In third grade, Carolyn Laub had to write a report on a newspaper article. Her father helped her select a story about math aptitude in boys and girls, using the opportunity to caution that she might have trouble overcoming stereotypes because she was a girl skilled in math.
For the first time, Laub realized that “ideologies of masculinity and femininity can be very constricting,” she says. “I retained the message that the world is not necessarily fair and that I can do something about it.”
It’s not surprising, then, that she became an advocate for young people facing difficulties due to gender issues or sexual orientation. Today, the former anthropology major runs a statewide nonprofit that helps develop leaders for high school support groups known as gay-straight alliances (GSAs). The San Francisco-based GSA Network, founded by Laub in 1998, is the first centralized resource of its kind. It serves 320 GSAs, reaching 25 percent of California’s public high schools.
GSAs are student-run extracurricular clubs that meet on school grounds, providing a safe place where classmates can talk freely about gender issues, harassment and ways to reduce homophobia. Participants may be straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or “questioning,” Laub says.
More than 1,000 individual GSAs exist in the United States, many launched after 1996 when the Salt Lake City school district attempted to ban all extracurricular clubs to keep students from forming a GSA. Laub was working for the Mid-Peninsula YWCA at the time, coordinating an AIDS prevention effort.
“I could see the growing numbers of questioning youth and their struggles [in my work]. They were marginalized at school and had no safe place to go,” Laub recalls. “A lightbulb went on in my head. There’s a problem in schools that is unjust, and we have an obligation as a society to deal with it. GSAs demonstrated the power of young people organizing in their schools to fight homophobia. I wanted to accelerate that process.”
She began meeting with student organizers of Bay Area GSAs to determine how best to help. Within a year, her network held its first leadership-training session. Grants from the Echoing Green and Ashoka foundations helped Laub set up an office with four employees and a cadre of volunteers.
In addition to grooming student leaders, the network offers activism training and promotes compliance with the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act of 2000, which requires schools to protect students from harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity. With the new law, resistance from administrators is becoming the exception, Laub says. “What we are still seeing is individual students facing discrimination. Many school administrators still don’t understand their obligations.”
Students, meanwhile, are becoming more aware—and more organized. Laub “has an amazing vision for what queer-youth organizing can be,” says NYU sophomore Geoffrey Winder, who led the GSA at his high school in Davis, Calif., and now serves as one of nine students on the network’s 16-member board. “Young people come away knowing that they can be leaders.”
—SUMMER MOORE, ’99
