Queer Kids Kick Ass in Joyful Protest
Josh and Dustin learn power lives in loving solidarity
Rap! Rap! Rap!
Josh groaned as he slipped out of sleep. His nose bumped into Dustin’s cheek, and his lungs expanded with happiness as his boyfriend’s soft scent filled him up.
Rap! Rap! Rap!
“Dude!” hissed Dustin. “Get off the bed!”
Rap! Rap! Rap! “Boys, time to wake up.”
“Damn it!” grumbled Josh under his breath as he dove head first onto the floor and scrambled into his sleeping bag. “Too early!” he grumbled in his worst morning voice.
His mom laughed through the closed door. “You guys have a visitor. Can we come in?”
“At dawn? Oh, my god, whatever.”
He blinked as harsh Florida sun flooded in from the skylit hallway. When he squinted enough to recognize the slim figure standing beside his mom, he groaned. “Olivia, what are you DOING here so early?”
“It’s 10:52. In what world is that early?”
“My world! I’m 14, it’s Saturday, and Dustin and me don’t have to get up until we start to starve.”
“Or until I come in and pour a pitcher of sweet tea on you,” laughed his mom. “I saved some biscuits and gravy. Y’all can cook your own eggs. By the way,” she said as she turned around to leave. “Sleep OK cramped together in a single bed like that?”
“Hey! No, we …” objected Josh from inside his sleeping bag as Olivia laughed and closed the door.
“Think you’re fooling anybody? ‘Dude, get off the bed!!’” she mimicked.
Dustin sat up and wrapped a blanket around himself. “You heard that?”
Olivia’s rolling eyes answered for her. “Whatever, nobody cares about you love birds. We got serious shit to talk about. Get up, Josh!”
“Turn around!” he grumbled. “I’m only wearing boxers.”
She snorted but did as Josh asked as both boys jumped up and pulled on shorts they harvested from piles of clothes on the floor.
“OK, what’s up,” said Josh.
Olivia sat down cross legged on shag carpet. “First, good job busting queer stereotypes? Your room is a pigsty, gay boy.”
“WHAT are you DOING here, bi girl?”
“We got serious planning to do. Mr. Grant called me last night to tell me all our GSA posters and rainbows and trans flags have to come off classroom walls and bulletin boards. The principal says.”
“What the frick!” whispered Dustin, his body tensing up against Josh like when he was really mad but didn’t want people to know.
“But why?” said Josh.
“I dunno, some parents complained at some board meeting. Mr. Grant says people were calling our stuff indoctrination and grooming.”
“What the hell is grooming?” said Josh.
Olivia shot him a look. “Clearly not something YOU know anything about. Dustin, will you DO something about your boyfriend’s hair?”
Dustin chuckled and started smoothing Josh’s bedhead down before he answered in a very serious voice. “Grooming is what child molestors do before they, you know … mess with kids.”
“We ARE kids!” said Josh. Then he grinned at Dustin. “Keep playing with my hair and you can mess with me all you want.”
“Josh!” said Olivia, “We gotta do something. We can’t just let em teach other kids we aren’t OK.”
“But what can we do?” said Dustin. “Did you ask Mr. Grant?”
“He said that’s for us to decide, and no matter how much I bugged him, that’s all he would say.”
“Damn, it!” said Josh, starting to feel his Saturday morning happiness drain away. Now that his mom was finally letting Dustin sleep over again, he’d been so excited about the weekend. They were gonna play video games until their eyeballs fell out, play basketball in the driveway, swim, ride bikes, and have real private time. Getting pissed off was NOT on the agenda.
“GOD damn it,” he repeated. “They can’t do this! We gotta call Mr. Grant again and get him to help us.”
“Shhhh,” soothed Dustin into his ear as Olivia jumped up and stuck her phone in front of the boy’s noses.
“What is that?” Dustin asked. “Pretty long text message.”
“From Ken,” Olivia said. “He sent this huge list of links an hour ago with no explanation. Fire up your tablet, Josh. Mr. Grant obviously thinks it’s not safe for him to say anything, but his husband ain’t shy.”
Thirty minutes later, over biscuits and gravy with Josh’s slightly burnt scrambled eggs, the trio huddled over his tablet, reading story after story about kids who organized walkouts at school.
Keesha whipped off her sunglasses and glared at Olivia. “Hold on! Y’all acting like everybody here WITH you. What the hell we gonna get outta this, except our asses in detention? You gonna let anybody else talk or we just gonna do what you decide?”
Josh’s eyes went wide as he looked around the pool deck at the 20 kids they’d invited over the day before. GSA planning meeting, as Olivia called it.
“But we have to do something!” he said to Keesha, a tall trans girl he barely knew. “We can’t let em get away with this, and Mr. Grant’s husband, you know, Ken, he said …”
“Like Barbie doll Ken?” said Keesha. “He another rich white boy like Mr. Grant? Nobody gonna call the cops on him for truancy. No school safety officer gonna cuff his ass. I don’t see Grant here, anyway. He gonna just keep his head down again?”
“That’s not fair!” said Josh as he felt his face catch fire. “Mr. Grant is cool! If it wasn’t for him, I never would have come out or anything. He can’t do too much cause he’d get fired, but he’s there for us when we need him.”
He heard a murmur of approval, then Keesha walked toward him and pointed one long finger right at his nose. “Super happy you got role models.”
She waved a hand around. “Must be rough living in a mansion with a pool with parents who make snacks when you invite the queer kids over. I can see you need Grant to help you out. You gonna be aight?”
Josh heard Dustin suck his breath in and saw him stand up from where he’d been sprawled all chill on a lounger.
He looked like he was about to talk, but Lucas interrupted. “Keesha has a point,” said the short, super skinny kid who’d just decided they didn’t want to be called he anymore.
“No, she does …” started Josh, getting really angry. Then Dustin tapped him on the back of his neck and spoke really low. “You need to let other people talk now.”
Josh glared as Lucas continued. “Look, I can’t do the walkout thing. My parents find out and I’m dead! Fuck, I’m dead if they find out I’m here and we’re even talking about queer shit. Can I just say something about all of us before we talk about what to do next?”
Keesha struck a pose that said, “Go, girl,” as Dustin said, “Floor’s yours, man, I mean, uh gir… kid.”
“We all got problems,” said Lucas. “Some more than others … But all I know is, I hardly had friends before I met you guys. I got made fun of every day by everybody. But now … Keesha lets me sit with her at lunch, Olivia helps me with makeup and with taking it off before my parents see it, Dustin’s teaching me to shoot hoops just for fun, and Josh loans me his mom when I really need her. And I mean … no offense, guys, but I don’t need rainbow flags or whatever. I’m scared we’ll lose everything we already got.”
For a minute, the only sound Josh heard was breathing, then Keesha said, “I ain’t say I’m scared, but we got your back, Lucas.”
Olivia said, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t think about any of that.”
Dustin walked over to Keesha and put his arm around her for a second before he spoke. “I don’t usually talk so much,” he said, “but look …”
“You and me need to talk in private,” whispered Keesha, pulling him aside. She raised her voice to address the whole group. “Back in a minute, y’all.”
Sitting in 5th period social studies, Josh’s stomach twisted up. He begged the the clock to hold still. He glanced across the room at Olivia tearing a piece of paper into tiny pieces. He figured she was as scared as he was.
His phone alarm went off inside his pocket and he swallowed hard. He almost decided to stay in his seat, especially when he noticed Olivia not exactly jumping up like lightning.
Then he thought of Dustin, Martina, Lucas and Keesha. He reached into his left pocket and pulled out a rainbow flag. He tied it around his left arm. He reached into his right pocket and tied a trans flag around his right arm. Then he grabbed the other flag. He shot a look at Olivia and saw she was doing the same thing.
He stood up.
“Josh!” said the teacher. “What on earth are you doing. You look ridiculous. Sit down right now!”
The force of Mr. Johnson’s voice pushed him halfway down into his seat before he remembered what he was supposed to do. He pulled a slip of paper out of his notebook and looked over at Olivia, who nodded at him to start.
“This is as walkout,” he read out, stumbling over some of the words that came next. “We, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students of White Sands Middle School refuse to be silenced. We will say gay. We will say transgender. We will say bi. Today, our friends join us sending a message of love and joy to our fellow students and a message of protest and defiance to the school board as it tries to teach our friends that we deserve shame instead of respect.”
Mr. Johnson’s mouth dropped open like he wanted to talk but couldn’t figure out what to say. Then he smiled. Big. Right into Josh’s eyes.
Olivia handed out copies of the statement on her way to the door. “Meet us on the football field,” she said to the class. “All of you who support us.” Josh took her hand and walked out without looking back.
Josh and Olivia were holding hands and swallowing hard as they got to the fifty-yard line where everybody had agreed to meet. “It’s not working!” hissed Josh. “Nobody’s coming!”
It’s not that nobody was. They were the first because their classroom was the closest … but kids sure weren’t pouring outside. A few straggled up, flags whipping in an afternoon wind that promised a thunderstorm.
“It’s not enough!” said Olivia. “We’re dead!”
A few GSA regulars drifted over, fear obvious in their faces as they eyed dark clouds racing toward the beach.
“Look!” shouted Josh. The huge double gym doors had just opened and he spotted Dustin leading a crowd, all waving flags. “He did it!”
“It’s like the whole basketball and football team!” said Olivia. “They came!”
Cheers broke out, and Josh thought they were for the jocks until he saw another big crowd running from the other side of the school. Keesha was out in front with cheerleader pom poms, a trans flag hanging from one, a Black Lives Matter flag from the other.
“She’s got like like every Black kid in school with her,” shouted Olivia. “She did it!”
Keesha and Dustin met in the middle of the field in a big hug. Keesha raised a bullhorn to her mouth. “Thank you for coming,” she shouted. “I didn’t want to, because I figured I’d be mostly alone. There ain’t enough queer kids at White Sands to stick together and stay safe. Then me and Dustin made some plans. And look!”
She pointed at the school doors, at even more kids pouring outside, all of them just regular straight kids as far as Josh could tell. Keesha handed Dustin the megaphone.
“I don’t usually talk so much,” he yelled, “but look, the adults trying to silence and censor us are NOT who we are. The kids in this school ARE NOT OK with that. Most of the TEACHERS aren’t OK with it, but maybe they’re afraid, so it’s up to us to show them what to do. They can’t punish the whole damn school! Right!?”
A few kids hollered back, but not many. Dustin shouted even louder. “RIGHT!?”
The roar that came back hurt Josh’s ears.
Keesha grabbed the megaphone as rain started to pound down. “Black lives matter!” she chanted, Dustin lifting her up into the air so her voice would carry farther.
Every kid on the football field chanted back. Josh raised his Black Lives Matter flag high in the air and waved it around. Half the kids in school roared the chant. A few minutes later as adults with a video camera and a big microphone ran at them through the thunderstorm, Keesha changed the chant to “Say Gay! Say Gay!” A few minutes later, roars of “Say Trans!” competed with thunder.
Dustin grabbed Josh and spun him around in the rain, almost like they were dancing. Josh laughed and cried at the same time, thinking about Lucas who couldn’t be with them and Martina who had disappeared and was probably hurting really bad.
But as hundreds of kids chanted “Say gay” with him, the warm afternoon rain drenched him with joy.
He felt his phone vibrating and pulled it out. He swallowed hard when he saw the text from his mom. “You get home right after school, young man! You have some serious explaining to do!”
Want to read more about Josh, Dustin, Olivia, Martina, and their friends? Check out these stories, which you don’t have to read in order, though you might like to:
James Finn is a columnist for the LA Blade, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, and an “agented” but unpublished novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].
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