Subject: Profiles in Courage: Jamie Nabozny; CA Curriculum Meeting
From: [email-masked] (Jessea NR Greenman)
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 06:17:57 -0800

[found at URL:
http://www.cyberspaces.com/outproud/oasis/9602/oasis-profiles.html]

Profiles in Courage:
Jamie Nabozny, 20, of Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Jeff Walsh, Oasis Editor

As a teenager, Jamie Nabozny tried to kill himself just so he wouldn't have
to go to school.

>From seventh to eleventh grade at Ashland Middle and Ashland High Schools
in Wisconsin,
Nabozny was: harassed, spit on, mock-raped while other students laughed,
urinated on, called a
"fag" by a teacher and kicked repeatedly in the stomach by his fellow
students. He eventually
dropped out of school.

"My life will never be the same because of the things that have happened to
me," Nabozny said.

The middle school principal told Nabozny and his parents that "boys will be
boys," regarding the
assaults, and that if Nabozny "was going to be so openly gay, that he had
to expect this kind of
stuff to happen."

Nabozny, now 20 and living in Minneapolis, is the plaintiff in a federal
lawsuit against his former
school, its administrators and principals for not protecting Nabozny from
the constant abuse. It is
an appeal of a judge's previous ruling in favor of the school.

"This isn't going to happen to anybody else," Nabozny says. "People need to
realize that this is
happening and that they can't do it. A lot of times it's unfortunate, but
in this country people will
do things that aren't right until they are told they can't. Another school,
another teacher is going to
realize if I do this I can get sued. It's unfortunate, but it happens."

Nabozny's suit seeks punitive damages from the school, as well as other
concessions which would
allow him to attend a graduation ceremony at the school.

'I knew I was gay ... I basically dealt with it.'

Nabozny says he was always a shy, quiet kid and a good
student. He first dealt with his sexuality when he was 11 years
old.

"In sixth grade, I realized I was gay and came out to my parents.
It wasn't a total acceptance on my part, or my parents' for that
matter. But I realized I was gay and that it wasn't going to
change," he says. "I basically dealt with it and accepted it."

Nabozny's parents noticed he was depressed. After repeatedly
asking what was bothering, he finally told them. "My mom said
she probably knew before the meeting and she just needed to
hear it from me," he says.

The name-calling began at school after people realized Nabozny had been the
victim of sexual
abuse. "It started out as people found out about a sexual abuse case that
ended up in the media that
involved me," he says. "I had been abused by my youth minister at my
church. When that became
public, my name wasn't in the paper or anything, but it's a small enough
town, people figured it
out. And then people started calling me names. I didn't acknowledge it, nor
did I deny it until I was
15."

The name-calling led to the harassment and assaults, which made Nabozny's
parents deal with his
sexuality quicker than they would have preferred. "After telling my
parents, they went into denial,
but then all this stuff started happening at school and they couldn't deny
it anymore or pretend it
didn't exist," he says. "They had to deal with the fact that I was gay
because they had to deal with
the fact that I was being harassed because of it. With their acceptance, I
came to accept it more."

'I was gay and it didn't matter. This shouldn't have been happening to me.'

When Nabozny was physically and verbally harassed in school, he didn't keep
quiet or hide. He
went to the school officials, told them he was gay, and demanded the abuse
stop. Sometimes
officials would meet with the abusive students and it would settle down for
a while, but it would
always start up again. Nabozny never told any of the students he was gay at
that point.

"I got tired of this happening, and people always saying 'Why don't you
just tell them you're not
gay? Why don't you just tell them you're not gay? They'll leave you
alone,'" he says. "But at that
point, it wasn't about that. I was gay and it didn't matter. This shouldn't
have been happening to
me. So, confirming it, I thought, may actually lead to them leaving me
alone. Because it wouldn't
be that they were guessing I'm gay and harassing me because of it."

Nabozny was 15 when he came out to his fellow students. He didn't know any
other gay students
at his school, and even if other gay students were there, they wouldn't
have talked to Nabozny.

"Everybody was too afraid to talk to me, because people would think they
were gay," he says. "I
did have two ... and I wouldn't even call them friends, we were so
different. We were only
together because we were the social outcasts of the school. It was a
Jehovah's Witness girl and a
schizophrenic girl, who wasn't there half the time. We wouldn't hang out
after school, we'd sit
together at lunch time or whatever, but that was it.

"I did start a gay youth group when I was going to school there, because I
wanted a place where I
could just go and talk," he says. "I thought maybe there would be other
kids who would end up
going because they wouldn't have to worry about talking to me in school,
but that didn't happen."

Growing up, Nabozny did have a gay best friend whom he had met when he was
eleven. "We
grew up together in Ashland. He moved there and then we started hanging
out," he says. "But he
didn't go to school ever."

                       'I want to have a normal life .. if that's possible.'

                       Nabozny credits his parents with his being alive
today. "Without
                       them, I don't think I would have made it. I would
get really depressed
                       and very suicidal," he says. "A lot of times, the
only thing that would
                       prevent me from killing myself is the fact that I
didn't want to hurt my
                       mom."

                       It was his parents who usually prompted any action
against the
                       abusive students. "I would go to the principal,
explain what happened,
                       and she (the principal) wouldn't do anything," he
says. "I'd go home
                       and tell my parents and my parents would call and
demanded a
                       meeting. They wanted to confront the youths and the
parents
                       themselves. My parents were very angry and upset.
They let the
                       principal know that this wouldn't continue and they
wanted something
                       done."

                       In eleventh grade, Nabozny, with his parents'
blessing and on the
                       advice of his guidance counselor, dropped out of
school. He has since
                       gotten his GED.

                       "In December of my eleventh grade year, we had a
meeting with my
parents and guidance counselor at school, and we decided the best thing for
me to do was to
leave," he says. "She (the guidance counselor) said 'I've tried to help you
through this whole thing
and nobody's willing to do anything.' My parents had a really hard time
letting me go. So, I left
and I moved down here (to Minneapolis).

But finding a new school wasn't easy. "The high school I tried to go to
decided it was going to be
too difficult to have an openly gay student in their school, so they sent
me to college," he says. "In
Minnesota, they have something called post-secondary options. If you test
out of high school, you
can go to college."

Nabozny had to put college on hold because of his lawsuit. "After the
lawsuit started going, I
started doing depositions and a lot was going on with it, so I postponed it
(college)," he says. "In
the fall, I will definitely be going back no matter what. I realize I have
put my life on hold for the
last two years. Even if I win (the lawsuit), I'm two years behind where I
have been."

Nabozny plans to get a master's degree in social work. "I want to work with
gay and lesbian
youth," he says. "My ultimate goal would be to start group homes for gay
and lesbian youth."

"Once my lawsuit's done, I want to sink back and have a private life
again," he says. "I want to get
married, have kids, and have a normal life if that's at all possible. But I
still have five more years
of school."

'I'm going to go on, and I'm going to be okay'

Nabozny thinks another Ashland student also had trouble accepting his
sexuality, but was unable to
pull through his trouble. That boy killed himself after Nabozny was out of
school for a couple of
months.

"I didn't know he was gay, but when I was little, we used to mess around
together. He ended up
killing himself and leaving a note. The note was kept private," he says.
"The family didn't want
anyone to know what it had said, and I really believe that's what it had
said. He actually did call me
while I was in high school and he couldn't say anything.

"He said 'hi, this is so-and-so,' and I said 'hi.' He said, 'what are you
doing?' And I said, 'I'm
watching TV,' or whatever I was doing, and he just kind of said 'Oh' and he
just shut up. I said
'are you there?', and he said 'Yeah, I got to go, I got to go.' And then he
hung up."

"I believe wholeheartedly that's what happened and he was really having a
lot of hard times with
other things," Nabozny said. "He was really popular. He was in sports."

When Nabozny finally got out of Ashland schools and moved to Minneapolis,
he didn't even think
about filing a lawsuit against the school.

"When I first came down here, I wanted to put it behind me and just get on
with my life. And I
went to a place called the Gay and Lesbian Community Action Council and I
was trying to find gay
foster parents down here, because I had just turned 17," he said. "I needed
to get back into school,
and I couldn't exactly get a job. The crimes victim advocate was who I met
with because she was
there, and she told me what had happened to me was totally illegal and the
school should be made
held responsible for that.

"I didn't realize what was being done to me was illegal or wrong. I just
thought it's a small town,
they're very prejudiced, homophobic," he says. "I almost felt it was okay
what they did to me, that
they could get away with it. I knew it wasn't right, but I didn't know it
was illegal until that point."

A few days later, the advocate found him an attorney, and the suit was
filed. "I think the attorney
who took this case in the first place thought this was going to be a quick
thing and she was going
to get her money and that was it. She didn't realize how involved it was
going to be," he says.

The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund wanted to be involved in his
case from the
beginning, but Nabozny's lawyer was against using their help.

"It was surprising to me, because when she took the case, I thought she was
very sympathetic and
it was going to be a good relationship," he says. "But she turned out to be
quite homophobic and
she did not want to be labeled as a gay rights advocate. She did not want
this to be a gay case.

"When we lost, I had the opportunity not to continue with her representing
me and Lambda was
very interested in doing the appeal. I chose not to keep her because of the
way she was," he says.
"I wasn't able to do interviews. I wasn't able to talk to people. That was
one of the important
things about my case. If we lost and there was no public knowledge of my
case, nobody would
have realized this happened. Because of the fact it got publicity, people
now know this happened.
It's horrible, because the way the law is written right now, it can continue."

When he lost the first round in his case, Nabozny said he didn't want to
appeal the decision.

"When the judge gave summary judgment to their side, I was very, very upset
and I didn't want to
continue and it has been a long, hard process. I have to live this stuff
over and over again," he
says. "The depositions are very difficult, because their lawyer is
ruthless. He's very cruel, that's
what he gets paid for, but it's not easy at all. So, I thought, 'Now I can
let this go.' But I realized,
'No I can't.' I got letters about the decision, people saying you have to
appeal, you can't let this
happen.

"It really had become so much more about everyone else and less about me.
Because my life is
going to go on," he says. "I've worked through a lot of this stuff and am
still working through it,
but I'm going to go on, and I'm going to be okay.

"But there's a lot of people who aren't, some people don't make it out of
high school because they
kill themselves or run away and get involved in stuff that kills them,"
Nabozny said. "It's very
important, to me, that they know they don't have to take the abuse. They
don't have to go through
this stuff."

Nabozny says the way Wisconsin's laws are written, "they don't protect
youth, they protect adults.
Minnesota has very specific laws that schools are to be safe for everyone.
The Minneapolis schools
have curriculum-wide stuff on gay and lesbian youth," he says. "Every
school has a support group
when it's needed. Minneapolis is very progressive on these issues.

"I've been involved with District 202 since I came here, which is the gay
and lesbian youth center
here," he says.

'I lived in fear every day'

But no matter how far away Nabozny is from Ashland, a small Wisconsin town
with about 8,000
residents, the memories remain.

"I was sick all the time. I would get up in the morning and say 'I can't go
to school, I can't go to
school,' and my mother would say 'You have to.' She'd always know what was
the matter, but I
don't think they realized the extent to which it was affecting me," he
says. "They'd go to school,
and they'd feel like something was going to be done when they left there,
and first, I guess. And I
wouldn't tell them a lot of times what was going on. If I came home and
told them every single day
what had happened ... I didn't want to deal with it every day I came home.
I just wanted to forget
about it.

"Every day I had stomachaches. I lived in fear every day I got on that bus.
I started walking to
school because after a while, I wouldn't even take the bus anymore, it was
just like my stomach
was in knots," he says. "I had to live every day trying to avoid being
harassed. I was very used to
dealing with the name calling.

"I'd go to school and get there early so that I could get to the library
before the other kids got there.
The librarian was always the first person to get there, so I was always
safe in there," he says. "I
had to live every day like that. I had to use bathrooms usually used by
teachers to avoid the kids in
the bathroom. I had to think about these things every day."

His appeal cites three instances where Nabozny couldn't take it anymore,
and tried to end his life.

"I tried to kill myself more than that," he says. "Those were the three
attempts that were quite
serious and I ended up in the hospital for."

'We support you'

Throughout the lawsuit, Nabozny said the school officials have refused to
comment to any media.
"Basically, they've let their lawyers handle it, and they are trying to get
around the law," he says.
"They cite a lot of employment cases, where if one employee beats up
another employee then why
is that Burger King's fault? But they're basically letting the lawyers
handle it to protect their butts.
They have not said one word to the media."

The judge who ruled on the case in favor of the school said he didn't
dispute the harassment
happened, but that the law "didn't back up what we were saying," says Nabozny.

"He said he believed everything happened to me, but since I was in a public
school, I wasn't
protected," he says, "whereas if I was a criminal and I was locked up, I
would have been
protected. Or if I was in a mental institution, I would have been
protected. School is a voluntary
place to be, he said, which is absolutely absurd, because by law you're
supposed to go to school."

One student at Ashland High School, when she heard of Nabozny's lawsuit,
used her disgust at
the school to prompt her to come out.

"The day after it was in the paper, she announced at lunch time that she
was a lesbian and that she
thought this was ridiculous," he says. "At this point, I had been out of
school for a few years.
Some of the other kids that were there were a lot more supportive and they
actually got together and
made a huge poster for me saying "We support you" and then there's all
these kids signatures on
there and they wrote little notes to me."

Change for the better

"In high school, I was very withdrawn, shy. I had no
friends, except for my one friend, and even then it was
a minimal existence," he says. "Since I've moved out
here, I have made a ton of friends. I'm doing things
constantly. I go out. I have fun. I'm a very, very
different person. I'm not shy whatsoever. A lot of
people can't believe I ever was shy."

Nabozny submitted written testimony about the abuse
he suffered in high school as part of the Hoekstra
hearings in Congress recently. He also did a little
lobbying while in Washington D.C. and gave packets
if information to people who were going to be on the
panel for the hearings, which only allowed one "pro-gay" voice to testify
-- Mary Griffith, the
mother of Bobby Griffith, who killed himself because of his inability to
accept his sexuality.

Nabozny is also affiliated with the Log Cabin group, which is for gay
Republicans, "which most
people think is strange," he says. "But I do consider myself a Republican.

"The fiscal policies are the stance I'm more into. The only Republican I've
ever supported is our
governor Arnie Carlson, because he's not anti-gay whatsoever. He's been
very supportive,"
Nabozny says. "I went to the Governor's Ball, after he won the election,
with a male date. He's
extremely liberal on a lot of issues. And also (openly gay Ohio Republican
Congressman) Steve
Gunderson, I met with his staff in Washington and he wants to have dinner
with me now, so I'm
going to try to arrange that. There is a handful of Republicans who are
very supportive."

Nabozny still maintains an excellent relationship with his parents.

"Being gay isn't an issue anymore, and very few people can say that about
their parents. It's so
much a non-issue that they'll meet people who are gay and they want to set
me up with them if they
like the person," he says. "I bring my friends up there for Thanksgiving
and Christmas if they
don't have anywhere to go or their family isn't supportive. My parents come
down here for gay
pride. It's so weird when people talk about their parents, and I don't know
what to say to them.
My relationship would be the same with them if I were straight."

His social life has improved as well.

"I go on dates," he says. "Although, I'm less interested in settling down
at this point than I will be
in the future. I've had a couple serious relationships and they never last
very long. I think part of it
is my age, and I'm not ready to settle down yet. I'll know when I'm ready.

"It's really weird being my age and having been out for nine years," he
says. "I don't date people
my own age, and it's not just about maturity, but about my life experience,
how long I've been out
and what I've done since I've been out. Most people can't relate to that at
all."

A photographer is also shooting a photo documentary of Nabozny (and another
person's) life. "It's
supposed to be like 150 pages with glossy pictures with direct quotes from
me about what's
happening in the pictures. That's supposed to come out a year from this
spring," he says, also
mentioning it might also be available on CD-ROM.

So, it doesn't seem that quiet private life is going to happen to Nabozny
right away. "People are
writing about me and doing articles about me and it's kind of weird," he
says. "And when this
book comes out, there will be 13 and 14-year-old kids looking these
pictures of me, and I haven't
really dealt with that part of it yet. So, as much as I'd like to have a
private life, it might be 30 years
from now and someone could be reading this book."

Nabozny isn't comfortable with being called a "role model" for gay youth,
though. But he does
like the ability to help other gay youth.

"I see what I'm doing as something that will be helpful to other gay youth,
but my coming out
experience was not normal at all. So the things I'm doing right now would
be difficult for someone
to do for someone who's 20 and only came out when he was 19," he says. "I
have a very good
understanding of who I am, what I'm all about, and what I want out of life,
and that hasn't
changed since I came out. I think I was 14 years old when I decided I
wanted to work with gay and
lesbian youth."

But sometimes, Nabozny forgets that his acceptance of his sexuality and
coming out are not typical
of most gay youth. "When someone asks me for advice, I have to remember
that I'm not talking to
someone who's been out forever, and they're just dealing with being gay,
and that can be a
fundamental issue for someone for a very long time," he says.

Nabozny has only recently started using the Internet, and was awestruck by
its possibilities to help
gay youth.

"If I would have been able to have access to it, I wouldn't have felt so
alone or alienated," he says.
"And I think that a lot of people are finding that. When I first was on the
Internet, I was talking to
13-, 14-, and 15-year-old kids and I was thinking this is just very
bizarre. I would never had had
the opportunity, and they would not have had the opportunity without the
Internet. I was very
surprised to see that."

But despite his desire to help gay youth, his legally challenging his high
school to account for how
they treated him and his desire to go into social work, he doesn't even see
himself as doing
anything special.

"People have called me an activist, and I don't feel like I'm this radical
person," he says. "I feel
I'm doing what I'm doing because I think it's right. I'm not out there
every day beating on
people's door telling them 'Gay Rights Now.' It's not my thing, I guess."

Nabozny can be reached online at <[email-masked]>

The author, Jeff Walsh, may be contacted at <[email-masked]>
==========================
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History-Social Science Subject Matter Committee
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