Pride and the Rest of a Story

I accidentally got up an hour early (I don't know how it happens either), so I have some time to kill. I'm going to pride today. I haven't been this excited about anything for a very long time.

There are going to be plenty of rainbows and music, but most of all I'm looking forward to being in an environment where I can hold my girlfriends hand without being shouted at.

About that, I feel I left the story without a proper ending. Sara snapped, she wrote a very angry, but absolutely fantastic letter to our head of year explaining about the homophobic bullying we recieve everyday from students and how staff have not helped us in coming out, in fact some have been directly unhelpful. I'll see if I can post her letter on here, it'll be the best damn letter you ever read.

Yesterday morning Sara goes into our head of years office and puts the letter down on her desk as noone is around. She turns around and a member of staff who has always supported us is standing behind her, "pick up that letter."

She explains to Sara that although it's a bloody brilliant letter she is acting out of anger and that's the wrong way to go about it. Her, Sara and another member of staff who has always helped us have a long discussion concerning all of this and decide to do things a little differently.

The first teacher takes the letter to our headmaster and the second goes to see our head of year. Our head of year claims she was merely ensuring that younger students would not copy our behaviour and have physical relationships within school. Because, you know hand holding is just a step away from fucking with a big purple dildo in the middle of the school cafeteria. Our headmaster had a far more desirable reaction. He said that although he doesn't believe "kissing and kanoodling" has any place in school regardless of gender or sexuality, any student feeling victimized will have his support 100% and he has invited us to go and speak to him about the problems we've been having both from staff and students. We will almost certainly take him up on that.

I wonder why it took either of us so long to act on all this, but I know the answer. It just didn't seem right to complain about something we knew would happen. Having people jeer and shout at us everyday was always going to happen because we are the minority, but it's the 21st Century. I expected more from adults in an influential position and one of power. I've been let down.*










*This is not to say that no adults helped us through this, but they were as much of a minority as we are.