A Successful Night

I needed some time to recover from what has been a whirlwind of activity in my life before I could post on the great event that happened Tuesday evening on the Tallahassee Community College campus.

The Big Bend Anti-Bullying Task Force, a product of conversations between Gentle Shepherd MCC, PFLAG-Tallahassee and State Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda's office, kicked off an awareness campaign with the movie "Bullied", a film that tells the story of the Jamie Nabozny case in Wisconsin. Jamie came out as gay when he was in middle school, and thus began a cycle of violence and abuse that nearly killed him a couple of times. Principals and other school administrators refused to protect him from a group of bullies who would punch him, kick him, and even urinate on him. They (the school) would tell Jamie and his parents, "Boys will be boys." Or the even more incredible, "Well, if Jamie is going to be so openly gay, then this is what he can expect." Jamie finally met a legal advocate who encouraged him to sue the Ashland, WI, school district. He did, and he won.

The movie was produced for the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Teaching Tolerance" campaign. And in only a few months, the Center has already sent off nearly 40,000 copies at the request of school districts and non-profits.

We were lucky to have the film director and producer, Bill Brummel, join us for the panel discussion after the movie. He noted for the crowd of about 120 people that it was important to protect all children in schools. And that it was incumbent on everyone to work on changing the culture, so that bullying becomes unacceptable. A tall order. But it is not impossible to make what everyone assumes is part of growing up into a thing of the past. The attorney on the panel, Holly Dincman, said what I had been saying in our meetings with the representative: protecting students from harassment and bullying is a human rights issue.

One of the most moving moments to me during the evening was when the moderator, Pat Smith, a light-skinned African-American woman, began sobbing as she related her own experiences of being bullied in middle school by a darker-skinned girl. She talked of the fear, and the depression, and the anxiety caused by the events which all came back to her as she watched the movie. Beyond my feelings of empathy for her as she tried to compose herself again to lead the discussion, I was heartened that a black woman in the south could see the connections to her own experience through a film about a white gay boy in Wisconsin. The trauma of bullying is a universal feeling. The hurt and the damaged caused by "isms" and "phobias" are the same. This is why the artificial barriers erected by some between the black experience and the gay experience are just that: artificial. The bigotry is for different reasons, but it is still bigotry. And it is all wrong. The fact that the moderator saw herself in the story of Jamie Nabozny speaks to that universal truth, and to the long-term effects of bullying. Imagine how much adults spend on therapy trying to undo the damage done to them in childhood!

I considered the evening a success. We've got people thinking and talking. That is the beginning of action, and the way that we can make things better now.