Why Did MassResistance/PRC Tape "Fistgate"?

Why did the Parents’ Rights Coalition (now MassResistance) decide to tape the 2000 GLSEN-Boston workshop, AKA “Fistgate”?

Below is then-director Scott Whiteman’s December 1999 testimony before the Massachusetts State Board of Education – just months before the March 2000 GLSEN event. State education officials ignored it as not credible.  Read this testimony with the hindsight offered by our Fistgate audio tapes.

Whiteman refers to BAGLY (Boston Alliance of Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Youth) – whose director was a founding member of the Governor’s Commission, a close working ally of Kevin Jennings, and has run the GLBT youth prom for decades. 

At this same Board of Education meeting, the Chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth (David LaFontaine) even admitted that “he [did] not have statistics showing the number of gay and lesbian students harassed or attacked in schools each year." Yet he went on to say, "We feel it's the responsibility of the state to stop the antigay violence in so many school systems." And so the “Safe Schools” program proceeded, despite the fact that there was no proof of antigay violence. (Boston Globe, “Students urge state to clarify gay rights,” 12-21-99.)

Testimony by Scott Whiteman 

Massachusetts State Board of Education Meeting

December 21, 1999
[See original document here as pdf.]

“We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools.” - Michael Swift, Gay Community News, Feb. 15, 1987.

On February 10, 1992, the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth was created by William Weld's having signed and authorized Executive Order 325, stating as his predominant reason for the institution of this Commission that 30% of completed youth suicides annually are by gay and lesbian youth; and . . . that suicide is the leading cause of death for gay and lesbian youth.

It is not my purpose to extrapolate fully on why the use of a 1989 Health and Human Services report on Youth Suicide was erroneous, rather to merely point out that the report was speculation then and has since been proven false by the Centers for Disease Control. I point this out for two reasons, which I call the Double Lie:

1. that there is a high percentage of youth suicide in the gay community

2. that the Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth is in the schools to prevent youth suicide

The Governor's Commission was founded on false premises with misrepresentation and disregard of the facts about the homosexual lifestyle. The facts were, and remain, that it is not determinable how many of the 5,000 annual youth suicides are by gays or lesbians. The intent of instituting the Commission on these premises was, and still is, to deceive you as to the nature of homosexuality. The Governor's Commission would have you believe that gay youths are beaten or harassed on a daily basis to the point that they contemplate suicide to escape this terrible lifestyle which they were born into. Fiction is fun, but the reality is that all teens, gays and lesbians alike, are resilient to attacks if they occur. However, where are they occurring? In Massachusetts, how many gays are beaten on a daily basis? How many are killed for being gay? These are the real numbers we need to see before the Governor's Commission should be allowed to continue with its supposed agenda, since the foundational 1989 study on Youth Suicide has been declared inconclusive.

What then, since the suicide rate is not so prevalent [as] the agents of the Commission [say], does the Commission, through the Gay Straight Alliances, do? According to the Recommendations in Prevention of Health Problems Among Gay & Lesbian Youth given to the Governor in 1994, the Commission has provided "trainings" on "Sexual Orientation and [the] Coming Out Process." Additionally, when dealing with STDs, information about safer sex should be given "as it relates to gay, lesbian and bisexual youth," with the understanding that "[g]ay, lesbian and bisexual youth may not be able to practice skills crucial to developing [a healthy homosexual relationship]."(1) Exactly what skills ought we be teaching children to practice? Should it be how to keep their fingernails trimmed so they don't tear their lover's rectum while "fisting" him, as the Color Me Healthy brochure from The Fenway instructs? Maybe they ought to be "practicing" on a New Hampshire lakeside weekend retreat and be paid $25 to do it at events sponsored by the Boston Area Gay and Lesbian Youth (BAGLY)? BAGLY itself recognizes that their age ranges from 14 to 22 at its meetings. Have we decided that youths who question their sexuality aren't protected from pederasts simply because they think they might be gay?

I am 25. If I were to approach any of your 14 or 15 year old daughter or granddaughter to "discuss sex" and give her a chance to "really get to know [me] ... on a much deeper level,"' you would rightly come against me and prevent me from meeting your daughter in this, or any, atmosphere. You might even seek to punish me criminally. Yet, we allow our young boys to be preyed upon by older men and call it "diversity." Pedophilia is still a crime in Massachusetts, and consensual sex is still rape when it occurs between a child under the age of 16 and an adult above the age of 18. Who will be to blame when an older man and a young boy lie together, facilitated by the GSAs? [gay/straight alliance clubs in the schools, mandated by the DOE “Safe Schools” program] Keep in mind that homosexuals are too ready to admit that "only" 30% of the pedophilia crimes are committed by homosexuals; stated differently, by 3% of the population.

I have come today not to give you questions to ponder before you allow the Governor's Commission to influence the schools with their call to diversity. Rather, I have come to reveal to you that they are in your schools under the guise of "safety." They have lied to you to get into the schools, lie to parents while in the schools, and you must pray that they are not lying with boys who statutorily cannot consent to sex. If you provide the in-road for these criminal pedophiles, you ought to be held accountable as well for their crimes. I leave you with this thought:

“How many gay men, I wonder, would have missed out on a valuable, liberating experience -- one that initiated them into their sexuality -- if it weren't for so-called molestation?”   - Carl Maves, "Getting Over It," The Advocate, May 5, 1992, p. 85.

This was in a 1992 edition of The Advocate, a "mainstream" gay magazine. According to the gays, you don't have to fear that they are pedophiles, you should thank them.

___________

(1) Prevention of Health Problems Among Gay & Lesbian Youth, p. 21

(2) BAGLY pamphlet announcing meetings and a $25 stipend for those who attend a lakeside weekend retreat.

Kevin Jennings' Fistgate Conference Gave Teachers DOE Professional Credits

Kevin Jennings and his organization GLSEN worked hand in hand with the Massachusetts Department of Education. The DOE has tried to distance itself from the infamous GLSEN-Boston Fistgate conference in 2000. But that won't wash. They were in this together.

The DOE Commissioner wrote a welcome letter in the conference booklet, but further, teachers were also able to collect professional development credits for attendance. We can't imagine that the DOE would extend professional credits for an event unless they knew the content of the workshops. Two of the instructors of the fisting workshop were DOE employees (in the "Safe Schools" program). If the DOE people knew the content, wouldn't the man in charge of the conference know too?

That would be Kevin Jennings. And the Mass. DOE "Safe Schools" program was his brainchild.

Here's the diploma, good for 6.0 hours of professional development credits:

Kevin Jennings' GLSEN-Boston Director Defended "Explicit" Content at Fistgate

More proof that Kevin Jennings' GLSEN-Boston had no problem with the explicit content at the Fistgate conference in 2000: His Boston chapter's executive director defended the fisting workshop leaders and their explicit content.
Massachusetts News reported in April 2001 on a letter from a Mass. Department of Education official who clearly stated that then GLSEN-Boston executive director Wallace Bachman spoke out against firing the DOE employees who led the fisting workshop. And as we posted a few days ago, in 2001 -- the year after Fistgate -- the GLSEN-Boston conference still handed out sex kits for fisting and oral sex. Excerpt:

In a revealing letter written shortly before the [2001] conference, an official from the state’s Department of Education, Kim Westheimer, seemed disappointed about GLSEN’s new policy barring explicit sex instruction. 

In the March 20, 2001 letter, Westheimer, who works for the DOE’s “Safe Schools Program for Gay and Lesbian Students” wrote, “[U]p until the last minute it looked like GLSEN wasn’t going to have a conference at all. Sites they tried to obtain were unwilling to host the conference fearing negative publicity because of what happened last year.

“It might be possible that the only way GLSEN could host the conference at Tufts was to agree to stipulations about materials. I wouldn’t want to make any assumptions about GLSEN’s actions without asking organizers what went into their decision-making. People may agree or disagree with the decision to have the conference without providing explicit AIDS/HIV education. But to cancel the conference would have also sent a negative message to young people.”

The Department of Education employee continued, “Our challenge as a community is to find ways for explicit education to take place as well.”

The Westheimer language which supports “explicit” sex education belies the DOE’s official distancing from what went on last year at Fistgate. Interestingly, at the particular workshop last year which was tape-recorded by the Parents’ Rights Coalition (PRC) [now MassResistance] and where kids were given explicit homosexual instruction on fisting and other sexual practices, 55 minutes passed before there was any mention of AIDS/HIV.

Westheimer wrote, “When PRC launched their campaign against GLBT youth last year, GLSEN Boston and Wallace Bachman [GLSEN-Boston Executive Director] in particular were among the few organizations or individuals who spoke up publicly against PRC, against DOE firing, and in support of providing AIDS/HIV and sexuality education for GLBT youth. Not many organizations spoke out in support of GLSEN or the DOE employees who conducted the workshop.”

Two DOE employees were fired last year for teaching children how to perform dangerous homosexual sex acts such as “fisting.” The letter from Westheimer supports the contention of fired employee Margot Abels, who is suing the Department of Education, that she had the support of the DOE in what she taught the kids and she was made a scapegoat. [Emphasis added.]

Kevin Jennings Did Know Content of Fistgate Fisting Workshop in Advance

Media Matters is trying to help Kevin Jennings avoid accountability on his GLSEN-Boston Fistgate conference. But it won't wash. Of course Jennings and the Massachusetts Department of Education knew beforehand what the "sexuality educators" would discuss with children at the "fisting" workshop. The instructor Margot Abels said so herself, and was disappointed when she later became their scapegoat.

Jennings, after all, worked hand in hand with the Mass. Department of Education from the beginning, as co-chair of the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth education committee, which set up the statewide program, "Safe Schools for Gay and Lesbian Students" in the DOE. That is the program the fisting workshop instructors worked for.  (See Jennings' bio in the Fistgate Conference program booklet. He also confirms this in his memoir, Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, Chapter 11.)

 

Margot Abels, Fistgate instructor

[photo: Marilyn Humphries, Bay Windows]

Rod Dreher wrote in the Weekly Standard (July 2000):

The [Fistgate] tapes went out anyway [despite GLSEN's threat of a lawsuit for "illegal wiretapping"] and became a talk radio sensation. On May 19, state education chief David Driscoll canned Abels and Netherland and terminated Gaucher's contract. But Driscoll also insisted that the controversial workshop was an aberration that shouldn't be allowed to derail the entire program. Abels fumed to the press that the education department had known perfectly well what she had been doing for years and hadn't cared until the tapes had surfaced. Camenker, ironically, agreed. [emphasis added]

From Atty. Ed Pawlick's report in Massachusetts News (September 2001):

The teachers at Fistgate knew that the public would not approve what they were teaching to the children about graphic homosexual sex, one of the teachers revealed last week. 

“[W]e flew sort of below the radar screen for a long time,” Margot Abels told Boston’s homosexual newspaper, Bay Windows. 

She taught them sex because she thought she knew better than the parents what should be taught to the children. She says she had the support of state officials during her seven years at the state Department of Education.  

“We always knew that we were working in an area that in certain places was considered really controversial and we also knew that we were doing cutting edge work and that there are plenty of people that don't support doing work with gay kids. But I think that we flew sort of below the radar screen for a long time and were able to, and had the complete support of our agency. Maybe David Driscoll [Commissioner of Education] didn't always know everything that we did, but certainly our supervisors did," said Abels.  

She added that she and Julie Netherland, another teacher at Fistgate, always had the “absolute support” of their immediate supervisors.... 

After reviewing a few of the campaigns they had tried, Abels described for the teachers the project she had worked on, the “Gay/Straight Alliance HIV Education Project.” She traveled to five different schools each year conducting up to eight “HIV prevention sessions” in that school’s gay club. She and the other teachers who had just told a group of children how to properly position their hands for “fisting” were telling this room full of educators that they would visit their schools and teach the same thing to their students.  

Abels says that the Massachusetts schools were a “nationally recognized model” for teaching teenagers about homosexual sex until the scandal surfaced. [emphasis added]

Kevin Jennings had long been fearful that his actual GLSEN materials and conference content might be exposed. He once even called Brian Camenker (head of Parents' Rights Coalition, now MassResistance) at his home and yelled at him. (This was probably in 1998.) Massachusetts News reported on this harassment in 2001. (See the complete interview here.) Excerpt:

Brian Camenker Discusses Confession of Margot Abels, Fistgate Teacher 

By Ed Oliver  
(October 2001)

A teacher at Fistgate, Margot Abels, recently confirmed what Brian Camenker has been saying all along about what she and others taught to Massachusetts school children.

Abels was fired from the state Department of Education for what occurred at Fistgate. But an arbitrator recently awarded her all of her back pay and ordered that she get her old job back. He said she had not been acting on her own but with approval from her superiors to teach this material.

She now says that she “flew sort of below the radar screen for a long time,” as no one in the public realized what was happening.

MassNews: What did your people try to do before Fistgate that led to the taping? How did you know what the homosexual movement was teaching the kids?

Camenker: Well, the interesting thing about that is we had actually been to the previous two GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) conferences. In fact, one year we had let the word out that we might be protesting and the president of GLSEN called me at home to harass me about it.

MassNews: Who was that?

Camenker: His name was Kevin Jennings. He actually got my home phone number and called me at home to harass me.

MassNews: Harass you how?

Camenker: Oh, he basically yelled and screamed at me a little bit. The way he found out about it interestingly enough is I had mentioned it to a Channel 5 News Reporter. The news reporter called him in New York and warned him about this. The way we found out was Jennings did an interview with Bay Windows and said that a Channel 5 Reporter had warned him. When I asked Channel 5 about it they said they called him up to do an interview. I asked how is it that a TV station would do an interview on the phone. I’ve never heard of that. Well, they didn’t have an answer for that.

MassNews: And that happened when?

Camenker: I think that was in 1998.

MassNews: Wasn’t the Parents’ Rights Coalition trying to approach the Dept. of Education before the taping incident at the Tufts conference in March of 2000?

Camenker: Yes. Before the Tufts conference in 2000, we approached the Dept. of Education. Scott Whiteman told them, “This is what is happening in the schools and you need to know about it.” This was in December, several months before the March 2000 conference. We were saying we had been to the last one or two of these conferences and we had seen everything that was going on there. I mean, the literature that was being handed out, everything was absolutely disgusting. The State Board of Education, which includes some people that you would consider conservative like Abigail Thernstrom and Jim Peyser, completely ignored him and in fact laughed at him. They treated him very badly and suggested that he might be homophobic or something and ignored us.

So we knew we had to prove what was going on. The interesting thing is that when Scott went to the March 2000 conference he brought a tape recorder really as an afterthought. If I remember correctly, the idea was if anything interesting happened turn on your tape recorder. It wasn’t planned all that intricately. He just sort of happened to wander into a couple of workshops and it was absolutely horrifying. And you know, I think even more horrifying than what we got out of there was the fact that the people there didn’t think that there was anything abnormal about what they were doing to children. I happened to listen to the tape again recently and it is really, really gross and disgusting. And the fact that these people didn’t think so is very troubling. And in fact Margot Abels is quoted in Bay Windows as saying that she thought it was a very positive experience for children. I mean, this person is a lunatic. These people have no business being around children at all.

MassNews: When you read that interview you must have felt vindicated by what she said.  Abels said they flew below the radar screen for some time with the support of DOE supervisors. It sounds like she knew the public wouldn’t support what they taught the kids behind closed doors.

Camenker: Well you see the DOE tried to paint her as this anomaly, someone who just came in and did something bad. The department is made up of people just as radical as she is and in many cases more radical. And so, when Driscoll, the Commissioner, and the others tried to say that what she had done was unusual and said it would never happen again, they were a bunch of liars. In fact, they weren’t shocked at all. They knew what was going on. They helped her plan it and they approved it at every level. When the people there heard about what she was doing when we first told them about it, they weren’t surprised. This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the DOE knew about it and planned it and was actually very comfortable with what she did. The only reason that they fired her was because of the immense public outrage. And you know an interesting thing? Right after the tape became public, Alan Safran, who is the deputy commissioner right under Driscoll called me up and asked me if he could listen to it. We met at an elementary school in Newton. They gave us a room and I played the tape for him in this room.

The fascinating thing was to watch the expression on his face. It was completely blank. He had no emotion about this at all. Most people when they hear this are sickened by it and outraged. Here is the second highest-ranking person in the DOE and his only comment at the end of the tape was, “Boy, it’s time for lunch.” That is literally what he said. He had no emotion at all. He could have been listening to the news for all we know. I think that he was just a little aggravated that we had made it public and he wanted to do what he could to keep the outrage down. You could tell by the look on his face, he was very comfortable with it and had no outrage at all....

See also Massachusetts News  on an article in the homosexual newspaper Bay Windows:

Abels says she was disappointed by lack of support from the homosexual community. The newspaper said, “Abels says there was no sustained support from the gay community on an issue which has broader political implications beyond her losing her job."