Hendricks Chapel is no stranger to serving as a backdrop to Syracuse University student activism, and on Wednesday evening it played host to local students in and around the city of Syracuse who gathered for the third-annual Loud and Proud Rally.

The Day of Silence, a project of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network in collaboration with the United States Student Association, took place prior to the rally on Wednesday. The day recognized the discrimination, harassment and abuse faced by voiceless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students and their allies in schools.

‘Every year, more people become involved in the Day of Silence. Every year, acceptance goes up and discrimination goes down in the hallways of my high school,’ said John Crandall, a senior at local Henninger High School and an active member of his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance.

The student-led Day of Silence was broken at the rally, empowering participants who have remained silent to raise their voices, said Jason Tifone, a graduate assistant at the LGBT Resource Center.

‘This rally isn’t a protest, but a small victory. We won because we weren’t hateful or violent, but rather we used tools of acceptance,’ Crandall said.

Area high schools students, as well as students from Le Moyne College, joined the SU community for the rally.

‘We’re trying to give perspectives from different areas within education,’ Tifone said. ‘We want to broaden the message that discrimination isn’t localized; it affects everyone involved in students’ lives.’

Baker High School senior Lauren Ford emphasized how important it is for her straight friends to understand that gay isn’t something that began circa 2001.

‘The gay community (has) made great contributions to this country for decades. Our straight friends have to understand that gay isn’t new,’ Ford said.

Ford also said the first step to protecting students from abuse and discrimination in schools because of sexual orientation and gender identity was to support the Dignity for All Students Act.

‘This day was designed to make a statement, help make this statement a reality by supporting the Dignity for All Students Act,’ Ford said. ‘All minorities had to fight for their rights, and now is our time.’

In her speech, Syracuse resident Jackie Kelly said what it was like to watch her own daughter be silenced.

‘At first my daughter felt special that she had two moms, and then two-thirds of the way through kindergarten, she told me the grown-ups at school didn’t want her to talk about her family.’

Administrators and teachers expressed concern that Kelly’s daughter was talking about her family a lot, and by the end of kindergarten, her daughter didn’t want to talk about her family anymore, she said.

‘A 5-year-old had been silenced,’ Kelly said.

The Loud and Proud rally sought to lay the groundwork for a plan of action.

‘I’m not going to call my girlfriend Amber my friend,’ said SU freshman Krychelle Davis. ‘I’m going to scream from the rooftops that I love Amber. I refuse to hide who I am. When I get married, I’m not going to hide it. When my wife and I have children, I’m not going to make up some story about how I slept around in order to conceive them, like my mother has suggested I do.’

Davis said that now that she is in college, she is free from the suppression that at one point almost killed her spirit.

The Day of Silence coincides with the release of the 2005 National School Climate Survey that gives voice to the truth about anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in America’s schools.

Doreen Bertrand, a school nurse at Henninger High School, said there was no support for the LGBT community when she was a sophomore at the high school.

Standing on the steps of Hendricks alongside her 4-year-old son, Skylar, Bertrand said she hoped when her son is a sophomore at Henninger, there won’t need to be a Day of Silence and a Loud and Proud rally anymore.

‘Maybe by then, people will learn to treat each other like human beings,’ Bertrand said.

‘It gives me hope for a different tomorrow when I see so many young people care enough about their own experiences and the experiences of their friends to speak out like this,’ said Adrea Jaehnig, director of the LGBT Resource Center.

Jaehnig said it is hard to communicate the kind of isolation many in the LGBT community endure.

‘It’s important to give these issues visibility. If a school isn’t safe, it’s hard for a lot of these students to succeed academically,’ Jaehnig said.

The Day of Silence is among the largest student-led actions in American history, involving an estimated 500,000 students at 4,000 schools, Tifone said.

‘A lot of times I have to sit in a classroom where a teacher will say, ‘Come on, haven’t you all fallen in love with a woman before?’ This isn’t what I want to hear, but then I realize I never said anything, so I was silenced,’ said Thomas Tarbox, a junior drama major at Le Moyne College.

Tarbox said he did not come to the rally to throw stones, because if he did, his glass house would break, too.

‘We need to break down the barriers we’ve made for ourselves, because until we all unite under the banner of humanity, we’re all being silenced,’ said Tarbox, adding, ‘I just want people to understand that, yes, if you break us, we will bleed.’

Mary Doody, a local director of Volunteer Services for Aids Community Research, urged the Loud and Proud participants to speak up and speak out all year round.

‘Ask for more LGBT-inclusive libraries, ask for school non-discrimination polices to protect students from abuse due to gender identity and ask that the prom and other school events be LGBT-friendly,’ Doody said.

Quoting Margaret Mead, an anthropologist known for her work on the relationship of culture and personality, Doody told the heartening crowd to ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’

Published on April 25, 2006 at 12:00 pm