Bronx Science Has No Pride
By: Kat Rjavinski
Tags: LGBTQ, Pride

Earlier in the 2019–20 academic year, The Bronx High School of Science hosted a “Pride Day” as part of our twice-annual spirit week activities that coincide with alumni homecoming. And of course I always do my best to spare the feelings of my queer comrades, but to be clear I do not mince words: Pride is not a spirit day, and more poignantly — Bronx Science has no pride.

And when I say that Pride is not a spirit day, I don’t just mean that Pride should be a week or a month. Pride is not bound temporally — Pride is the ongoing commitment by the school administrators, faculty, and student body to the excellence of young queer adults within and without the confines of the school building. The common criticism attributed to June as being America’s official “Pride Month” is that it is essentially a veneer for corporate capitalism to hijack queer organizing and visibility for sinister profit-motivated ends up as little more than a shallow commitment to the legitimacy of queerness in our society that ends the moment the calendar hits July. Change the logo in the Instagram profile picture to rainbow for a month and then “who cares about the gays” once the date no longer begins with “06”.

That is how our spirit day made me feel, like a homecoming commodity to be paraded around as demonstration of the school’s commitment to making its queer students succeed. But how committed is the school to Pride, really? Let’s take a closer look:

Our history curriculum is downright anemic. 11th grade US History classes give Stonewall the respect of all of two minutes of class time and give a grand total of zero time to the AIDS crisis, the DADT disaster, the birth of the white nuclear family, and ballroom culture (DESPITE THE FACT THAT WE ARE A HIGH SCHOOL IN THE BRONX, ONE OF THE MOST VIBRANT BALLROOM SCENES OF ALL TIME)! Frankly, I’m outraged — and each and every one of the students should be too. How are young queer people supposed to learn about their history and the struggles and injustices that are ongoing in our community when the place we expect to educate us won’t even give state-sanctioned negligence that took the lives of thousands a whisper in US History classes.

And it gets even more ridiculous, 10th grade coding classes spend a day or two on Alan Turing, rightfully so as he is one of the foundational thinkers in computer science, but don’t deign to mention the fact that he’s gay and that the British government made him suffer physically and socially for it. English classes have hardly any exposure to literature from queer authors and even in the rare occurrences when thankfully James Baldwin makes his way into the lesson plan, the curriculum lacks sufficient context about how his queerness related to the rest of his struggles as a Black man that it does his legacy an injustice. And in those English classes, certain teachers even need to be taught lessons about non-binary pronouns by the students which is a situation that should never have arisen in the first place (I would know, I was the student).

And although I know I am now venturing into old wounds, the former social worker at Bronx Science outed children to their parents — and Bronx Science wonders why I think it doesn’t have Pride.

And now the issue of Pride is back on the table during an upcoming meeting of one of the few bastions of queer life at Bronx Science — the Gender-Sexuality Alliance, or GSA. I propose that our approach not only should, but MUST be radically different, and if that means calling upon the administration to put their foot down on forcing teachers to incorporate queer histories, literature, mathematicians, etc. We, the queer population of Bronx Science, have had enough — do better, right now, or by god we will call it from the rooftops: Bronx Science has no Pride, it’s high time to change that.