In 2007, Kevin Jennings was still national Executive Director of GLSEN. His “mothership” chapter in Boston held its annual conference on March 31 that year.
The Boston Gay Men’s Chorus were the featured performers - providing opportunities for youth to mingle with adult gay “mentors”. Workshops pushed transgenderism, elementary school gay fairy tales, middle school gay clubs, the fluidity of "sexual identities", and warnings about gay dating violence. (See list of workshops here.)
The Boston Gay Men’s Chorus were the featured performers - providing opportunities for youth to mingle with adult gay “mentors”. Workshops pushed transgenderism, elementary school gay fairy tales, middle school gay clubs, the fluidity of "sexual identities", and warnings about gay dating violence. (See list of workshops here.)
The keynote speaker was actress/activist Sol Kelley-Jones, “a household name in the queerspawn universe” (according to the queer blog, Damn Straight). She
self-identifies as “queer and person-specific rather than bisexual.” Sol’s experiences with hostility and discrimination happened at a younger age than many of her queer peers, but not because her parents were unsupportive. On the contrary: “I also identify as a second generation or queerspawn as I was born into a lesbian parented family.”
… a second generation queer activist and artist who passionately believes in the interconnection between struggles for justice and the radical potential for creative coalitional organizing. As the daughter of lesbian parents, Sol grew up on the frontlines of the LGBTQ movement in Madison, Wisconsin. She actively countered the harmful effects of heterosexism from her youngest years, developing anti-homophobic and anti-racist school curriculum, leading LGBTQ cultural competency and diversity trainings for teachers and youth, and both serving on the National Board of COLAGE [queer family activism] and starting a thriving local chapter…. One of Sol's proudest accomplishments is as co-founder and former youth artistic director of Proud Theater, an award-winning theater troupe and support group for queer youth …
As in previous years, MassResistance activists monitored the proceedings, including a young Boston mother who wrote the following report. Note that GLSEN doesn’t just push GLBT issues and pansexuality. It fosters every hate-America leftist outlook imaginable, focusing on “oppression” and “social justice”. Report by a Boston mother:
I didn’t take very many notes on the keynote speaker because she spoke so fast and I walked out 10 minutes before she was done because I was so angry. She basically spoke very loudly and fast in a way that was designed to pump up the crowd and show that she was saying something very powerful.
She rocked back and forth on the podium as she spoke, like an actor performing a soliloquy, and she spoke as if she was Martin Luther King giving his “I have a dream” speech.
She compared gay rights to immigrant rights and the shakier parallel of the black civil rights movement.
She kept saying the word HETEROSEXISM and almost spitting it every time she said it. I didn’t even know what the word meant but I knew it was a slur! I’ll elaborate on that later.
She chastised us for being heteronormative (meaning a false assumption that heterosexuality was our normal state). She said that queer families have multiple parenting experiences and they have fluid identities, at any given time they may consist of any configuration of people. (Like these sickos that said they had 4 moms, their dad’s lover, their mom’s lover’s other lover, and the previous mom’s new lovers etc. etc. all in the same household.)
She said that racism, classism and homophobia are all lumped into the same group. She basically echoed the sentiments of the teenage Marxist lesbian in my bisexual workshop/lecture -- calling the USA a “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” and saying “our schools are in collusion with the systems of oppression.”
She then started to talk about the Iraq war and how we should be so proud of our government because the soldiers are over there killing Iraqi children and covering them with American flags. And as she goes on about this, people in the audience start to give her a standing ovation. So at that point I am in the front row and I start BOOING her as loudly as I can, and I got up and stormed out on her with everyone watching me go.
The man who I thought had ‘outed’ me and was watching me followed me out of the auditorium. Turns out his name was Frank Pantano and he was the co-chair of the conference. He said he had been following me because he wanted to tell me how proud he was that I was attending this conference and that he felt so happy because I was exactly the type of person he wanted to reach with this info.
Then he asked me what the speaker had said that got me so upset I told him my dad served in the Army during Vietnam and I have many other family members who are career Marines. My godfather’s ENTIRE FAMILY are career marines -- he, his wife and all three kids! I have NO TOLERANCE for people talking sh*t about the military who are right now giving their lives in order for this woman to have the right to stand up and say the stuff she is saying. I said I came here to learn about the gay culture, not to hear her politics and not to be insulted by you all.
I must have been purple with rage at that point, so he calmly and so caringly asked me how I was being insulted. I asked him, “Please explain to me what this term HETEROSEXISM means! I don’t know what it is but I know that when she spoke it she said it with such disdain that even a moron would have to know they were being insulted!” He told me that it basically means an assumption that everyone and everything is heterosexual, and that it can be meant as a pejorative term just like you can use homosexual in an insulting way.
