Queer kids in Mississippi deserve heroes, representation in curriculum – Clarion Ledger
Most of you probably do not remember learning about queer people in high school.
Mississippi is one of a handful of states to have “no promo homo” laws that specifically target public schools’ ability to discuss homosexuality.
Section 37-13-171 of the Mississippi Code of 1972 says that sex education must include the “current state laws related to… homosexual activity.” Borrowing comical language from King Henry VIII’s 1533 Buggery Act, the Mississippi sodomy law says, “Every person who shall be convicted of the detestable and abominable crime against nature committed with mankind or with a beast, shall be punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for a term of not more than ten years.”
However, in 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in the Lawrence v. Texas case that individual state laws prohibiting homosexual intimacy violated the due process clause of the 14th amendment. This ruling nullified the Mississippi sodomy laws.
A more recent attempt was made in 2019 at the state level to amend the sodomy laws with House Bill 1286, but it failed to pass. Regardless of the laws, Mississippi youth are not learning about important topics.
According to the most recent School Health Profiles released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2019, less than half of public high schools and only a third of middle schools in Mississippi reported teaching about sexual orientation. They also found that only 44.8% of students grades 9-12 were taught how to use a condom, further explaining why Mississippi is second in the nation for teen pregnancy with 29.1 teen births for every 1,000 women.
The lack of LGBTQ+ specific education is not helping to remedy the health disparities for young Black gay men in our state who have dealt with disproportionately high rates of HIV infection. The primarily abstinence-only stance that many schools use has also widened the wealth inequality gap.
There are also many non-sexual aspects of queer education that are often left out of the school curriculum.
The most recent Mississippi Department of Education Readiness Standards for Social Studies only has LGBT listed once under a hypothetical half credit elective titled “minority studies” that has rarely been offered in an actual curriculum.
Students will likely not see a history question asking them to discuss how Joseph McCarthy’s homophobia paralleled the anticommunist movement to create the Lavendar Scare.
They probably won’t learn about the first known gay congressmen from Mississippi, John Hinson, who was a veteran and advocated against bans on gays in the military.
They probably won’t learn how government inaction during the AIDS epidemic left thousands of queer people to die, and how Dr. Anthony Fauci has already helped save the world once before.
They won’t hear about Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Frank Kameny, Harvey Milk, Larry Kramer and others taken by history.
They won’t learn to be proud of themselves and the people who made their existence possible.
It’s hard for queer people to see where they fit into history.
Queer kids deserve to have heroes. Representation gives kids permission to live when the invitation is already so hard to read in the darkness of a closet.
Mississippi schools must put in the work to integrate these aspects of history and culture into their curriculum. They must reform sex education in ways that won’t easily pass a vote at the PTA meeting. And along the way, everyone might learn something useful.
Sean Patterson is a second year Yale psychiatry resident and a native of Mississippi.