High School Presentations

by

Robert Locke, Pseud. Clayton Bess

I would like to offer three basic high school presentations.

The first alternative would be a more challenging and in depth look at the VOICE and CHOICE presentation I offer to Middle School students. With high schools students, however, I would ask and invite far more probing questions about character motivations, particularly in regard to A Ghost in Silence. Here we would talk much more frankly about Chazz's issues with his parents, his coming out as gay and what this would mean for a college student, living away from home, wanting independence but still caring deeply for his family and wanting no longer to be living a lie. The younger brother, then, 10-year-old Dillon who narrates this book, becomes almost a secondary character. Still Dillon's choices now must be viewed in a much more profound way, and this should make for a far more mature look at the writing process. I suggest this alternative for high school English classes.

The second alternative would probably be much more in line with Sex Education or Family Life classes and indeed a much more mature audience. Read more about this alternative here.

The third alternative would be not a presentation, actually, but a shared dialogue with Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs on high school campuses. When I first heard that there even were such clubs, I was stunned and delighted. What a distance high schools have come since I was a student in high school! I remember sneaking to the "H" drawer of the Card Catalog at the local public library, and finding the one book on homosexuality which was shelved in the psychiatry section of the stacks. Homosexuality was thought of in those days as a disease. And now, bravo!, there are Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs in high school. There is PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, to offer support to young people who are trying to come to terms with the plain and simple fact that they are merely "different" from the norm. I invite teachers and librarians and students who are reading this paragraph to take a look at what I write on this webpage to see my general advice to young gays and to the parents who need a little help understanding them. I hope that students who meet me in this context will come away with new understandings of different generations of gay people, and how one author has attempted in almost all his works to enlighten the unenlightened about being gay. Apropos of these efforts, I also invite you to take a look in the Reading Room for Older Kids to read the three pages under "CIVICS 1A" about Proposition 8 in California and the ongoing efforts to write discrimination into not only our California State Constitution but also into the United States Constitution. In these pages are links to historical court cases along the way in our nation's progress toward Equal Rights.

As always, I am open to the ideas of teachers and librarians and administrators to customize any of my presentations for their particular classes for the perceived good of their students.

Contact: Clayton Bess

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