Recently, I discovered that my High School is (apparently) the best place in space to be LGBT!... Yes, ok. I know you think I'm lying. How is any High School 100% LGBT friendly? Well, just ask the students in my Spanish class and they'll tell you!





At the moment, we're talking about different forms of discrimination, like racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and - for the first time in my 17 years of education - homophobia. When I saw we were going to be talking about homophobia I so very nearly cried out "Oh, at last!" or "I never thought I'd see the day", but I didn't. However, it is true. I have never been in a classroom when homophobia or LGBT issues have been discussed and I haven't heard of any other class covering these topics either.

The teacher (who's very open-minded) went through the list of discriminations at the end of the chapter so we could get some ideas for the essay we had to write. He asked about each and every one of them. "Does racism exist in our school?", "is there any xenophobia?" etc. All the questions so far were getting "yes, to a certain degree" as an answer. So when the teacher asked "does homophobia exist in our school?" I was expecting an overwhelming "yes" from the class, but instead everyone went silent, muttered and conferred with the person next to them. Eventually, my class came to the conclusion that homophobia does not exist in our High School. At this point I really wanted to jump up and shout at them, but I get on well with everyone in my class and besides, I'm still in the closet when it comes to classmates. So lets pause this scene right here, shall we?





Some days I count how many homophobic slurs I hear in the hallways or in the canteen queue or just around the place in general. I often lose count or forget to count some, but my school averages about 10 a day. Now, I know this probably doesn't sound like much to some of you out there, and I'm not saying my school is really homophobic because I know it's not, but bear in mind that I'm 1 person in over 500, I don't hang out with homophobic people and I can't be on every square meter of my school grounds at once. Now take into account the fact that my High School is made up of a large majority of liberal people. Yet, there are still that many slurs per day.



