Different high school, different lesbian student, same bigoted fucksticks:
When Veronica Rodriguez opened Wesson Attendance Center’s Yearbook on Friday, she didn’t find a trace of her lesbian daughter Ceara Sturgis after a long battle with school officials to include a photo of her daughter wearing a tuxedo in the school’s 2010 yearbook. “They didn’t even put her name in it,” Sturgis’ mother Veronica Rodriguez said. “I was so furious when she told me about it. Ceara started crying and I told her to suck it up. Is that not pathetic for them to do that? Yet again, they have crapped on her and made her feel alienated.”
Sturgis has been a student at Wesson Attendance Center—WTF with that name?—for 12 years. Sturgis is an honor student. She was told that her photo wouldn’t appear in the yearbook because, you know, God hates lesbians in tuxes. But that wasn’t enough for the bigots running Wesson: they removed all references to Sturgis. Her photo doesn’t appear in the yearbook, her name doesn’t appear on a list of graduating seniors, there’s no mention of the academic honors she racked up.
Like Constance McMillen—another lesbian student who had the nerve to stand up for herself and to be herself—Sturgis was retaliated against by the small-minded bigots who run her school.
Time for an accountability moment: the website for the Wesson Attendance Center is here. Ronald Greer is WAC’s principal and you can email him here. Oscar Hawkins is WAC’s high school principal and you can email him here. The school’s phone number is (601) 643-2221. The school’s fax number is (601) 643-2458.
Go get ’em.
Wow, the Constance McMillen thing was already bad enough, but this is so seriously fucked. Erasing people from history in ways such as this is the type of shit you expect from dictatorships. This cannot be allowed to fade away — it’s past time for bigots like this to hear loud and clearly that they can’t just do this crap and get away with it.
There goes half the yearbook sales.
See, this is precisely the set of circumstances when a rabid Pit Bull or twelve really WOULD come in handy.
Fucksticks, indeed.
@2 – Probably not, don’t you have to order and pay for those things weeks or months ahead of time?
I don’t know how it works everywhere, but my high school’s yearbook content seemed more-or-less at the whim of the yearbook staff, and there wasn’t a lot of space dedicated to students outside the staff’s circle of friends, apart from obligatory inclusions like students involved in sports and extracurricular clubs.
Thinking the tux picture is a big deal is obviously ridiculous, but these fools really take the idiocy up a notch with their petty retribution. If I ran a college admissions office, I sure as hell wouldn’t want these aspiring journalism majors anywhere near my school’s program.
When you think about finishing high school your one big wish is to go to your Senior Prom and then pass around your Senior yearbook for your classmates to sign one last time. Those are 2 memorable moments in your life that you will never get back.
How can anyone who calls themselves an Educator deny them this? The sheer cruelty of these 2 seperate actions astound me.
Their web site sucks.
@4 is correct is most cases.
Keep it up Mississippi–plenty more tornadoes to come.
@3 ftw
“Copiah County School District spokeswoman Martha Traxler refused to comment on the school’s reason for excluding Sturgis from the senior page, and referred all questions to Copiah County attorney Olen Bryant, Jr.”
Martha Traxler’s email address is martha.traxler@copiah.ms. She also shows up in a poorly-copy-edited article about the issue from October of last year: http://www.wlox.com/Global/story.asp?S=1… wherein she claimed that “the issue goes beyond just clothing.”
No shit, Martha.
Olen Bryant Jr. works for Bryant & Rutland, PLLC, whose firm website is http://www.olenbryant.com/; they have a contact form linked under “Email Us” and their number is 601-894-4555.
look at the vulgarity with which you need to express yourself. know what I say to this? big deal. adam and eve, not adam and steve. stop expecting everyone to celebrating your same sex relationships. i like gay people individually when i get to know them, and its your business. but stop trying to get straights to change our values.
you want it, you live with it.
leave us alone. if you don’t like our style, go start your own school.
By the way, Mississippi has a Human Development Index of 0.799, putting it underneath Kazakhstan at 0.804.
(I discovered this while researching stuff related to the Arizona immigration law — Sonora, the Mexican state to the south of Arizona, has a higher HDI than Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, or Mississippi).
This utterly sucks…though I have to admit I don’t understand the whole lesbian-and-tuxedo thing. I’m straight, but I’m not a girly-girl. Still, my mind doesn’t go to tuxedo when I think of wearing something nice. I don’t know.
Either way, though, who cares? Clothes are clothes. I wouldn’t care if a boy wanted to wear a pink blouse, either.
As far as the school’s name goes, a lot of really small, rural districts in Mississippi essentially have a one-building schoolhouse, where preK-12 go to the same school. They are always called attendance centers. Why? I have no idea.
@ 11? go fuck your cousin you god damn nazi.
From the end of the article:
“The students love and accept her,” Rodriguez said. “The kids even nominated her for prom queen, but she ducked out, knowing the officials would never let her be prom queen.”
At least in this case the students aren’t assholes too.
@11 How does a Tuxedo offend your values?
I’m boycotting Mississippi as well as Arizona.
If it were me I’d start glueing my photo in all my friends yearbooks. Ridiculous
Many (most perhaps? – I don’t recall) public high schools in Mississippi are called “attendance centers.” There is no pretense of an education in these places.
This makes a strong statement about the emphasis that Mississippi places on education, and would be unbelievable if it were not actually true.
That, Dan, is WTF with the name.
The district’s website is already down. Congratulations!
In the USA we have 49 states; Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana share a border; our main watershed is called Old Man River.
@18 – Genius!
Someone should print her some yearbook-page-sized stickers with her photo and all the other standard yearbook stuff, so her friends can paste them over the photos of the yearbook staff and/or administrators who are responsible for this crap.
Re-revisionist history FTW.
@4 – good point.
Maybe they can sue as a class action for their money back.
but I love @18.
whoops, my mistake — the website’s not down, it just sucks.
Dear Mr Hawkins,
Did you realize that officials in Soviet Russia used to require schools to “update” their textbooks by pasting unrelated entries over the biographies of former Stalin insiders who fell out of favor with that mercurial leader? This sounds
suspiciously like what your school has done to Ceara Sturgis, with all references to her time at the high school having been removed from her senior yearbook.
Are you folks really proud of yourselves for taking such demeaning, bigoted, and petty actions against a teenager? I feel sorry for anyone so scared of people who are even
slightly different from themselves, as appears to be the case here.
None of the adults involved with this travesty deserve to keep their jobs.
Sincerely,
@5, the staff of my senior yearbook printed the pictures of all 200-odd sophomores on one double-page spread, each one about the size of your fingernail, and issued the book with a crackerjack magnifying glass. Yes, there was a furor, and many bottoms were spanked, theoretically at least. Very offensive, and pretty funny too.
Dear Ms. Traxler,
I’m writing because Dan Savage asked us to let you know how inappropriate and mean it was to exclude Ceara Sturgis from your yearbook. I’m sure you’re hearing from a lot of people already, and you’ll be hearing from many more soon. The phones at the school will be ringing off the hook tomorrow, with angry people expressing their hurt at your decision to discriminate against Ms. Surgis because of her sexuality.
The time has come when news of bigoted actions like yours are rapidly disseminated over the internet, and people like me — and there are a lot of people like me — will make sure your work is distracted. If you thought you could just make Ms. Sturgis disappear, you were wrong. Now she’s the most well known thing about your school district, your county, and probably your career.
Surprise! This is how the civil rights movement is going to work in the internet age. We’ve learned we can advance civil rights from anywhere, and we’re going to advance them everywhere. Because we’re people, we’re Americans, and we deserve to be treated equally under the law and with respect.
Thank you very much, and good luck with the tsunami of distraction over the next couple of weeks. You’re going to get all the notice your actions deserve.
Best wishes
If 1984 were on the reading list, maybe they would’ve had second thoughts about making her an UnPerson. Probably not, though.
@11
Ha ha ha… You’re hysterical. So you “value” hate & emotional cruelty, huh? No one is trying to change you, all we’re doing is calling you out & showing the world what assholes you are for valuing bottom-of-the-barrel morality. Live free, I say.
But stop acting like a WATB when people treat you like you deserve: as a douchebag and a dickwad. If that’s what you value, then that’s how people will react to you.
Breaks my heart.
A tuxedo is only clothes, it is formal and respectable. I presume it had no vulgar statements to decorate it, derogatory slogan to make it offensive. It was a tuxedo, she wore a tuxedo. And, some how that justifies her being erased from the yearbook, she is invisible now.
When will we learn that when you scratch one of us, you will find all of us. When you treat others badly, you treat yourself badly. And, when you deny one person their humanity, you are also denying your own.
I’m off to compose some emails.
To Oscar Hawkins and the staff of the Wesson Attendance Center:
Congratulations for raising your school to national prominence! It’s a shame you did so not by creating a curriculum of depth and excellence, but by your short-sighted and, ultimately, counterproductive actions.
Ceara Sturgis and your appalling treatment of her is now what will be most readily known about your fine institution and possibly your career- your names will now be tied together in news stories and written articles forever.
In the 21st century, every written word is preserved and tied to you always. Enjoy the fruits of your labors.
Cheers,
I bet if a straight girl wanted to appear in a tux in her senior photo the staff would be a-ok with that. On the other hand, if they think they can successfully punish people for being openly gay, they’re wrong. If you have enough self-confidence to be out in high school in a conservative place, a little administrational bullying probably isn’t going to make you back down.
I wasn’t going to send in an email, because I’m too tired from work and too depressed by all the crap that is in the world.
And then I pulled my shit together, and got typing. If anyone else out there is feeling like they don’t have the heart/energy/words, hopefully this will help. Change whatever, I don’t care.
To Ronald Greer and Oscar Hawkins;
The most powerful and cruel way to dehumanize someone, to make them both invisible and unreal, is to take away their name. You erase their identity and their individual self-ness, that tiny flame we were all born with which makes us known to each other and to ourselves. Many powerful and terrible people have known this; concentration camp victims were given numbers in place of names, African American slaves’ names changed depending on the whim of each new master. These are serious and outrageous examples, and yet I think they are appropriate. Wesson Attendance Center’s complete failure to mention graduating senior Ceara Sturgis does not only withhold from her the same respect, the same honor that other students received when they were pictured, and named, celebrated. It is dangerous, because it was motivated by fear and hate, and it encourages others to also think of Ceara as a non-person. Remember the youth in your school who look to you for examples on how to treat their fellow human beings. Make the honorable, courageous choice, and right this wrong.
Sincerely yours,
wait…i just figured out how it works…if you pretend something you don’t like never was, well, it NEVER WAS.
So everyone, say it together now, “There are no bigoted cruel individuals in the world.”… there, now see, all better.
Here’s what I wrote:
Dear Ms. Traxler, Mr. Greer, and Mr. Hawkins,
Did you know that teens who are homosexual account for more than 30% of all teen suicides in the US? I wonder why that is? Could it perhaps be that many of these teens come from places like Copiah County, where “God fearing” folks indoctrinate children to believe that, if they are different, they are unlovable?
From what I understand of Ms. Sturgis, she is a kind, caring, intelligent, popular, and hardworking member of your Wesson community. How have you chosen to honor her for this? By deleting her, and any mention of her, from the yearbook! I was absolutely in shock when I read this story. I am disgusted and appalled that any child could be treated like this by the community that she has been a part of her entire life. You should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves.
Now, Ms. Sturgis is a lucky girl because she has a family and friends who love and support her despite the fact that she is “different.” I use the word “different” with hesitance because, first of all, I am from a place where people’s differences are celebrated rather than reviled. Second of all, I don’t know anyone who doesn’t possess qualities that are different from my own and different from what people like yourselves consider “normal.”
Do you not have teenagers in your community who have gotten into trouble with the law, or who have become pregnant out of wedlock, or who have tormented and bullied their peers? Are these students allowed to be remembered in the yearbook? What if Ms. Sturgis was Jewish, or physically handicapped, or different in another way that was completely out of her control? Would you ostracize her then? What if it were your sons or daughters who were being treated this way? Do you not think that there could easily be (and probably is) a member of your family who was born, not with an affliction, disease, or abnormality, but with a propensity to love, even if the way in which they love is different from your own?
Assuming your hatred is founded in religious zeal, and also that you refer to yourselves as “Christians,” I challenge you to locate a passage in the New Testament where Jesus preaches that we should respond to things we don’t understand with bigotry, persecution, and censure, rather than love, understanding, and kindness.
Ms. Sturgis is a good person who has done nothing wrong, except, perhaps, believe that she could be true to herself and honest with the people around her, and be accepted and loved in return. There will come a time, soon, when Ms. Sturgis will have the opportunity to leave your miserable, oppressive influence. She will go to college somewhere that she will be embraced as an individual, which is what she deserves. She will go on to live a beautiful life, filled with knowledge, growth, and love. From time to time she will, perhaps, regret that she doesn’t have a keepsake from her high school years, to remember the friends who supported her during a time when the adults around her did not. She will be fine though.
Ms. Sturgis will not become one of the numbers of teens who commit suicide because they are taught by people like you that they do not deserve to be happy. Perhaps this disappoints you? Perhaps you would prefer that a wonderful and intelligent young woman, who is full of promise, would crumble under your criticism and choose death over a future? How many teens in your community have already made this choice due to fear of persecution? Unless you wisen up and begin to truly live by the “Christian” values you claim to possess, there will most certainly be more.
I hope that the ACLU sues you and that the damages you are forced to pay to Ms. Sturgis will pay for her education, and, in turn, facilitate her freedom from the miserable existence you are forced to endure. Ms. Sturgis will be just fine. I fear for those who come after her.
You are detestable and monstrous. I don’t personally believe in Hell, but, if I am wrong, which I am sure you believe I am, I hope that there is a particular spot reserved for the three of you right next to the furnace. From that vantage point you will surely have a good view of the rest of your fellow residents whom you can vilify and judge for the rest of eternity. Enjoy.
Sincerely,
E-mailed this in already. This is really my only response.
To whom it may concern,
In this world, we are always accountable for the things we do. No matter how small, consequences exist for every act. When we do right, we are rewarded, if only with our own personal pride. When we lash out at other people and commit acts that we recognize will hurt them, we are punished – if not by our own shame, then by the eyes of those around us who will look upon us with less respect for who we are. The only thing that can speak for our characters is our actions. When we hurt others, it tells those who look at us that we are callous, cold-hearted, cruel people. What this school has done to Ceara Sturgis does not undermine her – after all, she still did all the work and those who know her will recognize her hard work and dedication that put her on the honor roll – it only undermines the integrity of the school. Keep that in mind, the next time you decide to lash out at a student who dares to be different.
#33, your words are beautiful
Hrm.
The elephant in this room is that Mississippi (and other localities which could be construed as its sympathizers) have drawn their line in the sand, and they will hold that line until it is wrested from their cold, dead, rigid hands. They have a stellar track record for this — what with the CSA, holding onto Jim Crow, burying public swimming pools.
Expect all of this to come to a bitter, protracted, hard fought, ugly end in the U.S. Supreme Court. You could probably safely invest on that as a wager.
that really sucks! its kinda like the way trans people have been erased from history here, it is time to start holding people accountable and not shut up until they acknowledge, that yes it is WRONG to do these things, and be made to undo as much damage as they can and until they do this we must publicly shame them…often!!!
@39: Hey, you said it, not me.
But I don’t think I follow you. Or if I do follow, then I’m not exactly in total agreement. If anything, the Mormon thread today seems more like a transsexual analogy in that “certification of baptization” is some kind of destiny the way a birth certificate might be to those who’d want to institutionally keep things that way, if you can dig.
they suck. I wish I had copied one of the entries above as I am all bleary-eyed and sent off an email that was not nearly half as good… Maybe I will send a new one tomorrow!!
Great writing guys. (and girls)
This is rich: Wesson is listed on this web site as a “great school”! You can rank the school right there on the site to warn parents away.
Wesson got a very low ranking from me – imagine that.
http://snipurl.com/vu48s
Just to be clear, the Jackson Free Press is the ONLY non-fuckstick publication in Mississippi, so try not to call them that when you link to their page. PLEEEEEAAAASSSEEEE?
Ex-Mississippian Ballardite
OK, so maybe they are bigoted fucksticks, but the school’s got a great math program. Just check out what they have to say about their pre-calculus / trigonometry class: http://www2.mde.k12.ms.us/1500/WAC/hw/tr…
@43: Just curious, but what brings you to Ballard, Ex-Mississippian Ballardite?
Scratch that… great academic program over all. Every link says the same thing…. they haven’t had a homework assignment in at least six years.
Disgusting.
Email sent.
How about starting a campaign to get all sympathetic female students to wear tuxes and males to wear something alternative) to next year’s proms, all over the country, in solidarity?
I sent the principal this email:
Dear Mr. Hawkins,
I can’t believe that you and your administration made the decision to exclude an honor student from this year’s yearbook just because of her sexual orientation and her wish to dress in a different type of formalwear than the other girls in the senior class. How could you be so small-minded and thoughtless? It’s 2010, you should be able to deal with the image of a woman wearing a tuxedo. For example, Janelle Monae looks great in hers and so do her other women dancers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xktMnfb0Q… so maybe you should learn to respect your students’ awesome sartorial choices?
I suggest that everyone else spam him with the “Tightrope” video too.