NO SANCTUARY, part of our QUILTBAG history of creating safe places for youth

NO SANCTUARY: Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses
STEPHEN LANE
ForeEdge
$22.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: School can be a special sort of nightmare for LGBTQ youth, who are sometimes targets of verbal or physical harassment with nowhere to turn for support. No Sanctuary tells the inspiring story of a mostly unseen rescue attempt by a small group of teachers who led the push to make schools safer for these at-risk students. Their efforts became the blueprint for Massachusetts’s education policy and a nationwide movement, resulting in one of the most successful and far-reaching school reform efforts in recent times. Stephen Lane sheds light on this largely overlooked but critical series of reforms, placing the Safe Schools movement within the context of the larger gay rights movement and highlighting its key role in fostering greater acceptance of LGBTQ individuals throughout society.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This academic study of an important piece of Pride Month's celebrations...the history of how we, as Queer or QUILTBAG or Gay people came to have safe spaces and allies in Massachusetts's schools...starts its journey with a solid overview of the struggles to get going against conservative outrage and loudly performed "fear" of what they saw and see as sick, perverted people having open and honest contact with the youth of Massachusetts. This hideous risk to their children's physical, psychic, and moral safety was intolerable, and they made no bones about shouting it. The problem was that there was, and remains, no scintilla of evidence to support their fear-mongering. What the evidence showed, and still shows, is that QUILTBAG students face physical threats and psychic battering from their intimates, and need the schools the law says they must attend as safe spaces, as refuges against the ignorant fearful powers that control their very lives.

A group of teachers, whose front line positions place them in the path of evidence of physical harm and threats to mental health disproportionately meted out to these minority-among-minorities students, and allied administrators worked together to create some safety for the abused from their abusers while they were at school. But that story isn't the beginning of The Story. Education in the US is a fraught subject. We're arguing, in 2022, about what students should be allowed to see that might affirm and support ideologies like anti-racist thinking and identities like Queerness. Many conservative...misnomer; I believe these people are radicals, determined to remake Others into invisible or absent non-persons...parents are deeply threatened by their children learning that white is not Right. (See my review of Jason Stanley's HOW FASCISM WORKS: The Politics of Us and Them for more about why this fear is expressed now.)

In the more-openly racist times of 1970s Massachusetts, teachers were aware of the horrors their Black queer students were suffering. And that, bless their born-in-the-1940s hearts, moved them to action and got them nagging their administrators to assist in designing ways and means that school could be turned into the Safe Schools program, created to provide guidance and professional development for administrators and teachers about this at-risk population. It was, and remains, a startling resource to someone whose contact with the schools was indifferent at best and malevolent at worst.

What results from this program is remarkable both as educational and social policy. It affirms its allyship and it defends its vulnerable client-students. What the author does to make this come alive for us, however, is not always as energetic or as riveting as these results might suggest. If your first respsonse to this story is, "I don't know anything about the gay-rights struggle so I won't *get it*," allow me to assure you that you will know quite a bit more about the gay-rights struggles, the civil rights struggles, and the reactionary resistance to them by the time you get to the Safe Schools story.

The fact that we're given a whirlwind tour of forty years' activity before we get to The Story isn't necessarily a bad thing. It pays for you, the potential reader, to know what you're in for before starting the journey. I was passingly familiar with the history presented here on a national level but the specifics dealing with Massachusetts are new, or at least new in this kind of detail, to me. I do not think the subtitle, "Teachers and the School Reform That Brought Gay Rights to the Masses," overstates the delivered story or oversells the impact of the program Author Lane profiles.

Again quoting Author Jason Stanley's book referred to above, "For the fascist, schools and universities are there to indoctrinate national or racial pride, conveying for example (where nationalism is racialized) the glorious achievements of the dominant race." The gender and sexual minorities are very much included in this exclusion, if you'll forgive the ugly phrase that still says what I mean better than anything else I came up with. Safe Schools is an enemy enclave, a Mariupol that the reactionary right needs to take control of. It flies in the face of the fascist agenda of normalization for only the identities and people that the fascists deem desirable and worthy for schools to act as places of succor and freedom for those Othered.

In the four years since this book first appeared, its chronicle of good people seeking to give weak, vulnerable people safety and affirmation has become more elegiac in the reading. There are so few places left in the US where this kind of active, protective stance is being taken on this level and with goals as ambitious as these goals are. I'm sure the future holds more challenges to the Safe Schools program, and the need for it will only increase on a daily basis.

Read this deeply tendentious tale of the right thing getting done. Let its factual basis inspire you to take action of your own.