"There is absolutely no homophobia in my school"

Recently, I discovered that my High School is (apparently) the best place in space to be LGBT!... Yes, ok. I know you think I'm lying. How is any High School 100% LGBT friendly? Well, just ask the students in my Spanish class and they'll tell you!

At the moment, we're talking about different forms of discrimination, like racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, and - for the first time in my 17 years of education - homophobia. When I saw we were going to be talking about homophobia I so very nearly cried out "Oh, at last!" or "I never thought I'd see the day", but I didn't. However, it is true. I have never been in a classroom when homophobia or LGBT issues have been discussed and I haven't heard of any other class covering these topics either. 

The teacher (who's very open-minded) went through the list of discriminations at the end of the chapter so we could get some ideas for the essay we had to write. He asked about each and every one of them. "Does racism exist in our school?", "is there any xenophobia?" etc. All the questions so far were getting "yes, to a certain degree" as an answer. So when the teacher asked "does homophobia exist in our school?" I was expecting an overwhelming "yes" from the class, but instead everyone went silent, muttered and conferred with the person next to them. Eventually, my class came to the conclusion that homophobia does not exist in our High School. At this point I really wanted to jump up and shout at them, but I get on well with everyone in my class and besides, I'm still in the closet when it comes to classmates. So lets pause this scene right here, shall we?

Some days I count how many homophobic slurs I hear in the hallways or in the canteen queue or just around the place in general. I often lose count or forget to count some, but my school averages about 10 a day. Now, I know this probably doesn't sound like much to some of you out there, and I'm not saying my school is really homophobic because I know it's not, but bear in mind that I'm 1 person in over 500, I don't hang out with homophobic people and I can't be on every square meter of my school grounds at once. Now take into account the fact that my High School is made up of a large majority of liberal people. Yet, there are still that many slurs per day.

Therefore, the fact no-one said they think homophobia exists in our school might be an interesting basis for a theory. Has everyone in schools grown accustomed to hearing homophobic slurs - whether they agree with them or not - and therefore don't realize they're that widespread? Or is everyone afraid to say "yes" because they know the teacher will ask them to explain and their classmates start to think they're gay? There's nothing wrong with supporting and defending LGBT people. You don't have to be gay to support gay rights and you don't have to be transgender to fight transphobia. I know for a fact that the latter theory isn't true, because there is a girl in my class (who is straight) who doesn't hesitate to stand up for LGBT rights and she said nothing. In fact, she turned to her sister and asked her if she thought it exists. They both came to the conclusion that they have never seen or heard any evidence of it, so it strikes me that everyone in schools has grown accustomed to hearing homophobic slurs. This is not good. In fact, it's very bad news for the French government if they ever decide to start a campaign that tackles homophobia in schools. How can you start to fight something that "isn't there"? The fact of the matter is, it's only really the gay people who pick up on these remarks, and only they are affected by them.

The French government did launch an anti-homophobia campaign way back in 2009, and even then they got their priorities completely wrong. Did they run it in Middle Schools? No. In High Schools? No. They ran it in universities! What did they hope to achieve? That's like cutting the leaves off a weed. It'll grow back when it gets more nourishment from the roots. The roots in this case being Middle Schools. That is where the problem needs to be tackled and although a lot of the homophobia in Middle School is just so someone can fit in with a group of people, they still need to be taught that it's not acceptable under any circumstances. Once you have that system in place in Middle Schools, you might not start to see results until after a few months or even a few years, but it needs to be done in any case. When these people move on through High School and into College they won't be as homophobic and there should at least be less of them if the campaign works properly. But the French government doesn't really care. Even in 2009 it was a half-assed attempt.