A Lesson Plan from Creating Safe Space for GLBTQ Youth: A Toolkit

Leader's Resource for Introduction to Sexual Orientation Lesson Plan

Slowly read the following to the participants.

Please get comfortable. If you feel comfortable to do so, close your eyes as you sit or lay back. Concentrate as I take you to a world very different from the one in which we live—a world in which you are straight, but everyone else is not. In this world, almost all of the teachers and students in your school are gay. All of your friends and family members are gay; most of the doctors, judges, politicians and world leaders are gay. Celebrities are all gay, as are all of the priests, rabbis, Sufis, and imams. In this world, all of the books and television programs are about gay characters, and marriage is legal only for gay couples.

Of course, there are some straight people, but they are ridiculed and whispered about. Clearly, there is something really bad about being straight. You have heard things like: straight people are sick; they are obsessed with sex. Programs on television sometimes explore the curious 'straight lifestyle,' describing how straight people are always getting pregnant or infected with HIV. In these programs, straights are like the characters out of an old circus sideshow—exposed for their oddities. Your friends have told you that straight people are often child abusers and you have overheard your neighbor saying that straights are emotionally disturbed and have no morals.

Last year there was a big problem in your town because someone accused one of the teachers of being straight—parents don't want straight people to teach their children—so, the teacher was fired even though she insisted that she was gay. There are few, if any, protections for straight people. You have heard that straights can't lead scout troops, and that straights can be fired from their jobs or kicked out of the military if people find out about them. There's even a story you heard last week about a kid who was kicked out of his own home because he told his dad he might be straight.

This is all very scary for you because you are beginning to think that you, too, might be straight. More than anything in the world, you want your parents to love you, to accept you as you are. What will they say if you tell them that you might be straight?! The thought of telling them—of telling anyone—makes you sick to your stomach. Who can you turn to? Your brothers talk nonstop about how cute the quarterback on the local football team is. Your sister has a crush on the latest supermodel. You wish you had a crush on someone of your own sex, but you don't! It's people of the opposite sex that attract you. No one in your family has these feelings—in fact, no one you know has them, so you continue to hide this scariest of secrets. Somewhere deep inside you understand that, if people found out who you really are, they would ridicule you. Worse yet—they might not love you anymore!

Sometimes you think that you have to tell someone about this secret. You spend hours thinking about whom to approach. You remember when you were a kid hearing your dad tell nasty jokes about straights at the dinner table and everyone laughed. So, you can't tell your family. You remember your family's religious leader telling the congregation that being straight is unnatural and immoral and the whole congregation nodded in agreement. So telling the religious leader is definitely out. In health class you learned that it is normal to feel physically and emotionally attracted to people of your same sex. No one talked about being attracted to someone of the opposite sex. You are sure that what you are feeling cannot be normal and that no one can help you. Last week in math class, two of the popular athletes started taunting this shy kid and calling him 'straight.' The teacher just ignored it. You heard her laugh the week before, however, when the kid in the second row called out in disgust that the poem the class was supposed to read for English was 'so straight.'

All of this makes you feel really isolated and afraid. You are unsure what to do. Where can you turn? Who can you talk to? You can't talk about your feelings at home; your school feels unsafe; you don't trust your friends to support you. Having this secret is a little like having a piranha inside—it keeps eating away at your self-esteem, so that after a while you hate how you feel and you hate yourself, too!

* Written by Faughn Adams, Psy D; adapted and reprinted with permission of Links, North Shore Youth Health Services, Northfield, IL.

Reprinted from Creating Safe Space for GLBTQ Youth: A Toolkit, Girl's Best Friend Foundation and Advocates for Youth, © 2005.

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