IN THE SHADOWS OF HATE

HoustonChronicle.com — http://www.HoustonChronicle.com

June 11, 2005, 9:24PM

Mayra Beltran / Chronicle Sue and James Null ‹ of the group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays ‹ have displayed “hate-free zone” tape at churches that support gay rights. Deborah Murphy of the Montrose Counseling Center says, “There is not a young, gay person today who does not get hated at daily by somebody.”

IN THE SHADOWS OF HATE

Many gay teens are living with scars of abuse

Whether they’re mean words or violent attacks, the pain can shatter the lives of youth already struggling to find acceptance, advocates say By ALLAN TURNER Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

RESOURCES YOUNG AND GAY Teenage gays and lesbians continue to be targeted for verbal and physical harassment despite generally growing tolerance for sexual minorities in the United States. They also exhibit a greater tendency toward drug use and self-destructive behavior. € Victims of verbal harassment: 85 percent € Physical harassment: 40 percent € Punched, kicked or attacked with weapons: 20 percent € Used marijuana: 70 percent € Used cocaine: 29 percent € Used injectable drugs: 18 percent € Houston’s homeless teens: An estimated 33 percent are gay, lesbian or transgender. € Sources: Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey; Montrose Counseling Center ————————————————————————

Thomas Jurewicz never will forget the night he told his parents he was giving up his cherished dream of becoming a Lutheran minister. The November evening was stormy, and he took a stroll in the chilly downpour to calm his nerves. When he returned, he found his parents in their bedroom. His father was half asleep; his mother was placidly working a crossword puzzle.

“Mom, Dad, we need to have a talk,” the Clear Lake-area teen timidly began. “I’m not going to become a minister after all.” Then he got to the hard part. “The Missouri synod of the Lutheran church doesn’t ordain homosexuals.”

Jurewicz’s father bolted upright in bed.

“Son,” he demanded, “what the hell are you trying to tell us?”

Then he hurled a water glass at the teen’s face.

Jurewicz, now 19 and studying out of state to become an Episcopal priest, came away with a chipped tooth ‹ and the shattering pain of utter rejection. His story likely resonates with thousands of Houston-area teenage gays and lesbians who have felt the lash of intolerance. Gay activists say curbing such attacks, which are sometimes violent but always emotionally devastating, is a top priority in what may be shaping up to be one of the hottest social battles of the new century.

“There is not a young, gay person today who does not get hated at daily by somebody,” said Deborah Murphy at the Montrose Counseling Center’s HATCH youth program. “There is no safe place. There is no safe day. … I have known kids to be beaten, thrown out of the house. I’ve seen them emotionally destroyed, taken off for exorcisms. I’ve seen them abused just short of murder.”

The continued rejection and abuse of such adolescents paradoxically comes as the gay youth movement ‹ an estimated 5 percent of the teen population is homosexual ‹ makes significant advances.

Nationally, campaigns such as April’s Day of Silence, in which an estimated 450,000 students in more than 4,000 schools vowed not to speak, spotlight the plight of adolescent sexual minorities.

In the Houston area, roughly a score of high schools now host “gay-straight” clubs, and several school districts, notably the 209,000-student Houston ISD, have written policies banning harassment of homosexuals.

Broad segments of society, though, adamantly oppose recognition of homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.

Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist and other major religious leaders view the practice as conflicting with biblical Scripture. Though groups such as the American Psychiatric Association hold that homosexuality is not a mental illness, others in the mental health field argue it is a condition that can be remedied through “reparative” therapy.

Studies tell of teens’ plight Most who object to homosexuality strongly oppose verbal or physical attacks on gays.

Yet, in a recent national survey of young sexual minorities, 40 percent said they had been physically harassed because of their sexual orientation; 20 percent had been punched, kicked or injured with weapons; 85 percent had endured verbal abuse.

At their most severe, such episodes may qualify as hate crimes.

But, said Houston police Lt. John Silva, hate-crimes coordinator with the department’s criminal intelligence office, few cases come to the attention of authorities.

In the past nine months, he said, Houston police received only one such case involving a gay adolescent victim.

Other studies show gay teens are more likely than their straight peers to abuse drugs and attempt suicide. Seventy percent had used marijuana; 29 percent, cocaine; 18 percent, injectable drugs.

In a Massachusetts survey of high school homosexuals, 40 percent reported they had attempted suicide. It and other studies indicate the gay attempted-suicide rate is much higher than that of heterosexual classmates.

Even in the best of circumstances, coming out ‹ acknowledging one’s homosexuality to friends and family ‹ often can throw teenagers into a vulnerable tailspin.

‘Always an issue’ By the time Jurewicz came out to his parents and to himself he had spent years in emotional turmoil.

“Probably by 13 or 14, I really kind of knew I was different,” Jurewicz said. “What really made me aware of how different I was was the same-sex attraction. That was always an issue ‹ something I viewed as sinful. I was in constant prayer about it. I even consulted Roman Catholic priests on forms of exorcism.”

In high school, Jurewicz was in deep denial. He performed hundreds of hours of community service with the church, hoping to gain a college scholarship to study for the clergy. At school, he was a leader of a Christian organization and was called upon to address students on why they should oppose formation of a gay-straight alliance.

“It was like a temporary patch on a tire,” Jurewicz recalled. “I kept telling myself I was a good Lutheran, a Christian, not gay. It was ridiculous.”

Others recalled similar stories.

Jeffry Faircloth, 20, who was brought up in a fundamentalist Pasadena household, agonized for years over his growing attraction to the same sex. Nightly he tearfully entreated God to make him straight.

“I felt that if I didn’t change,” he said, “I would go to hell.”

His worst fear was that his stern father would learn of his homosexuality.

That moment came during his senior year in high school when his father found a copy of What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality under Faircloth’s bed.

The revelation all but wrecked the youth’s family life.

“It’s very depressing,” Faircloth said. “I have a big sense of loss. Very few people in my family are accepting. I know I’m not going to have this wonderful family relationship.”

Such emotional trauma can have long-lasting consequences, said Denise O’Dougherty, a Houston psychiatric nurse with a large gay and lesbian clientele.

“One of the most harmful things for children to feel is a lot of shame,” she said. “Being abandoned, struggling to fit in and not fitting in, discovering that your sexuality is different ‹ all of that can bring shame on a child. … A lot of people carry that for life. They are basically broken.”

Klein activist fights in court For Marla Dukler, 19, who graduated from Klein High School last year and is a political science major at Northwestern University, going public with her lesbianism brought more than mere anxiety.

Dukler said her ordeal would begin every morning as she pulled into the school’s parking lot. From there to the classroom, she would be peppered with anti-gay epithets. Food was thrown at her in the cafeteria.

Once, while walking in the hall during class, she said, she was slammed into a wall of lockers. When, stunned and bruised, she turned to look at her attacker, she heard a chorus of obscene jibes and saw a trio of male students walking away.

Klein ISD has a written policy banning such harassment, and Dukler filed a complaint. But she was unable to identify her assailants, and nothing came of the protest.

“I had been active in school, in extracurricular activities and sports, and I always enjoyed going to school. I loved learning,” Dukler said. “But more and more, every day, it was harder to get out of bed in the morning.”

In her senior year, Dukler joined students petitioning for formation of a gay-student alliance ‹ an effort that came to naught until Dukler filed suit against the district in federal court with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The action took advantage of a law requiring schools that allowed any noncurricular group to use school facilities to provide equal access to other such organizations.

Dukler’s attorney, David George, recalled the lawsuit generated “over the top” community opposition. Parents jammed school board meetings and picketed. Dukler remembered some parents insisting the school establish separate restrooms for homosexuals. But when the hysteria waned, the district settled out of court.

Klein Principal Pat Huff now thinks establishing a gay-straight alliance has contributed to a feeling of good will at the school.

Words that hurt Arguably, taunts and social rebuffs ‹ far more common than physical attacks ‹ are the meanest weapons in the daily assault on gay self-respect. One student, who asked not to be named, recalled her speech teacher’s midlecture asides to openly gay students: “You can’t fool Mother Nature.”

A 19-year-old transgender, suburban high school student said she experienced death threats and almost daily taunts and assaults. Classmates routinely pushed her down stairs.

“There was always somebody there to push me,” she recalled. “Bump, bump, push or punch.”

The exhausting ordeal led to repeated hospitalizations for depression. At times, the student considered suicide. For more than a year, she was home-schooled.

Another teen, anonymous because his father doesn’t know he’s gay, told of a female passer-by at a neighborhood festival who approached him and opined that he was an abomination. A former Baylor University student now studying medicine in Houston remembered being howled down in class discussions whenever he offered any moderate views on homosexuality.

Such youngsters’ parents, noted Sue Null of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, often are flattened by their offsprings’ coming out.

“This is such a jolt to them,” she said. “They’ve had expectations, and now there will be no grandchildren. Now there will be no daughter in a long, white dress.”

Null and her husband, PFLAG President James Null, are the parents of a lesbian daughter and the surrogate parents of a young, gay man. At worst, Null said, distraught parents drive their gay and lesbian children from the home. By some estimates, as many as a third of Houston’s homeless teens are gay, lesbian or transgender.

Even when parents endeavor to be “as loving as possible,” she said, friends, relatives and churches can create problems. “Society,” Null said, “puts all these barriers in the way.”

Religious objections Much anti-homosexual sentiment has religious overtones ‹ and the topic is an explosive one in the decision-making bodies of the nation’s leading denominations. The Catholic Church and the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention both hold that the practice of homosexuality is contrary to biblical teachings.

Later this month, Houston-area evangelist Voddie Baucham plans to submit a resolution to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Nashville, Tenn., that would empower churches to call on members to withdraw their children from schools that “treat homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle” or host homosexual groups.

The SBC, said spokesman John Revell, acts out of love for “those trapped in homosexuality.”

“There is sensitivity and compassion for those caught up in homosexuality,” he said. “There is no sense of persecution or attack or anger.”

“You don’t bully people,” Baucham agreed. “It’s wrong to dehumanize, humiliate or hurt any person.” But, he argued, parents are right to oppose homosexuality in their children, both for moral and health-related reasons.

Engaging in gay sex is a matter of choice, he contended, and intervention by “reparative therapists” advocated by such groups as Exodus International, often can direct young gays into the heterosexual fold.

Exodus International President Alan Chambers said he believes homosexuals can be pulled from a gay lifestyle just as alcoholics can be saved from the ravages of drink.

“To say homosexuality is, therefore we must accept it, is too simple,” Chambers said. “It flies in the face of millions who have found freedom.”

Chambers, 33, counts himself in that number. Once a sexually active homosexual, he said he is now a heterosexual married man and father. Efforts such as his, though, draw sharp criticism from those outside the church community.

“These are profoundly misguided folks who truly don’t understand the nature of sexual orientation,” said Gilbert Herdt, director of San Francisco State University’s Human Sexuality Studies Program and of the National Sexuality Resource Center.

“In their efforts to help, they are inflicting tremendous damage. The result of people being forced into so-called sexual reorientation by faith-based communities is profound feelings of worthlessness, of wanting to die, of wanting to kill people.”

Struggle remains Thomas Jurewicz’s father died four months after their stormy confrontation.

“When he died,” Jurewicz said, “I had the freedom to live with integrity. Now, I thought, I could embrace who God made me to be.”

Jurewicz decided to inform pastors of his church of his homosexuality, even though it could lead to excommunication.

“There were three of them sitting there,” he said. “They asked me to tell them what the situation was. It was very much like the interrogation. It reminded me of communist brainwashing. … God was the only thing that pulled me through it.”

The minister of the Lutheran church cited confidentiality concerns in declining to comment on the matter.

“They kept giving me Bible verses condemning homosexuality,” Jurewicz said. “I gave them back in the original languages, pointing out that they meant nothing like that. They’d say, ‘Well, no, here it is in black and white. This is what we’ve built our church on.’ Back and forth. Back and forth. … I recognized that this church could no longer be my church home.

“I felt very relieved and happy to not be part of a church body that did not appreciate my work – and very sad.”

allan.turner[at]chron.com

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