Youth, Education, and Marginality: Local and Global Expressions

Chapter 9: Still Sleeping in the “Gay Tent”? Queer Youth in Canadian Schools

chapter 9 178 I got a phone call from Ryan’s junior high school guidance counsellor telling me Ryan was experiencing distress. Ryan wanted she and I to meet with him the next day so he could share what was up … I realized later that she was giving me plenty of hints and tips on what was going on. When Ryan and I were together at home I asked if he wanted to talk about it, he said wait until tomorrow with the guidance counsellor. He did allow me to guess about what was going on, thinking I’d never guess, right? So I said “are you gay?” “well how did you know?” That was the first response out of his mouth! … So I give him a big hug, told him I love him, and assure him everything will be OK … we go meet with the guidance counsellor and Ryan discloses he wasn’t worried about my acceptance, he was worried about my Catholic family rejecting both of us because of his sexuality … after helping us deal with that the guidance counsellor provided me with information to connect us with PFLAG PEI [Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays] … at that meeting and throughout Ryan’s two years at that school, we couldn’t have asked for a better support system. (Brenda, quoted in Hilton, 2010)1 From active denial to active acknowledgement of queer youth’s existence in schools by school-based guidance counsellors, these two quotes suggest disparate pedagogical perspectives, connectedness to school, and research participant’s comfort level with claiming their voice and identity. Importantly, these quotes are also separated by fifteen years as well as the Supreme Court of Canada’s (SCC) 1998 judgment in Vriend v Alberta, which is considered by Harris (2008, p. 1) to be “one of the three most important decisions in the history of the court.”2 In their unanimous decision in Vriend, the justices ruled that the government of Alberta’s exclusion of sexual orientation from proscribed grounds of discrimination within the Individual Rights Protection Act (renamed in 2009 as the Human Rights Act) was unconstitutional.3 The justices of Canada’s highest court dismissed legislation that effectively rendered all Albertans “equal in dignity and rights, except gay men and lesbians” and thereby compelled Alberta and PEI to enforce sexual orientation as a proscribed basis for discrimination in their respective Human Rights Acts.4 Robinson (2006, p. 1) first identified these two Canadian jurisdictions as being “most resistant to the provision of equal rights for gays and lesbians,” and I first specified the respective post-Vriend adoption processes employed by the governments of PEI and Alberta so as to better contextualize, identify, and connect issues of sexuality to the marginalization of youth within Canadian schools. In June 1998, a mere two months after the SCC’s landmark Vriend decision , PEI’s legislators amended the Human Rights Act to include sexual orientation as a proscribed ground of discrimination. At the same time, legislators restricted another of the act’s proscribed grounds—marital status—to opposite sex relationships. Given the judicial precedents then being established in the Still Sleeping in the “Gay Tent”?: Queer Youth in Canadian Schools 179 Canadian courts, Herb Dickieson (1998, p. 5661), a member of the legislative assembly (MLA), characterized efforts to limit the Human Rights Act to an opposite sex definition of marital status as “discrimination within discrimination [that] kind of kills the whole purpose.” Disregarding Dickieson’s prophetic warning and notwithstanding Vriend’s fundamental lesson that “the concept of democracy means more than majority rule,” a majority of PEI’s legislators voted to restrict the definition of family status to opposite sex relationships only.5 Having been freed by their party leader and then premier, Pat Binns, “to vote their conscience” (Standing Committee on Social Development, 1998, p. 8), legislators agreed with MLA Deighan’s (1998, p. 5662) reasoning that “on this issue the people have spoken loud and clear … I feel compelled to represent what I judge and what I view to be the majority [view] of my constituents.” Voting as they did to limit the act’s definition of marital status to opposite sex relationships, PEI’s elected representatives claimed their conscientiousness “strengthened marriage and enriched family life” (Deighan, 1998, p. 5663). The SCC, however, soon denounced PEI’s brand of legislative reasoning. In M. v H., the SCC found that...