California School Apologizes For Illegally Banning Sixth Grader’s Presentation On Harvey Milk
RAMONA, CA – A California school has apologized to a sixth grader for illegally censoring her classroom presentation about Harvey Milk last month, and school officials promise they won’t engage in unconstitutional restriction of similar free speech in the future. The apology comes after the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter on May 30 to the Ramona Unified School District about its violation of the student’s free speech rights when it refused to allow her to give the presentation in class. Wrongly citing a school policy on sex education, the school had improperly required classmates to get parental permission to see the presentation during a lunch recess. The student was allowed to give her presentation in class this morning.
“Harvey Milk always stood up for his beliefs and what was right, so I felt like I should do the same thing when my school told me they wouldn’t let me do my presentation,” said Natalie Jones, a sixth grader at Mt. Woodson Elementary School. “I worked really hard on my presentation and I’m glad I’m finally going to get to share it with all of my classmates like everyone else got to.”
The assignment, part of an independent research project class, was to prepare a written report on any topic. Natalie, who was inspired to write about Harvey Milk after watching Sean Penn win an Academy Award for portraying him, got a score of 49 out of a possible 50 points on the written report. Students were then told to make PowerPoint presentations about their reports, which they would show to other students in the class. The day before Natalie was to give her 12-page presentation she was called into the principal’s office and told she couldn’t do so. When her mother spoke with the superintendent about the presentation, she was told Natalie couldn’t give her presentation because of a district board policy on “Family Life/Sex Education.” A few days later, the school sent letters to parents of students in the class, explaining that her presentation would be held during a lunch recess on May 8, and that students could only attend if they had parental permission due to the allegedly “sensitive” nature of the topic.
“Instead of quaking at the mere mention of an LGBT person’s existence, schools must understand that talking about someone who happens to be gay is no more sexual in nature than talking about a person who happens to be heterosexual,” said David Blair-Loy, Legal Director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. “Censoring Natalie’s presentation violated the First Amendment and the California Education Code, and we’re pleased she will finally get to give her presentation on a historical figure who was such a fierce advocate for the rights of not just LGBT Californians but of all people.”
* The school has apologized in writing to Natalie and sent a letter about that apology to all the parents who were sent the school’s letter about the presentation.
* The school allowed Natalie to give her presentation to all the other members of her independent research project class.
* The school has agreed to bring its “Family Life/Sex Education” policy into compliance with state law, and acknowledged that the mention or acknowledgement of a person’s sexual orientation is not sufficient to invoke the statutes and policies on sex education.
“If the school had taken a moment to consider its legal obligation to respect and uphold its students’ free speech rights instead of jumping to erroneous conclusions and trying to justify its actions by wrongly conflating Natalie’s historical presentation with sex education, this would never have happened,” said Elizabeth Gill, a staff attorney with the ACLU national LGBT Project. “There’s a tremendous difference between sex education and writing or talking about someone who happens to be gay, and we’re glad we were able to help the school finally understand that.”
“I’m always proud of my daughter, of course, but I’m even more proud of her for the way she stood up for her rights,” said Bonnie Jones, Natalie’s mother. “We’ve also heard from many people in town and other parents at Natalie’s school who have been amazingly supportive. I think if Harvey Milk were still here today, he’d be happy about how this all worked out.”
Harvey Milk, one of Time Magazine’s “Time 100 Heroes and Icons of the 20th Century” in 1999, has been the subject of several books, an opera, a documentary film that won the 1984 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, and a feature film released last year that won two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor. Milk’s birthday is the subject of a bill pending in the California legislature that would make it a state holiday.
For additional information, including a video featuring an interview with Natalie, copies of the school’s apology to Natalie and its letter to parents of students in her class, Natalie’s presentation on Harvey Milk, the school’s letter to parents, and the Ramona U.S.D. “Family Life/Sex Education” policy, can be found online at www.aclu.org/milk
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The Tony Awards’ Gay Extravaganza! And ‘Billy Elliot’ SheWired
The 63rd Annual Tony Awards hosted by Neil Patrick Harris were held Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall, New York City with Billy Elliot snatching 10 Awards and making Tony history, according to Advocate.
Broadway took “let’s put on a show” to a whole new level opening the award show with a smashing musical number starring Dolly Parton, Elton John, Liza Minnelli, metal band Poison and the casts of West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Pal Joey, Shrek, 9 to 5: The Musical, Next to Normal, Rock of Ages and Billy Elliot. Although Poison lead singer Bret Michaels hit his head at the end of his band’s performance in the opening number, he reportedly suffered no major injuries.
The 2008-2009 theater season was marked with an amazing 45 shows opening on Broadway — the highest number of productions in 25 years.
British musical Billy Elliot, led the show winning an impressive total of 10 Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Director and Leading Actor in a Musical — an award bestowed upon the teenage trio – David Alvarez, 15, Trent Kowalik, 14 and Kiril Kulish, 15. However, its composer, Elton John, did not win in his category.
The threesome each received Best Performance by a Lead Actor in a Musical for their shared role setting a milestone in the history of the Tonys as the first time three actors were nominated for one role.
They also set another record as the youngest winners of a lead acting honor at the Tony Awards.
“And we want to say to all the kids out there who might want to dance, never give up,” said Kulish during their acceptance speech.
Meanwhile Angela Lansbury received her 5th Tony for Blithe Spirit and Liza Minnelli won for Liza’s at The Palace. Marcia Gay Harden took Best Actress honors for God of Carnage and Geoffrey Rush took Best Actor honors in Exit the King. See The Tony Awards’ Gay Extravaganza! And ‘Billy Elliot’
SheWired
* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
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California School Bans Sixth I Presentation on Harvey Milk
California School Bans Sixth
Grader’s Presentation on Harvey MilkFaces Possible
ACLU Lawsuit For Violation Of State Education Code
RAMONA, CA – Wrongly citing a school policy on sex education, a
California
school illegally censored a sixth grader’s classroom presentation about Harvey
Milk earlier this month. According
to a demand letter sent by the American Civil Liberties Union to the
Ramona Unified School
District today, the school violated Natalie Jones’s
free speech rights when it refused to allow her to give the presentation in
class. Instead, the school
improperly required classmates to get parental permission to see the
presentation during a lunch recess.
“This whole thing is unbelievable –
first my daughter got called into the principal’s office as if she were in some
kind of trouble, and then they treated her presentation like it was something
icky,” said Bonnie Jones, mother of the Mt. Woodson Elementary School
student. “Harvey Milk was an
elected official in this state and an important person in history. To
say my daughter’s presentation is
‘sex education’ because Harvey Milk happened to be gay is completely
wrong.”
The assignment, part of an
independent research project class, was originally to prepare a written report
on any topic. Natalie Jones, who
was inspired to write about Harvey Milk after watching Sean Penn win an Academy
Award for portraying him, got a score of 49 out of a possible 50 points on the
written report. Students were then
told to make PowerPoint presentations about their reports, which they
would show
to other students in the class. The
day before Natalie was to give her 12-page presentation she was called into the
principal’s office and told she couldn’t do so.
When Bonnie Jones spoke with the
superintendent about the presentation, he said Natalie couldn’t give her
presentation because of a district board policy on “Family Life/Sex
Education.” A few days later, the
school sent letters to parents of students in the class, explaining that her
presentation would be held during a lunch recess on May 8, and that students
could only attend if they had parental permission.
“The principal and superintendent
grossly misinterpreted school policy.
They illegally censored student speech protected by the First Amendment
and the California Education Code,” said David
Blair-Loy, Legal Director of the ACLU of San Diego and
Imperial
Counties. “Writing or talking about a gay
historical figure who advocated for equal rights for LGBT Californians is in no
way the same thing as talking about sex, and school officials should
not pretend
otherwise.”
The Ramona Unified School
District policy on “Family Life/Sex
Education” reads in part:
“(P)arents/guardians shall be
notified in writing about any instruction in which human reproductive
organs and
their functions, processes, or sexually transmitted diseases are described,
illustrated, or discussed. In
addition, before any instruction on family life, human sexuality, AIDS or
sexually transmitted diseases is given, the parent/guardian shall be provided
with written notice explaining that the instruction will be
given…”
“Schools that act as if any mention
of the existence of gay people is something too controversial or ‘sensitive’ to
discuss are doing a disservice to their students,” said Elizabeth
Gill, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s
national LGBT Project. “This school
completely overstepped its bounds in trying to silence Natalie Jones
by shunting
her presentation off to a lunch recess time and misusing a school policy to
justify requiring parental permission to see it.”
In today’s letter, the ACLU is
demanding that the school:
·
Apologize in writing to Natalie
Jones and send a letter about that apology to all the parents who were sent the
principal’s letter about the presentation
·
Give
Natalie Jones an opportunity to give her presentation to all the other members
of her independent research project class
·
Clarify
in writing that the parental notification and permission portion of the “Family
Life/Sex Education” policy only applies to the curricula identified as “course
content” for “Family Life/Sex Education instruction”
The ACLU is giving the district
five days to respond or it may file a lawsuit on Bonnie and Natalie Jones’s
behalf.
Harvey Milk, one of Time Magazine’s “Time 100 Heroes and
Icons of the 20th Century” in 1999, has been the subject of several books, an
opera, a documentary film that won the 1984 Academy Award for Documentary
Feature, and a feature film released last year that won two Academy Awards for
Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor.
Milk’s birthday, the subject of a bill pending in the California legislature
that would make it a state holiday, is this Friday.
For additional information,
including copies of Natalie Jones’s presentation on Harvey Milk, the school’s
letter to parents, and the Ramona U.S.D. “Family Life/Sex Education” policy,
visit http://www.aclu.org/Milk.
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‘Milk’ screenwriter calls gay rights the ‘civil rights fight of your generation’
COLUMBIA — Dustin Lance Black was in high school in 1988 when he heard about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Black said that at that point, he had never heard of an out gay man before, joking his first thought was that Milk must have been bad at hiding it.
Black, who won an Academy Award this year for best original screenplay for “Milk,” spoke at MU on Sunday evening. The movie, starring Sean Penn, recounts Milk’s election in 1977 to the board of supervisors in San Francisco and his murder by fellow supervisor Dan White. Penn won an Oscar for best actor.
Black’s speech at MU included some serious and not-so-serious topics that seemed to engage the mostly student crowd. Full and equal federal rights should be the goal, he told them, and not the current “bit-by-bit civil rights.”
“This is the civil rights fight of your generation,” Black said. “This is the civil rights fight of the 21st century.” See a’Milk’ screenwriter calls gay rights the ‘civil rights fight of …
Columbia Missourian
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Gay rights in Japan blurred on TV
When Sean Penn won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of slain San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk two weeks ago, he used his acceptance speech to rail against supporters of California’s Proposition 8, which last November repealed a State Supreme Court ruling extending marriage rights to same-sex couples.
Penn’s confrontational tone was in keeping with his prickly public persona, but it was also in line with his character’s real-life activism. Milk was one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, and the fact that he was openly gay defined his policies and goals.
“Milk,” the movie for which Penn won the Oscar, works better as political history than it does as biography. Harvey Milk’s long-term goal was to help build a society in which homosexuals participated fully without having to hide or deny their sexual preferences. But because he understood that many people abhorred those sexual preferences, he knew such a society could not be built on persuasion. He would have to force the issue through political action, just as the civil-rights movement won equality for blacks.
There was one stark difference, however. Black people couldn’t hide their blackness, while gays could hide their homosexuality. The only way Milk could accomplish his long-term goal was to urge his fellow homosexuals to come out and acknowledge their same-sex preferences to their families, friends and communities. He did this by presenting himself, often humorously, as a militant sodomite (“My fellow degenerates!”); in other words, someone who was going to live his life as he pleased.
The fact that Proposition 8 passed 30 years after Milk’s assassination means that his goal has not been accomplished, but his confrontational methodology has become the standard for gay activism. In the process, gays have become culturally, if not necessarily socially, mainstreamed in the U.S. In movie terms, that development is proved not so much by the Oscars for “Milk,” but rather by the box office success of the crude adolescent comedy “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” in which gay stereotypes and jokes are thrown back at antigay attitudes. “This is America,” says the main character, played by Adam Sandler. “You should have the right to put anything you want up your ass.” It’s something Harvey Milk could have said, and probably did.
It will be interesting to see the reaction to “Milk” when it opens here in April. There have been a few gay office- holders at the local level in Japan, but political action for homosexual interests is virtually nonexistent, mainly because there are no laws that explicitly proscribe homoerotic activity or deny rights to individuals who are openly gay. On the other hand, social pressure against coming out remains strong.
The media reinforces this situation by boosting TV personalities who trade in gay stereotypes without ever actually mentioning gay sexuality. It’s the whole point of the popular Nihon TV variety show “Oneemans,” where homosexuality really is the love that dare not speak its name. Last fall, NHK presented a two-part discussion about LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) on “Heart Talk,” a show that addresses social issues from a perspective of sensitivity. Though the program drew the derision of Shincho magazine, which wondered if LGBT was really a proper topic for a public broadcaster, it received a positive reaction from many viewers, and NHK aired a followup last month. Most of the discussion was about the difficulty of coming out to friends and family, and how important it was for LGBT people to receive support from parents. There was a profile of a Sapporo support group for parents of LGBT, one of whom appeared in the studio with his mother.
The show was basically an appeal for understanding, filled with testimonials from LGBT people about their loneliness and inability to function normally in a society that won’t acknowledge their situation. It was a passive appeal. The LGBT people who spoke out are waiting for society to change. One participant said LGBT should come out only when they were in a positive frame of mind, since doing so out of anger or frustration might create negative feelings. The advice was mostly about being respectful of other people’s — i.e., straight people’s — feelings. Even the example of the lesbian couple who made a point of not hiding their relationship from the neighbors was presented cautiously. The two women would walk through the streets hand-in-hand greeting everyone they met, and after a year or so people accepted them. However, on TV their faces were blurred out, as were many of the other LGBT participants’. They were not scared for themselves; they just didn’t want to take the chance of making friends and family uncomfortable.
The LGBT participants who did not opt for masking had more than a personal stake in the matter: former Osaka prefectural assemblyperson Kanako Otsuji, Setagaya Ward assemblyperson Aya Kamikawa, psychologist Toshiaki Hirata and some LGBT organization representatives. Hirata explained that the government’s new antisuicide measures do not take into consideration LGBT-related suicides, but that was as far as the discussion went into public policy. It was not the purpose of the program.
The purpose was to show how LGBT people feel, and it seemed clear that the main obstacles they need to overcome in order to live their lives freely are society’s fundamental ignorance and their own fears. In that regard, the program’s blurred-out faces and polite deference to straight sensibilities can only be considered counterproductive.
See Gay rights in Japan blurred on TV
The Japan Times
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Sean Penn: Is politics his next role? San Francisco Chronicle
Academy-Award winning actor Sean Penn met the media hordes Tuesday in San Francisco’s colorful mecca, the Tosca Cafe, to strongly endorse the official founding of a state “Harvey Milk Day” to honor the slain S.F. supervisor and gay activist.
But Penn left open the question on what might be his next big role: Does the thespian activist who has met Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, endorsed Rep. Dennis Kucinich for president and just generally rabble-roused about his ”Commie-loving” roots (we paraphrase his Oscar speech here) ever plan to run for office?
Surrounded by some of the real-life characters behind the biopic “Milk” — Milk’s friends and early activists Cleve Jones and Anne Kronenberg, state Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (who had a cameo in the film) and a host of gay and lesbian leaders — Penn deftly sidestepped the question.
“The closet,” he said looking around at the leaders behind him, “is brimming with skills.”
But the actor — who won the best actor Oscar this year for his lead role in “Milk” — did speak strongly on his belief that a state day, May 22, to officially recognize the accomplishments of Milk. And he predicted his fellow actor, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, will get behind it.
“I trust that Gov. Schwarzenegger is an increasingly reasonable man,” he said. “And that he understands that passing on prejudices, as surrounds this issue … is poisonous to future generations.” A day to recognize Milk, he said, would “wake up that interest in activism and volunteerism … in every way imaginable” among school children in California, who would be encouraged to learn of Milk’s grassroots efforts. See Sean Penn: Is politics his next role? San Francisco Chronicle * Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
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‘Milk’ named best film by New York Film Critics
Sean Penn and “Milk,” (LEFT),Gus Van Sant’s biopic about gay rights leader Harvey Milk, continued to gain awards momentum Wednesday, winning best film from the New York Film Critics Circle.
Penn was chosen as best actor for his performance in the lauded film about Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician who was assassinated in 1978. Josh Brolin won best supporting actor for his performance in the film.
On Tuesday, Penn was chosen as best actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. “Milk” also leads the Broadcast Film Critics Association with eight nominations, tied for the most with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
Like their West Coast brethren, the New York critics picked Sally Hawkins for best actress for her performance in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky.” Best director went to Leigh.
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