first was established in 2005 and now a small number operate in select high schools primarily within the city limits of Toledo. In many ways, Toledo is a typical, primarily blue-collar, medium-sized city in the Midwest of the USA. Unemployment among the 300,000 residents (with three times the Gender, Place and Culture 639 number in its metropolitan area1) is high as automotive and glass manufacturing declines. Central city poverty, however, contrasts with suburban middle-class affluence. Religion plays a significant role in the city as well as within LGBT cultural political organizing. Catholics dominate the urbanized area while the more rural areas are marked by more fundamentalist Christian denominations. However, a number of LGBT-affirming Christian churches are located within the city: these are mostly clustered in one neighborhood, the Old West End. Straight leaders and congregants of these churches have long been integral to LGBT cultural political organizing, including issues involving queer youth. By no means a majority, gays and lesbians also comprise a visible population in this central city neighborhood (Schroeder 2010). Heterosexism dominates all areas of school curricula, including sex education. Currently in Ohio, state law mandates that schools stress abstinence until marriage but also teach about the existence of sexually transmitted diseases. Schools are not required, however, to teach about HIV or safe(r) sex. Broader sex education curricula including contraception and safe sex are possible but depend on local school boards. In Toledo and the state, the extent of sex education has been a long and volatile debate. As early as 1988, the Toledo school district approved a more comprehensive sex education curriculum (Sewell 1988) only to restrict it again in 1996 (Toledo School District to begin Teaching Sex Education that Stresses Abstinence 1996). More recently, the state of Ohio has attempted to standardize sex education (Beyond abstinence-only 2007), and in 2007 the governor turned down nearly two million dollars in federal abstinence-only sex education grants (de Boer 2007). Teenage pregnancy, at the center of the debate, does indeed affect queer youth, as RAY youth members have had children. Yet, the debate neglects and/or disparages other nonnormative sexual expressions. The exclusion and suppression of queer experiences, ideas or contributions does not rest solely in school curricula but includes the everyday interactions between and among pupils and teachers/administrators. In my interviews, one high school guidance counselor shared his experiences of trying to be an openly ‘proud’ gay man: Other staff members who know I’m gay and are supportive and accepting want to keep the secret for me. They think the kids shouldn’t be told. But, I don’t care