As we head into pride month and corporations start slapping rainbows on things to get those dazzled by shiny objects to buy them, which they will do, I think it important to learn some of what makes us proud, well, me anyway.

I will be doing the Amtrak Rail Pass trip again this year. Having gotten to revisit locations from my past, the milestones along the way, while meeting certain obligations and having seen how the whole thing works, warts and all by way of delays due to tornadoes on the plains, cancellations, and having to spend a night with other passengers as equally unaware that Amtrak stations close from midnight to 7:00 a.m. creating small encampments of people and their luggage, this time there will be less travel induced angst. 

It will begin at Pride In Oklahoma City. I need for me to be at this one.

The festivities there and what may come after is still open and uncertain in a good way, but there will be an abundance of on board the train time and little for art. As a build up to Pride, I will run a few blogs that would be better timed for Pride Month, but may need to be done now if at all. 

I have said it before. The road to equality is not made of segmented compartments that arise in sequence, one after another, and, as each right is won, gets filed away on a shelf as completed so we can move into the next room remembering to close the door to the old room behind us. It involves a series of overlapping steps whose importance remains even as their goal is reached because what was instrumental in getting one right continues to contain what is useful for future progress.

Some forty years ago, having been inspired by the failed Briggs Amendment in California, bigotry being a bandwagon upon which the state would jump while itself not initiating it, Oklahoma passed a state law that would forbid teachers from teaching in public schools and remove any found to be already in the classroom. Gays were considered to belong to a unique, extra-legal category of “nonadjudicated felons” which did not require Gays to do anything to be subjected to all the negatives of being a convicted felon, no job, home, no respect. We just had to admit we were Gay, or were found to be Gay somehow, and that was the basis of the status. It was not what we did, sexual acts not being committed by a Gay virgin, but by simply stating who we were Gay. 

The law was found to be unconstitutional as a person without committing an illegal act cannot be declared a felon for life. An illegal act has to be committed with adjudication not a simple declaration. Just as it would need a Heterosexual teacher to be involved in some sort of sexual activity around students or within sight of any student or students and not just be Heterosexual or have thoughts about and toward the opposite sex as the basis of dismissal, the same should be true of Gay teachers.

And so, starting 1985, because of a court case that went up to the state supreme court, Gay teachers could not be fired for being Gay, but could be fired for inappropriate behavior in the presence of students just like Heterosexual ones.

Sadly, for the next 13-14 years, Gay teachers continued to remain in the closet for fear of being fired while a lawyer named Bill, who had been the lawyer fighting and winning against the anti-Gay Teacher law, knowing they could not be fired unless they committed a legally offensive act, had to watch teachers acting like they were still oppressed without options.

Discovery may have become less of a threat, but it still kept teachers and administrators in the closet only to be known for who they truly were by the few who heard things through the grapevine or being that close a friend where a confidence is respected, and their hiding perpetuated the idea that there was a reason being Gay, even with freedom, was kept secret.

In 1998, according to a deputy superintendent, up to 25% of the school district administrators were known to be Gay or Lesbian but were acceptable because of their complicity in this silence and were themselves comfortable in the convenient belief that the open secret was a sealed one. They could keep their jobs while continuing to be controlled by those who obviously disrespected them as people while accepting their work as administrators. They voluntarily sat under the Sword of Damocles while enjoying a possibly fleeting dinner party.

Not long after a meeting in which the Deputy Superintendent  realized that the safety and wellbeing of all students meant extending the same toward Gay students, and that, just as with other groups of students, their issues were student ones not political ones, they were students not political platforms, as I passed by his office in the administration building one day, he called me back and, much in the way it is done in Film Noir, with the accompanying demand that while the contents of the envelope may be referred to broadly but not in detail, the source must be kept secret and the actual contents not shown, he handed me a manilla envelope containing all the relevant papers related to the 1985 case, and some other papers based on recent Supreme Court cases that bolstered the case for the Gay kids. 

When it should have been a useful tool, the 1985 ruling seemed to have had no influence until, after referencing the court case in generic terms a few times, we had arrived at a point where directly citing the court case and related papers was called for and unavoidable, and it was revealed that those advocating for Gay students were more informed than the administration had believed and the demands made which they attempted to brush off actually were based on Bill’s case that we brought to them out of the blue and which deflated many of their excuses for inaction.

 Sadly as he aged, Bill began to develop dementia, becoming a very frustrated curmudgeon of whom the young know little. He did not live long enough to see his court case would actually bear fruit after the twelve years of advocacy based on the court case that had been decided 24 years prior.

The Deputy Superintendent left the district and became a superintendent in a district in another state. It is noted in his recent obituary that he promoted diversity, no doubt influenced by meetings and old court cases like the one he slipped me in the unmarked manilla envelope.

In the end, it wasn’t morality that had the school district act correctly.

Throughout the years of advocacy the school board had been given a simple choice, protect the Gay students as it was truly their obligation to do as all students have to be in school a certain number of days by law or legal action could be taken against the student or parent and not being safe at school could influence attendance which would adversely affect state funding based on attendance, or face an angry parent in court suing the district for negligence its having lost any claim of not being aware of the problem as we spoke in public to the board at its meeting for a number of years explaining the possibility of litigation.

Do it for the right reason, all students must be protected, or be prepared to face litigation without a plea of innocence as they had also been warned in the media, and if they choose not to cover the students, it was their collective derriere that would need coverage.

Where people saw me doing the unthinkable by putting myself out there, I did so knowing I had legal back up.

Finally, the head of the Board and a prominent local lawyer who was a little too intense in his refusal to protect Gay students seeing the passage of the Matthew Shepherd act, realized we had not been lying and now there was proof that the consequences of abandoning the Gay students would indeed bring about indefensible litigation. That would explain why, after 12 years of objecting to inclusion based on politics and religion, on December 14, 2009, after all school board members seemed to have simultaneously come across all sorts of studies, legal opinions, and case law over the previous weekend after having ignored the same for 12 years and were clearly holding the envelopes each had received over the years, one marks one’s envelopes like a poker player marks cards and the marked envelopes were held by each member who made the discovery, it was decided to add sexual orientation and Gender Identity as an emergency action which eliminated the required first and second readings of a proposed policy and voting in our original proposal about Gay Students at that meeting.

It was not a single, straight line from proposal to completion but one that surrounded time and people over years and through progressing steps sometimes going back to move forward.

Not only did the process bring about the results, but it also showed how the newly won protections could be preserved with no better example coming from the district itself that, after eight trouble free years devoid of any of the predicted fire and brimstone such inclusion would unleash, the district added Gender Expression, something they would not have done if the predicted problems with inclusion had actually happened.

Although it originally fought inclusion and did not embrace it, over time the district matured.

For the twelve years during which further protections were recognized, there had been no problem, making the Oklahoma City Schools District the case study that showed inclusion caused no harm and Trans students did not ruin sports. The people and papers needed to defend the protections existed in the city with some people aging out, but when after 12 years the rights of the Trans students came under attack, those who had won the protections were supplanted by national and state organizations whose position implied they were the experts but who, in spite of their previous attempts to get Trans students rights for those who didn’t have them and protect those of the ones who did, had failed consistently. 

When you had success in a certain area, what brought about that success should be remembered and sought. In this, the approach was to bring in theory and present studies done elsewhere that include a lot of point/counterpoint, boiler plates being tossed around. But what was ignored was the actual case study that existed at the time and could be used as a source of measurable fact and not theories and memes.

History was ignored and the students lost.

The rights were won for future students by people who would never experience school without harassment and discrimination as most were either close to or over fifty. They guarded their papers which the big named organizations had no use for, preferring the traditional failing approaches.

When Bill won, the win was not filed away. It may have taken some time, but the win of 1985 eventually became useful in the next step which began in 1997. A straight teacher, concerned about the death of a student and the bullying that preceded it and who, while being allowed to offer the student’s peers consolation that would be Christan in nature, would not be allowed to console those close peers who were not mainstream, went to a Gay teacher asking how this could be right. It came to include the teachers’ Union. A teacher was wrongfully dismissed for the pro-Gay student advocacy and won his job back in court in 2009. The plan to remove the messenger and, thus, kill or at least shelve the message, had failed leaving the teacher to continue. A win in the appellate court solidified the win. So there he still was. The court of public opinion had shifted just enough so that this whole court story, while being rather embarrassing for the district, also showed the rightness of protecting the Gay students and the weakness of opposition. Having lost the very public case the district had to find a way to do the right thing without losing face.

They had hoisted themselves on their own petards.

Then in October, 2009,  President Barack Obama gave the Oklahoma City School Board the out  it needed when he signed the “Matthew Shepherd and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act” which added crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability to the list of hate crimes. The District saw that the Gay Community had been right all those years since most documents submitted to the district, if not all, related to “Sexual Orientation” had included the words “real or perceived” after them.

Congress had spoken, so, regardless what anyone’s personal feeling might be one way or the other, this was something the school district could say they had been forced to do and to comply with or lose federal funds and avoid the wrath of those opposed to the additional language while to some they could be seen as their just being good people. In the end, they went with protecting themselves by adopting the added language from the bill and the students got the protections they should have always had.

If you look at the totality of the events, they involved a bunch of loosely connected people, mostly Boomers and War Babies, who brought their life experiences as Gay people worming through the decades and bringing forward what they learned, adding that onto, not next to, what needed to get done spanning 25 years of reliance on knowing who did what before and adding what worked to what was being done to get things done. From the Court case through the attainment of student protection, history played a role as events were pulled forward not recreated.

Bill was a War Baby, I a Boomer, but we worked together, even if apart in time and place, because we knew history and may have shared some, albeit similar but in a different place, and it benefited people we would never know, and we knew where to go to get the needed history. 

The won rights were lost when, instead of looking at the local history, it was replaced with modern boilerplates created elsewhere and not rising organically from those with the roots.

They could have been retained if history was not ignored in favor of texts and clever memes.

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