The Lasting Effects of Seeing a Pride Flag in the Classroom
It's healing seeing my old high school display Pride flags in classrooms
In high school, even though there were a couple teachers who were rumored to be queer, I didn’t know anyone who was out. “I saw Ms. B at dinner with a woman last night,” someone would incredulously spread around the school; queerness was a spectacle, and for reasons I wouldn’t fully confront for years, I was invested for different reasons than my classmates. Almost everyone I knew, including myself, belonged to one Christian denomination or another in our small west Michigan town. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2015, the year before I graduated, but it didn’t shift the status quo of our school’s culture.
As such, I spent my high school years the way that many do: seized with terror over the mere possibility of confronting any kind of queerness, my own or otherwise. I’d go through periods where I spent hours a day for months on end analyzing the “evidence.” I kissed girls as a child, but I was a cheerleader now. I hadn’t kissed a boy yet, but when my middle school fling held my hand, it made my stomach flutter. I didn’t have any official boyfriends in high school, just “situationships,” but DTR withstanding, being involved in any romantic way with a boy was always a relief — even if I wasn’t sure I wanted to kiss him.
Post-graduation, I friended a couple former teachers on Facebook. This past summer, eight years after graduation and around the time I got married (to a woman!), one of them posted a photo of themselves in their classroom. On the speaker of the intercom, I noticed a decal of the school’s logo in Pride colors, and the teacher donned a Stonewall Inn T-shirt. I commented, "Wow, so cool to see a Pride flag there, and you wearing your Stonewall shirt." My former teacher wrote back, "Yeah, most teachers have them up!" Witnessing not just one but several Pride flags displayed in the school made me feel like I was living in an alternate universe. Though it’s been less than a decade since I was a student there, it felt so far from my experience. The closest thing we had to pro-diversity messaging was a poster that touted “tolerance.”
It’s easy to think that something as simple as a decal on an intercom wouldn’t have made a difference in dismantling my internalized homophobia, but in reality, that line of thinking is probably a self-preservation tactic; it’s painful to consider how simple the act of celebrating all identities is — and was, all along. If I’m honest, I know that the mere visibility of non-heterosexuality would have been a game-changer for me. After all, homophobia was presented to and internalized by me more so via omission than by voiced hatred.
Part of me questioned whether queer people truly even existed. Yes, “Glee” premiered in 2009. There was “Will & Grace” long before that, premiering in 1998, the year I was born. But “Modern Family,” with its (albeit stereotypical) gay couple, was the first and only time I saw queer characters onscreen — and my parents and I only tuned in because it came on after “The Middle,” a sitcom that depicted a more traditional, “all-American” family: white, heterosexual and middle class.
When I saw that Pride decal and Stonewall Inn T-shirt in my former teacher’s Facebook post, I felt a sense of sadness for myself, but more poignantly, I felt hopeful. Hopeful that the queer students who go there now will be better off than I was. Maybe, I thought, they will at least be able to view queerness as real and possible. And maybe that sense of possibility will grow into a full embrace of who they truly are.
Yet, seven months later, as we stare down the barrel of Trump’s second term, fit with a Republican-majority Senate, that hope is threatened and the need for symbols of support becomes more stark. It’s been half of a year since his inauguration, and already, he’s signed a whole slew of anti-LGBTQ+ executive orders. These include, but are not limited to, the federal government recognizing only two genders and the slashing of DEI programs. In February, the Trump administration gave schools and universities two weeks to end DEI programs or risk losing federal funding. Many states have been taking this as an opportunity to introduce anti-LGBTQ+ legislation themselves.
Project 2025, a right-wing document containing terrifying and detailed plans for Trump’s second term, described by BBC as a “right-wing wish list,” details even more plans to pick away at the freedoms queer people have spent the last many decades fighting for. Though Trump’s administration has denied any affiliation with Project 2025, many have noted that his actions thus far seem to correlate closely.
In conservative spaces, it seems to be thought that shielding youth from any mention or representation of queer people is a means of protection (see: the uproar over kid-friendly drag events or the continued struggle for age-appropriate queer representation in children’s movies). Yet there’s no evidence to support that exposure to or mention of queer people can “turn” children gay or gender-nonconforming — what it does show is that kids have a far less chance of hating themselves or feeling hopeless. Or even committing suicide.
According to 2023 research from The Trevor Project, queer youth who receive support from a parent or caregiver, doctor, or teacher have 40%, 45%, and 43% lower odds, respectively, of attempting suicide within the past year. Moreover, in that same research, it was found that about two in three LGBTQ+ youth said that hearing about potential laws banning the discussion of queer people at school significantly impacted their mental health.
I hope that schools and their wider communities keep in mind the first principle of Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny,” a book that looks back on tyrannical regimes in order to help us avoid them in the future: do not obey in advance. Don’t preemptively comply with what this administration might try to take away. Protect the existence, rights and well-being of queer students at all costs. It doesn’t only make a meaningful — potentially life or death — difference in their lives right now, but I can also speak from experience when I say it’s sure to impact them well beyond their adolescence.
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