So there were two heartening developments in LGBTQ+ news yesterday. The first, of course, was the overwhelming community turnout in Peterborough to oppose the same dozen fascist dipshits that have been trying to disrupt drag queen storytimes or drag brunches all across Southern Ontario. Police estimated about three hundred people turned out to defend the venue, which is amazing. There was a similarly large turnout to counter hate yesterday in Coquitlam BC, opposing that province’s version of the Dimwit Dozen semi-pro bigotry team.
I’ve expressed my opinion of the bigots’ bullshit before: they’re not “protecting” anything, they’re just getting their jollies by being able to scream homophobic abuse in public without consequences. Honestly, though you’d think they’d start to get the point when every time the local community comes out en masse to protect these events while they have to drive for hours, pay for gas and rent hotel rooms just to make hateful fools of themselves again and again. The endorphin payoff has to be hitting the law of diminishing returns by now.
I don’t really want to re-hash it, except to say that the huge defence turnouts are very encouraging – especially in Peterborough, a community where I lived for many years. I’m proud of the many friends who went out and stood in the cold and held the line against the hatred… up to and including several incidents of assault as certain of the chuds tried to force their way past the defenders. Unsurprisingly, no arrests were made.
The other heartening development was a news article written by Tyler Cheese: the “Fully Alive” textbooks used in the Catholic school system have been discontinued.
I grew up in a very devout Catholic family: lots of siblings, mass every Sunday (I was an altar-boy but no jokes please) and of course the full-on Ontario Catholic school experience, from kindergarten to my Grade 13 graduation. (I’m dating myself a bit on that last, there hasn’t been a grade 13 in Ontario since 2003.) And growing up in that system meant that my “family life” education was through the “Fully Alive” curriculum.
“Family Life” is the euphemism used so that you don’t have to say the words “sexual education.” It’s a comprehensive program that indoctrinates – sorry, educates – growing children with Catholic values and attitudes approved by the Catholic Church. The grade school curriculum is organized into five themes, of which the third is titled “Created Sexual: Male and Female” in which students are introduced to the notion that there are Men and there are Women, and God intends that they get married and have Children and raise them Catholic, presumably to repeat the cycle. I vaguely remember this notion being introduced around grade five or six, just before the age when the boys started noticing the girls, the girls started noticing the boys and I, confusingly, started noticing both.
Which is rather the problem, because Fully Alive doesn’t really mention that there are alternatives to the boy-meets-girl, boy-marries-girl, boy-and-girl-pay-for-many-baptismal-masses model presented in the curriculum. Homosexuality is mentioned, late in grade school, but specifically referred to as a sin. Homosexual people, we were taught, should be treated with kindness and encouraged to reject their disorder at which time they could gain forgiveness and be returned to God’s love.
And that was it. We were given no more data to work from. Everything else was schoolyard gossip and what we could glean from the TV. And it was nineteen-eighties television at that, and where I lived we got all of four channels (plus PBS from Erie on UHF, but only when the weather was good) so I was definitely not being informed about the full and fascinating range of human sexuality and/or gender expression. By the time I went to high school, I mostly had the vague idea that Homosexuals Were Bad and Probably All Had AIDS and Were Going To Hell.
Which does a bit of a number on you when you’re fourteen and painfully awkward and developing a bit of a crush on the captain of the football team.
There’s a high school continuation of the Fully Alive curriculum, which was more of the same Catholic Church-approved education with a bit more basic biology added and a lot of talk about celibacy because you’re not supposed to act on your urges whether they were heterosexual (which God approves of but only in the context of Marriage) or homosexual (which is a Sin.) There was no mention of bisexuality at all, a word which I am embarrassed to admit I did not even learn until I was sixteen and hanging out with some friends-of-a-friend who went to a non-Catholic high school. The memory sticks in my head because it was a real “eureka!” moment for me.
There was no mention of condoms, either, which is why more than one young woman at our high school had to skip their graduation ceremony; it wasn’t just the queer kids which the Catholic curriculum failed.
The harm that the Fully Alive program caused wasn’t that of active promotion of hate against LGBTQ+ people, it was the creation of an informational void that denied me even the vocabulary to understand, let alone express, my sexuality. It promoted social isolation, stigmatized anyone that didn’t meet the straight/cis paradigm, and left me (and I have since learned, many others) with immense feelings of guilt and shame.
And the result was some pretty cringe coping mechanisms. For one, I was also attracted to women, and I was desperate to get a girlfriend because that would prove that I wasn’t gay. And since women find desperation to the point of creepiness a massive turn-off (take notes, kid) I didn’t have much luck in high school. Thank goodness this was all in an era where the internet wasn’t really a thing yet and the word “incel” had yet to be coined; I’d hate to think of what kind of chatrooms I’d have ended up in.
And then of course that informational vacuum left me without the knowledge of how relationships worked (outside the rigid guidelines of Family Life) and led to a series of disastrous decisions when I went away to college, including a relationship with an emotionally abusive predator that escalated to physical violence before I understood that I was nineteen years old and didn’t know a damn thing about what a healthy relationship looked like. And between the cops and sirens and residence gossip I was pretty thoroughly outed so I nose-dived into that identity for a few years because that’s all I understood.
I am, I hope, a good deal more emotionally functional these days. Or at least more interesting.
Okay, this is getting depressing, so let me circle back around to education. The problem, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t that I wasn’t given a good education about sexuality and relationships, it’s that I was given no education about it and had to sort the whole thing out myself from first principles, something which I was manifestly incompetent at.
So when I see these bigoted morons screaming about “indoctrination” and “grooming” and “protecting kids” I have to think that what they’re really looking for is kids to be ignorant, to grow up without any knowledge about sexuality at all. (And once again, there’s nothing “sexual” about a Drag Queen Storytime, that’s just a lie by right-wing bigots to justify their hatred.) They don’t want young people to have a notion that there’s more than just Boys and Girls and the Divine Sacrament of Marriage. They certainly don’t want a generation of youth growing up understanding, accepting and defending diversity.
They’ve already lost, of course, and I think they know it, which may be why they’ve become so aggressive recently in their promotion of hate.
I would like to end this with a caveat about the news story: the publisher has discontinued the Fully Alive textbooks, but it doesn’t mention whether Ontario Catholic school boards will discontinue the Fully Alive curriculum. As I don’t myself have kids in the Catholic system I’ll admit that I’m not sure what they’re doing vis a vis Family Life these days. But I hope, if they’re still teaching this nonsense, they’ve at least added information about non-cis-hetero people existing. (They could be a bit more respectful too, but I probably won’t hold my breath over that.) Young people having the information that there are people out there who don’t fit the defined heterosexual model is pretty damned important.
As an LGBTQ+ person, a little of that information at the right time would have changed my life in many ways.
