Posted on 05/04/2006 4:51:06 PM PDT by dukeman
Police toss him for taking photos
The 16th annual conference of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) of Boston took place with little controversy April 29 at Harvard University, but not for lack of trying by the Newton-based anti-gay activist group Article 8 Alliance. One member of the group, who declined to give his name to Bay Windows, was ejected early in the day by university police.
“He was taking photographs when it was explicitly posted, prohibited, so he was asked to go,” said GLSEN Boston Executive Director Sean Haley. Haley said the Article 8 member was also seen tape recording portions of the conference. He was asked to leave during the first event of the morning, a welcoming program featuring speeches by state Sen. Jarrett Barrios (D-Cambridge) and Lexington high school senior Eva Rosenberg.
One other attendee, an adult male, was asked to leave mid-day, according to Haley, because attendees complained that he made them feel unsafe.
“One other person was asked to leave based on published comments that were attributed to him related to Lexington and Lexington High School, and he was asked to leave because young people from Lexington were not feeling safe. They were feeling very threatened by him,” Haley said, referring to a recent controversy in which parents of a second grader at a Lexington elementary school filed suit against town officials after they learned that their son’s teacher had read the book King and King, about two princes who fall in love, to their son’s class. Haley declined to give the man’s name and said there was no indication that he had recorded any part of the conference. The man was given a full refund of the conference entrance fee, Haley said.
It is likely Article 8 was hoping to stir up controversy around the event, as the group has done in the past. Last year, Article 8 sent an undercover supporter into the conference who discovered that Fenway Community Health, one of the organizations that had rented a table at the conference, had included a sexually explicit safer sex manual called The Little Black Book on its outreach table. The Article 8 supporter took a copy of the manual, and the group held a press conference several weeks later on the anniversary of the beginning of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts to publicize that it had been distributed, claiming that the distribution of the booklet was somehow a by-product of same-sex marriage. GLSEN apologized for the booklet’s presence at the event and said it violated the conference’s ban on sexually explicit material. Fenway released a statement saying The Little Black Book had been brought by mistake and that it was intended for adults only.
Five years earlier, at the 2000 GLSEN conference, Scott Whiteman, then-executive director of Parents Rights Coalition (PRC), a group headed by Article 8 founder Brian Camenker, secretly taped a confidential safer sex workshop in which three state workers, two from the Department of Education and one from the Department of Public Health, answered students’ questions about safer sex. PRC released tapes of some of the more sexually explicit segments of the workshop, prompting a media firestorm which led to the three state workers losing their jobs. The incident also promoted two lawsuits against PRC, one of which is still ongoing (see “GLSEN Confab Lawsuit May Go To Trial This July,” April 13).
This year, at the start of the conference as attendees were checking in at the registration desk in the basement of Harvard’s Sanders Theater, Bay Windows spotted a frequent Article 8 supporter wandering from table to table in the upstairs hallway, where organizations like Greater Boston PFLAG and Project 10 East had set up tables to distribute literature and answer questions from attendees. This reporter recognized the Article 8 supporter from prior Article 8 protests, including a protest on the Lexington Battle Green on May 17, 2004, and from State House hearings on safer sex education bills where Camenker and other Article 8 supporters offered testimony. Most recently this reporter encountered him in Worcester photographing the Mr. Heterosexual contest, where the supporter took photos of the event that were later posted on the Article 8 Web site (see “Preening Hets,” Feb. 23).
When asked whether he was at the conference on behalf of Article 8 Alliance the supporter said no. “I wanted to come here for myself to see what it is. After what they found out last year, I was like, ‘Okay, I want to see it for myself now,’” he said. He declined to give his name. At the end of the welcoming program, after the speeches by Barrios and Rosenberg, conference coordinator Adam Glick announced from the stage that the Article 8 Alliance supporter had been asked to leave. Joe Wrinn, a spokesperson for Harvard University, said that no recording equipment was confiscated from him, and Wrinn did not release his name.
It is unlikely that Article 8 Alliance found any fodder for scandal at the start of the conference before the group’s supporter was ejected. None of the organizations tabling at the conference, including Protect 10 East, Greater Boston PFLAG, the North Shore Alliance of Gay and Lesbian Youth (NAGLY) and the family diversity photo exhibit Love Makes a Family, featured literature or posters that would have been considered sexually explicit by even the most prudish standards. Glick told Bay Windows that as in past years the conference organizers communicated to all speakers, presenters and tabling organizations that all materials and discussions at the conference were to be age appropriate.
“[We have] the same policies, that we want a safe and respectful space for everyone, and we’re working to ensure that that happens,” said Glick. He said all organizations that had participated last year were invited to participate this year.
Noticeably absent from this year’s event was Fenway, the center of last year’s controversy. Fenway spokesperson Chris Viveiros confirmed that Fenway, like other past participants, had been invited back, but he said the organization did not attend because the organization is currently searching for a new peer listening line coordinator. In past years the Fenway table at the conference has been staffed by the peer listening line coordinator, Fenway’s primary program aimed at LGBT youth. But Viveiros said since the coordinator position is currently vacant Fenway chose not to table at the event.
Despite the tame line-up of organizations tabling at the conference, the event was not without its racier moments. Keynote speaker Anthony Rapp, the out actor known for his role in the original Broadway cast of Rent, as well as the 2005 film adaptation, provoked laughs from the crowd while reading from his recently released autobiography, Without You, as he described an evening spent playing spin the bottle as a teenager with his friends, including comedian Andy Dick. He described the thrill he felt when it was his turn to receive “ear sex,” his friends’ term for licking someone’s ear, from an older boy, Ricky, during the game.
“And then there he was, next to me, and then there his tongue was, squirming around and around and in and over my ear, louder than I would have thought — but of course it was loud, it was in my ear — but it was warm, too, hot actually, from his breath, and soft, and moist, and absolutely thrilling… Soon I realized I was laughing uncontrollably and kicking my legs out like a spastic puppy,” read Rapp, provoking laughter from the audience.
Yet Rapp’s speech wasn’t all titillation. After the passage on spin the bottle he read a moving passage about a conversation with his mother while she was in the midst of an ultimately unsuccessful battle with cancer in which she finally told Rapp that she supported him regardless of his sexual orientation.
Rapp also talked about how coming out and after starring in Rent on Broadway prompted an avalanche of letters and e-mails from LGBT youth that continues to this day. He said that back in 1996 when Rent first opened many of the letters were from young people asking him if it was morally right for them to be gay. Over time the tone has shifted, and he said now youth often want simply to tell him their stories or to ask for advice on coming out.
“If there are questions now, it’s ‘When is the right time to come out to parents,’” said Rapp.
At the end of the speech, in response to a request from an audience member, Rapp sang the opening verse of the song “La Vie Boheme” from Rent, bringing the audience to its feet. Many laughed when, as he sang the lyrics, “to fruits,” he pointed out at the crowd.
There was no sign that last year’s controversy had diminished support for this year’s event. Glick said this year’s event drew about 500 attendees, similar to attendance levels in past years. Alan Rivera, a French and Spanish teacher at the Park School in Brookline and one of the faculty advisors to the school’s gay/straight alliance (GSA), said he brought seven students from the school, which runs from preschool to ninth grade, to the conference from the school’s upper grades. He said he brought a smaller group last year, and despite the controversy he had “no reservations” about attending this year.
“I picked up one of those [The Little Black Book] last year… I was surprised that such a publication would be available at the GLSEN conference, but I understood from media reports that it was an error, and an honest error,” said Rivera.
He said he believes the conference helps show members of the GSA that there are other youth working around the state on LGBT issues in their own schools.
“I think it puts the work that we do at the Park School with issues of diversity, and particularly LGBT diversity, it puts it in a larger context,” said Rivera.
Flo Dickerson, a senior from Lexington High School who has attended the conference twice before, agreed. Dickerson and another Lexington senior, Kim Douglas, led a workshop on how to organize a Day of Silence event at one’s high school.
“I think it’s a good opportunity for people to network not only in terms of getting information but seeing that there are other people doing what they’re doing and struggling with what they’re struggling with,” said Dickerson. At her workshop she and Douglas described how students organized Day of Silence events in their school for the past two years despite protests from small groups of fellow students.
The event had no shortage of high profile speakers, including Rapp, state Sen. Barrios, Cambridge Mayor Ken Reeves, and YGA Magazine publishers Benjie Nycum, but it was Eva Rosenberg, herself a senior at Lexington High School and a board member of GLSEN Boston, who spoke most directly to the mission of the conference during a speech to all the conference attendees in Sanders Theater. She said she disliked hearing adults refer to her generation as the leaders of tomorrow, and she urged her peers to be active, whether by doing voter registration drives or volunteering with organizations like GLSEN or being active in their schools. She asked her fellow students to stand up in the audience.
“Please take a good look not at the leaders of tomorrow but at the leaders of today,” she said.
They're afraid the public might find out what they're up to.
Yes, I get suspicious about people who scurry away when I turn on the light.
That's why they're called cockroaches.
Apparently not for any believers in traditional morality...
ping
“I think it’s a good opportunity for people to network not only in terms of getting information but seeing that there are other people doing what they’re doing and struggling with what they’re struggling with,” said Dickerson.
Biased reporting on the homosexual public school underage recruitment and dating service planning meeting also known as the homosexual predators mixer -publicized innocuously by the leftists as the GLSEN conference.
No doubt they discussed educational topics covering the full range of homosexuality -everything EXCEPT sexual activity. They try very hard to keep secret the only thing that differentiates homosexals from heterosexuals -the sexual activity...
This homosexual predator organization fools no one...
Hopefully they will be shut down soon.
**Apparently not for any believers in traditional morality...**
Ditto!
All the people (on FR and elsewhere) who say that "gays" don't bother anyone, or that what people do privately is of no consequence, or that so what if two men or two women can get married - what about articles like this?
Where are all the people on FR who say there is no gay agenda? Why do they never show up on threads like this one?
The Gaystapo are very effective in their security.
Exactly so!
Hey! Guys! Over here! Tell us there is no "gay agenda" again, okay?
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