♥ING HIGH SCHOOL

 Sometimes we take change for granted. We forget the way the way things were. We focus on moving forward, pushing for even more progress. That’s all well and good. Why settle? Still, it’s affirming—inspiring, even—to appreciate what’s already occurred.

On a recent, rambling Sunday bike ride through the streets of Vancouver, I passed Sir Winston Churchill Secondary, just as I’d done dozens of times. On this occasion, however, I glanced at the school entrance and a flash of color caught my eye.

Had I seen what I thought I saw?

I turned my bike around, set it on the grass and walked toward the doorway and marveled at a simple work of art painted to the left of the double doors, an image so clearly seen on approach though partially obstructed from the street by an ivy bush.

A rainbow heart, five feet tall, painted in 2019.

I thought of the bold message this work of art sent to all the LGBTQ students attending Churchill: You are welcome here. Not hated, not shunned, not just tolerated. You belong here just as much as the non-LGBTQ students.

How far we’ve come.

During my first year of high school in an East Texas town in 1978, there was no such symbol at an entrance, in a hallway or in any classroom to assure me that I was safe or accepted as a kid questioning whether I might be homosexual. Heck, the rainbow flag only made its debut as a gay symbol two months earlier at San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day parade. There were no Gay Straight Alliances with teachers stepping up as sponsors.

In 1981, there were about three hundred seniors in my graduating class and not a single one of them was out of the closet. (Trust me, it would have been big news.) As far as I knew, I was the only possibly gay person in the entire town of 70,000, a place where Baptist churches popped up every few blocks.

I shuddered every time one guy on the football team called me “faggot” whenever we both wound up at our adjacent lockers at the same time. The one thing I had to be thankful of was that his putdown didn’t catch on, not at least until the beginning of twelfth grade when my best friend and another friend, both on swim team with me, started telling people I was gay. I was horrified. How could they be sure of something I hadn’t fully figured out myself? How could I face them or my teammates?

I couldn’t. I quit the team.

This was three decades before Dan Savage and his partner posted an internet video with the message, “It Gets Better.” (Pre-internet altogether!) I had no reason to think anything would improve. I wasn’t some small town kid awaiting my grand escape to the city, anticipating that I’d find people like me in university. Nope. Six thousand students attended Texas Christian University when I started in the fall of 1981. I went through four years there, never meeting an openly gay person. (Suspicions? Sure. A few students and a couple of professors who seemed to take a shine to me. As mentors? As something else? I’ll never know.) I didn’t meet a gay person until, bored with campus life, I took a job waiting tables far from campus, in Fort Worth’s tourist-centered Cowtown in September, 1984, my last year at TCU.

What would things have been like if there’d been a big ol’ rainbow heart anywhere at my high school? What if there’d been anything to suggest gay was okay, something to combat the commonly accepted notion in the Bible Belt that homosexuals were sinners, Hell-bound scum affiliated with perverts and pedophiles? (They never said gay. Homosexual sounded more hideous, a word they could utter in five drawled-out syllables of judgment and disgust.)

What if there’d been some kind of message on the TCU campus to tell me I was fine? Something like the rainbow-painted concrete wall I noticed at the University of British Columbia when I wandered the empty campus during the pandemic this past spring? What if TCU hadn’t waited to host its inaugural LGBTQ alumni group online forum six months ago?

Imagine if I’d had “normal” coming-of-age stories and experiences like my high school and college peers.

It’s funny that I watched “The Prom” on Netflix this past weekend and I had to keep batting away the inner critic in me, which first fixated on the notion that I can’t stand Andrew Rannells in anything and then moved on to the thought that the entire premise of the musical felt outdated. A lesbian who can’t go to her prom with a girl? How Mississippi, 2010!

Yes, how thankful I am with how far we’ve come. Still, things can look deceptively rosy in liberal-leaning cities like Vancouver. Past progress reminds us that change is still possible—in places like Clyde,Texas (a two-hour drive from TCU) where a gay seventeen-year-old boy was given in-school suspension last week for wearing nail polish; in states like Michigan where a lower court just ruled that businesses can deny services to LGBTQ individuals; in countries like Bhutan where both houses of parliament just voted to decriminalize gay sex (it still requires approval from the king); and in the seventy countries where it’s still illegal to live life as person who identifies as LGBTQ.

Let’s not take for granted rainbow hearts, crosswalks and walls and all that they represent. May they continue to pop up in abundance in places near and far.