America is the mother of memorable firsts. Our country is the first and only nation in which 600,000 people of a single race were slaughtered in a conflict to free from bondage a people of a different race. We are the sort of curious and restless folk who would invent the first fragile airplane and within the span of a single human lifetime witness our countrymen driving a vehicle on the moon.
In 2002, America laid claim to the dubious distinction of creating this planet’s first taxpayer-funded public high school for homosexuals . . . plus the bisexuals, the gender blind, the polysexuals, the pansexuals, the compulsive cross dressers, the transgendered and all the other newly-emerging gender identities. Unsurprisingly, the location of the world’s only homosexual high school is smack in the heart of a gravitational Black Hole of gender confusion – New York City’s East Village.
The Harvey Milk High School is named for a socially maladroit Jewish boy from Brooklyn who moved to San Francisco and discovered his inner gay flamboyance. Mr. Milk was elected a San Francisco supervisor in 1977, where he won the hearts of that city’s burgeoning homosexual population by spearheading the defeat of Proposition 6, which would have prevented the colonization of California’s public school classrooms by homosexuals with teaching certificates. The provocative Mr. Milk was shot to death in 1978.
Situated in a Nineteenth Century high rise at 2 Astor Place, Harvey Milk High could be mistaken for the glitzy headquarters of a New York advertising agency. Its eighteen glass-walled classrooms arrayed along a curving hallway, punctuated by candy-colored lockers, is the epitome of chic. In the summer of 2003, Mayor Bloomberg announced that $3.2 million of taxpayer money would be lavished on Harvey Milk, plus another $750,000 for operating costs.
The school boasts an average class size of only 18.4 students and a student-to-teacher ratio of only 12.4 to 1. This is a wild departure from the rest of New York City’s overcrowded classrooms. The annual burden of educating each of Harvey Milk’s students is a whopping $31,368. The Harvey Milk High School has received generous funding from the San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co., which its president, Robert Hanson, says “has a rich history of standing up for the rights of the LGBTQ community.” Levi Strauss & Co. was the first Fortune 500 company to extend full medical benefits to the partners of its homosexual employees; it was the only California company to file an amicus brief with the California Supreme Court in support of homosexual wedlock; Levi Strauss worked to defeat Proposition 8, which was a defense of traditional marriage.
Harvey Milk opened with a spanking new cafeteria, six new classrooms, a new science lab and 75 new computers donated by IBM. The school specializes in computer technology, arts and a culinary program. It features courses in gay history. The school’s first principal, William Salzman, declared: “This school will be a model for the country and possibly the world.” (NY Post, 7/28/03) Let’s hope not.
In truth, the Harvey Milk High School is a monument to the collective failure of New York’s mayor, its Department of Education and its teachers’ union to impose civilized order within its schools. The sole justification for the Harvey Milk High School to exist is as a haven from harassment. But the mayor, who now runs the police department and the Board of Education, has capitulated to the bullies; his reluctance to expel, prosecute and waive juvenile protections for troublemakers has perpetuated the victimization of students who are fat, weak, unfashionable, or just weird. All of them are being robbed of a proper education.
Lacking the spine to impose discipline in their schools, New York’s liberals chose instead to invent a gay ghetto – a cushy velvet ghetto to be sure, but a ghetto nonetheless. Over fifty years after the Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, critics of HMHS are bandying about the phrase “separate but equal.” But this school is better than equal: the school system that wouldn’t toss a nickel to a religiously-oriented school is lavishly spending the taxpayers’ earnings on a gold-plated ghetto for gays.
Jerry Russo, a spokesman for Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, declared that “We are complying with state regulations governing alternate programs for students that have existed for years.” Really? Would Mr. Russo defend a chic new taxpayer-funded haven for white students who were being harassed by blacks and Hispanics? Of course not. For the record: the overwhelming majority of Harvey Milk students are black and Hispanic; only a small fraction are white.
Rather preposterously, the defenders of the world’s only segregated high school for sexual misfits claim that it is not an affront to the Brown v. Board of Education decision which struck down racially segregated public schools. They offer two somewhat contradictory arguments.
According to the first argument Harvey Milk is not really discriminating against heterosexual students because the decisions about who is chosen for admission are based upon who is most at risk in the larger school system; students are not really chosen because of their sexual orientations.
If there were any truth to this argument, Harvey Milk would include far more students who had been pestered because they were fat, weak or ugly. If the argument were true, then Harvey Milk would not include courses that emphasize gay culture, gay values and gay history. In truth, the school wouldn’t even be named after a radical homosexual activist.
As an historical footnote, prior to the Brown decision it was the segregationists who argued that blacks were safer going to schools with “their own kind” because whites would not accept them in white-majority schools. The Supreme Court rejected this argument, saying the risk to blacks was just part of the price of racial integration. The Court made it clear that it was the responsibility of the school system to ensure a safe learning environment for all students. In the case of Harvey Milk, the school system is clearly embracing the position of the old racial segregationists.
The second argument acknowledges that Harvey Milk is, in fact, a dedicated haven for homosexuals, but asserts that the school doesn’t discriminate against heterosexual students because heterosexuals are free to apply for admission. This is also a bad-faith piece of public-relations boilerplate.
First of all, simply allowing heterosexual students the opportunity to apply to Harvey Milk is not sufficient to prevent segregation. Heterosexual students have restricted access to Harvey Milk because the customary and preferred route of admittance is via a cozy and informal patchwork of insider referrals by teachers, counselors and parents. These referrals are prompted by incidents of harassment against students who are suspected of being homosexuals. No such pipeline exists for heterosexual students; therefore the “freedom of choice” defense used by defenders of Harvey Milk is bogus. After the Brown decision schools that “allowed” blacks to attend, but which continued to maintain overwhelmingly white majority student bodies, were still deemed to be segregated in the opinion of the Court.
All legal arguments aside, it’s obvious that the New York City Department of Education was motivated by the best of intentions. When honestly confronted by their lack of determination to impose civility in their classrooms, the teachers and administrators chose instead to offer the unhappy homosexuals within their system an alternative environment. No doubt the cracker-barrel utopians who dreamed up Harvey Milk High School envisioned it as a refuge for the hapless and misunderstood victims of gender discrimination. It would be an island of sanity where violence was a distant memory, where the lisping and the limp-wristed and the tenderly transgendered could pursue higher ideals safe from the predations of knuckle-dragging hetero hoodlums. That was the vision, but when the school became a reality Reality reared its ugly head.
Out of the Closet
During the school’s debut semester three Harvey Milk students assaulted a Brooklyn man at a nearby Starbucks and stabbed him with a screwdriver.
After that, five “transgendered” male students from Harvey Milk hit the streets posing as female prostitutes. Working in teams of two and three, they lured perspective johns, struck deals for sex and then announced that they were really undercover cops. Then the Harvey Milk students would handcuff their victims and demand their wallets in exchange for their freedom.
In their first assault, the transgendered cross dressers handcuffed a 24-year-old man and forced him to give up his ATM PIN number, after which they looted his bank account of twelve-hundred dollars.
Three weeks later, three of the Harvey Milk students got dolled up in spandex and mascara and told a 39-year-old man that he was under arrest for soliciting a prostitute. The three queens lifted the man’s wallet and trotted off with $600.
Four days after that, three of the Harvey Milk gender benders handcuffed a 31-year-old man who had fallen for their tawdry impersonations; they demanded his credit card and ATM access numbers. Their victim gave up the numbers in exchange for his freedom. Then the Harvey Milk freak squad hurried off to bank near West 11th Street and Waverly Place and stole $1,000 from their victim’s account.
Five days later, two of the Harvey Milk cop-and-female impersonators handcuffed a 33-year-old man to a fence on the corner of Jane and Washington Streets and robbed the clueless mark of $105 and his keys.
A day later the twisted teens snatched a mere $85 from a man who refused to give up his bank account access number.
Their crime spree ended at three in the morning when Detective Andrew Rindler of the Greenwich Village Anti-Crime Unit spotted 17-year-old Gerald Howard’s flaming red hairdo. The cops promptly arrested the little creep, along with his squalid teenage posse – Kevin Williams, Brian Gonzales, Keenan Oliver and Kevin Howell. Keenan Oliver, 16, was caught while in possession of a fake police badge, handcuffs and a police scanner. All five of the Harvey Milk High students were charged with robbery and the criminal impersonation of a police officer.
From their twisted-transsexual teenage perspective the crime spree had a lot to recommend it: there was bondage and discipline; there was the ego boost of being mistaken for genuine women. Better yet, after their crimes they could all skip off for some leisurely shopping at Dolce & Gabbana.
For the rest of us, there are lessons to be learned. First of all, these five freaks, who hailed from Jamaica, Queens; Long Island City; the Lower East Side; Williamsburg and Morris Heights in The Bronx, would not have met if they had not been brought together by the Harvey Milk school. Gathering together people who share a common delusion is never a good idea; they encourage one another in the worst way. For example, there is no such thing as a woman trapped inside a man’s body; there are only unhappy males trapped inside male bodies. But just try telling that to room full of biological males claiming to be “transgendered.” They “just know” that they were issued the wrong bodies at birth.
Out of the Night
The Christian world has always included a shadowland of homosexuals, but it was not until one summer night in 1946 that the contemporary paradigm of gays as an “oppress minority” was invented. That was the night that Communist Party activist and closeted homosexual Harry Hay sat down at his kitchen table and began to apply the Marxist dialectic to the homosexual subculture. Before Harry no one thought of homosexuals as an oppressed minority or even a minority.
Before Harry everyone understood that homosexuals were odd, abnormal and deviant – all of which was statistically obvious. It is not unreasonable to believe that the number of homosexuals in the general population does not exceed 2%. The pioneering Alfred Kinsey, himself something of a sex freak, pegged the number of homosexuals at a generous 4%, and by homosexual he meant what we usually mean: a person with a conscious and persistent erotic attraction to persons of the same sex. The wildly inflated figure of 10% that gay activists bandy about is a deliberate misuse of Kinsey’s observation that 10% of males entertain an occasional homoerotic mental image. Such stray thoughts do not qualify anyone as a homosexual.
The true number is probably below 4% because Kinsey’s studies were done among two captive populations, prisons and mental institutions, both of which were top-heavy with homosexuals during the era when Kinsey was asking questions. The prisons were bursting with homosexuals because of the vigorous enforcement of ubiquitous anti-sodomy laws and the mental hospitals were bursting with homosexuals because of the higher incidence of voluntary and forced commitment of homosexuals. Parents wanted doctors to “cure” their homosexual children; unhappy gay misfits longed to be “normal.” The three decades that preceded the 1960s put a premium on normalcy. The 60s blew the doors off; after that, all manner of restraints fell out of favor.
By the time the 60s came to a rolling boil Harry Hay’s paradigm of gays as an oppressed minority had spawned several gay advocacy organizations. Once the black activists had demonstrated how to manage political theater, all sorts of self-defined “minorities” and “communities” began to whine and agitate. The more shameless among them, including the homosexuals, likened their plight to that of black people, no matter how preposterous the comparison.
Once the homosexuals had successfully concealed themselves beneath the protective camouflage of civil-rights street theater, the last remaining impediments to their campaign for social acceptance were the mental health professions, which commonly considered homosexuals to be “disordered.”
There was no way that homosexuals could sway the psychiatrists with reasoned persuasion; the evidence against them was too overwhelming. So the gays resorted to more street theater – this time targeted specifically at individual psychiatrists. When ranking officials of the American Psychiatric Association were scheduled to speak, gay agitators would show up to heckle them from the audience. It was a variation of the gay assaults on churches, where activists would urinate in the pews and throw condoms at parishioners at prayer. The disruptions were relentless and the homosexuals kept it up until the elders of the APA agreed to meet with them. The gays wanted homosexuality removed from the APA’s catalog of mental disorders; the psychiatrists wanted their careers back. Meetings between the parties occurred sporadically for about a year; no one with a negative opinion of homosexuality was permitted to present evidence.
When the jawboning was done the gays had a deal: gay activists would compose and finance a postal opinion poll of the APA’s registered members; if the members chose to drop homosexuality from the APA’s catalog of disorders, then it would be dropped. The questionnaires were printed and mailed. After the returned ballots were tallied, homosexuality was removed from the list of mental disorders. It was a public relations coup for the homosexuals. However . . .
Everything about this picture is screwy. The very notion of putting such an issue to a vote taints all of psychiatry with an air of quackery. Did all the pre-existing evidence suddenly vanish? Worse yet, three quarters of the APA members who received the questionnaire threw it in the wastebasket; only 25% of the ballots were returned. As every professional statistician will tell you, a return that low renders the whole exercise worthless. We can reasonably assume that closeted homosexuals within the APA membership had a greater incentive to return their ballots; prior to this bogus ballot no APA member would admit to being a homosexual.
When the true nature of the balloting was revealed, some APA members said they would not have voted to drop homosexuality from the list of disorders had they known that gay activists had composed and bankrolled the questionnaire. Others said they still believed that gays were disordered, but had voted to delete homosexuality to spare gays from reproach. Members said they never imagined that homosexuals would become a political force. So the decision of the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic manual of disorders was a completely self-serving and a completely political decision. The mail-vote balloting that gave the decision a veneer of legitimacy was, in truth, statistically worthless. Psychiatrists continued to believe that homosexuals are screwed up.
So the American Psychiatric Association’s gutless capitulation to queer extremists was touted by gays as a clean bill of health for homosexuals when it was, in fact, only junk-science nonsense from APA careerists who desperately wanted gay hecklers to leave them in peace. Likewise, the popular notion that homosexuals are an oppressed people deserving of sympathy is the brainchild of a single Marxist dialectician who dreamed of political empowerment for himself and his fellow anal erotics. These two false premises are the foundation of all contemporary homosexual advocacy: that gays have been given a clean bill of mental health and that gays are an oppressed minority.
The social freedom of movement that these two false premises have given to homosexual advocates has gotten us the effrontery of same-sex marriage parodies, the grotesquery of homosexual adoptions and now the vulgar misguided excess of a taxpayer-funded multi-million dollar high school for sexual misfits in the grips of preposterous self deceptions.
This isn’t the America of my youth. It’s more like America as re-imagined by one of the later Roman emperors . . . Caligula perhaps.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2010
January 1, 2010