Issue Number 966 | From ABCs to LGBT | Advocate.com From ABCs to LGBT  |  | Advocate.com

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From ABCs to LGBT
The 1996 documentary It’s Elementary showed teachers talking about gay people with their students. A decade later, its impact can be seen in classrooms, state laws, and the kids -- now grown -- who appeared in it.
From The Advocate  July 4, 2006
From ABCs to LGBT

Brandon Rice remembers the day 11 years ago when filmmakers came to his Madison, Wis., school and taped his fourth-grade teacher talking to his class about gay people. Among the topics: whether students were ever picked on for seeming gay.

“People say that I act like a girl,” Rice said at the time.

“Because you’re artistic and you dance a lot?” his teacher asked gently.

Today, Rice, 23, still dances a lot. The Madison Area Technical College photography and performing arts major began coming out in junior high, but he recalls that day in fourth grade as a turning point: “There wasn’t a single person talking when she asked my question and the camera was on me,” he recalls. “And everyone was like, ‘Oh, wow, he’s gay -- I see it now.’ Afterward people came up to me and apologized. It was a big weight off my shoulders.”

That transformative moment was captured in It’s Elementary, a 1996 documentary by lesbian filmmakers Debra Chasnoff and Helen Cohen that showcased a then-small group of elementary and middle schools -- in Madison, San Francisco, New York City, and Cambridge, Mass. -- teaching students about LGBT people and the discrimination they face. The first look inside schools that dared such a curriculum, It’s Elementary was wildly controversial at the time -- Brent Bozell in the New York Post called it an affront to “common sense and decency” and “vomitous stuff” -- but the film has since had a tremendous impact in American education. Ten-year anniversary screenings of the video, along with the brand-new follow-up, It’s STILL Elementary, were held in New York City and San Francisco this October.

Despite the initial hoopla, It’s Elementary was eventually distributed in thousands of schools nationwide and was “a tremendous catalyst for the discussion of LGBT issues in elementary-age education,” says Eliza Byard, interim executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. There are now some 3,600 gay-straight alliances in high schools nationwide, for example, up from 300 or so before the video’s release.

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