Student endures jeers over gay school club
White County junior leading formation of support group
By ALAN SVERDLIK, gainesvilletimes.com from the Web, February 13, 2005
White County, Ga. -- Imagine the heartbreak an ordinary 16-year-old girl would feel walking down the aisle of a packed high school gymnasium to a chorus of boos.
Then again, not much is ordinary about Kerry Pacer.
The writings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are of more interest to the junior at White County High School student than the latest celebrity gossip.
She doesn't find membership in the "popular crowd" cool. That's reserved for leading the school's Gay-Straight Alliance.
School officials met Friday to discuss the club's formation, for which five other students have registered.
The club is a support group for gay students and sympathetic heterosexual classmates.
Despite outcries from parents, teachers and other students, White County Schools Superintendent Paul Shaw has said the federal Equal Access Act guarantees the club's right to meet.
The county's board of education could overrule him at its Feb. 24 meeting.
But the American Civil Liberties Union recently sent a letter to the board, saying federal law is clearly on the students' side.
Pacer's resolve was tested severely Friday as jeers rained down on her during a morning assembly.
"Nobody tried to stop them. Nobody came to my defense," she said matter-of-factly, recalling the boos that greeted her during Friday morning's "Sweetheart Assembly," a school pageant held every year around Valentine's Day in which clubs select a member to represent them.
The ruckus began when she was given a rose by a female friend before an auditorium filled with pupils, faculty and administrators, Pacer said.
Her supporters began to cheer, but were quickly drowned out.
"Friday was a day from hell," said her mother, Savannah Pacer. "I'm concerned about my daughter's emotional state of being."
A slender, restless, brown-haired teen who lives with her mother and younger sister in northeastern White County, Kerry said she became aware of her homosexuality in the seventh grade.
Her peers immediately rebuked her.
"In the locker room, girls told me, 'You can't change in here. You're a
lesbian,' " Pacer recalled.
At the church where she and her father worshipped, the reaction was unsparing.
"I was going to hell. I kept hearing that from the youth groups," Pacer said.
So she left the congregation.
Ever since, her goal has been to widen people's horizons. "My dream is for people not to be so quick to judge and to accept others for what they are," she said.
The club has gotten support from Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, a national advocacy group made up of parents and friends of homosexual youth.
Savannah Pacer is a member, as is a Gainesville woman who approached the administration about the idea of a club several weeks ago.
As tensions over the club have risen in their community, the Pacer family has struggled to persevere.
The three have tried to bunch together whenever they can, although Kerry works 30 hours a week waiting tables.
Younger sister Lindsay, a 14-year-old ninth-grader, recently wore a T-shirt to school that displayed the word "hate" with a circle around it and a black line through it.
"She had to change shirts," her mother said. "The school said it was inflammatory."
The hissing from the auditorium still rings in Kerry's ears. Her expressive green eyes water when she remembers a crude, anti-gay sign that a male classmate had taped to his backside.
"I broke down and cried, they were being so mean," she said.
Despite the harassment, Kerry says, the club will adhere to King and Gandhi's turn-the-other-cheek philosophies and won't tolerate retribution by its members.
In some ways, she wonders if she'll ever be able to abide.
"Everyone has their limits," she says. "They can say anything about me, but when it's aimed at my family or friends, I can't take that.
I will end up fighting back."
E-mail: news@gainesvilletimes.com
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