silence

for information on how you can help stop bullying of gay youth (or anyone else you love), go to: http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/antibullying/index.html

today is the national day of silence. because i am the sponsor, more or less, of the gay and non-homophobic children at our school, i decide to try to be silent. remember, i am a teacher. now, i share each class with a second adult but today one of those adults is home and we share two sets of children. i will be teaching two classes entirely alone without saying a word. a first period eleventh grade class of 31 and a fourth period tenth grade class of 32. did i mention today is friday? did i mention it's the friday before a nine day spring break? no get out your book. no sit down. no stop throwing that.

i write on the board why i'm silent, how i'm standing in solidarity with a community often silenced in schools, how i'm remembering with my actions the people who have gone before and who have been forced to be silent, forced to deny who they are because it makes someone else feel uneasy. i put the name of a support group at the bottom of the message. i draw a line. under it i write my suggestion for how to stop bullying against gay folks. "tell kobe bryant if he didn't mean it that way, he shouldn't have said it that way". i sign my name to that one. a boy near the front of the class passes me a sheet of folded paper. it says i feel like i'm in a charlie chaplin movie.

i put instructions on the board. we are to read the first part of class and then reflect in journals on how the characters in our novels have suffered and why. i put their homework on the board and directions for how to approach it. when reading time is over, i rap on the desk and gesture to the board. while they're writing, i gesture and point and communicate in plenty of ways that don't involve words. the kids are amused and uncomfortable. some take my behavior as a challenge and try to get me to talk. i am steadfast. i can't shut up for my own self but i know plenty of folks who have been isolated and shunned for being different. they don't get to choose to walk in and out of their isolation. i write on the board, bang my fist against words to get the attention of these bewildered kids. a few of them are choosing silence, too, but a handful begin to try to translate my gestures and pointing for the rest of the class. they prompt each other to share ideas or read aloud or stop talking. they become my voice. they seem to think i am winning something by being silent and they want to help. we work like this until the bell rings.

i eat my lunch in a room full of adults talking all around me. i spill pesto on my skirt and stare down at the oil seeping in. i am so quiet nobody sees me. i do not exist. for five hours i do not speak in a place where my most effective tool has always been my voice. i have nothing except the voice the children give me but i am never silent. there are symbols always, communication endlessly. i send out and they gather up. we share back and forth. i am a pale shadow of what i'm imitating, children for whom the silence is so large it is able to shove them out of windows and off bridges, so deep it swallows them in murky water, so oppressive they will try to claw it out of themselves with shards of glass or knives they don't know how to use.

i am not sure this is working. i do not feel like anything i've done today has made gay teens any safer or happier. but we have a little pizza party afterward. when i walk in there are plenty of kids clumped in little groups chatting easily around slices of pizza and gulps of pop. a mix of boys and girls, middle school through seniors, representative of several languages and cultures in our school. many of them are not gay and that's maybe part of the gift. straight folks and gay folks together in a room eating pizza and drinking pop and talking about nothing, nobody feeling ashamed or ugly inside. just laughing after all that silence and feeling how good it feels to be able to step out of it, all of us together like that.