Pride Reflection: Progress and Threats for LGBT Kids in Public Schools

MIchael Pruitt

We are honored to host this guest post by Mike Pruitt. During Pride Month, and every month, we proudly stand up for our LGBTQ students and beside our LGBTQ friends, neighbors, and loved ones as we seek inclusion, affirmation, and equality for all. If you or someone you know is in need of support or resources, please visit The Trevor Project.

Happy Pride!

When I was 12, I got my first crush on a boy. I didn’t know what that’d mean for me or my life, but I knew that growing up in a public school in the rural South in the 90s as a gay kid was going to suck. It was terrifying. I heard the way people in my community talked. Just a few months earlier, one of the most powerful men in the country wrote that things like my school-age crush were “immoral and destructive.” He compared it to bestiality, to incest, to murder, and worse. This is how my community, how it felt the world, looked at me.

Today, we’re in the final week of Pride month, which is a good time to celebrate how far we’ve come. At the age of twelve, I could barely imagine being out. I surely wouldn’t have been able to fathom sharing my queer coming of age experience as I ran for local office in the South. Just this past Sunday, my partner led a service in his boyhood church celebrating the LGBT+ faith community. Over one hundred congregants crowded in. On the altar, a hand-crafted rainbow stretched over a quilt of the Rappahannock. I sat in the front row with his parents, all three of us beaming. Pride reminds us to find joy in these moments.

But Pride also offers us the opportunity to call out the dangers still facing queer people across America. The most radical elements of our country have zeroed in on public schools as the new battleground. Whether it's Governor Youngkin’s proposed school policies that violate Title IX and Virginia law or laws in other states requiring that teachers call trans and gender non-conforming kids the wrong names and force them to use the wrong bathrooms, we see these attacks everywhere. While it’s easy to look at Pride flags hanging in businesses around town or openly queer public leaders and think we’re safe here in the shadow of Shenandoah, the reality is that kids in our public schools are under threat. This Pride, I’m focusing my attention on the looming threat to LGBT+ young people here in Albemarle County and the dangerous, anti-LGBT+ policies advocated by aspirants to our School Board.

I was lucky in my own public school experience. A few years after realizing that I liked other guys, I started going to a new high school in a new city. And I felt safer. I started talking to friends about who at school I had crushes on. I went on a first date with another boy to a pizza restaurant. And my teachers, because they were good teachers, because they paid attention and cared about our lives—they knew. And my parents… didn’t. Not because I thought they’d be anything short of loving and affirming, but because that was harder: a relationship that I spent my entire life building and it would be a big change for them.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like if one of my teachers called my parents and outed me. I can’t imagine the distrust, the pain it would have brought to my family. I did well in high school, and it set me on the path that put me here today. But if that had happened, if my school outed me, I don’t know that I’d be here. And I don’t just mean here as a decorated Navy vet, someone working in civil rights law, and a candidate, but as a living, breathing person.

Outing puts kids at risk for suicide.

If my school had outed me, would I be around at all?

I don’t know.

We can’t know how severe the harm might be if schools expose kids when they’re at their most vulnerable, still figuring out their own identities.

But that didn’t stop Dr. Meg Scalia Bryce, candidate for Albemarle County School Board, from going before the Board and advocating that they do just that. She demanded that our schools, as policy, out LGBT students to their parents. It wasn’t even self-motivated—Dr. Scalia Bryce’s children all go to private school and wouldn’t be impacted. She did it because she believes in these kinds of dangerous, anti-LGBT policies. She did it because she wants to insert her ideology into our schools. Which shouldn’t be surprising. After all, her father, Justice Antonin Scalia was the same man who called LGBT people “immoral and destructive,” who likened us to murderers, who compared my 12-year-old crush to bestiality. I don’t know how many other beliefs Dr. Scalia Bryce inherited from her father, but I don’t want us to have to find out.

Unfortunately, as Washington DC royalty, she has a lot of wealthy and powerful connections. That’s why her opponent, Allison Spillman, needs your help. As a former Chief Operating Officer in the private sector and current nonprofit board member, she’ll bring experience in strategy, leadership, and financial management. But the most important experience she’ll bring is a parent of five amazing kids in our public schools. A parent who knows what it's like to navigate IEPs, and bullying, and mental health issues that our families and students all face. I hope you’ll join me in supporting her. 

Mike Pruitt is a Navy veteran studying civil rights and anti-poverty law at the University of Virginia, as well as a candidate to represent the Scottsville District on the Board of Supervisors. When he's not working or campaigning, you might find him walking his dog Joseph on the Saunders-Monticello trail or buying jam at the farmer's market with his partner, Will.