Deliberate Indifference

I went to high school at an all-male college preparatory school. If you're smart, Catholic and a male St. Louisan, then that is where you go. It was a good place, mostly. Students and families of modest means paid what they could afford. The school seemed to take (and seems to continue to take) affirmative steps to promote racial and economic diversity among the student body.

Coming out as gay in such an environment was absolutely out of the question. The supposed insults of "fag," "homo" etc. were thrown around among the students constantly. All of us ... students, teachers and administrators ... were deliberately indifferent toward it. There is a kind of default environment of hostility among an all-male high school as it is ... I hate to imagine what would have happened to the poor kid who was discovered to be gay.

I also regret my own deliberate indifference to all of the slurs. They contributed to an environment that too often ends up deadly. I was only in my teens, but I should have known better to try and confront this environment in some little way.

Here is a little way.