Groundbreaking gay grads
Gay high schoolers enter adulthood with hope, big dreams

By JUAN CARLOS RODRIGUEZ
Jun. 12, 2008



Yanssen Borges Perreira, Michelle Chadwick, and Adam Brock each walked down the aisles at their high school commencement ceremonies last week as out and proud members of the graduating Class of 2008.

They are just three of perhaps hundreds, or even thousands, of GLBT seniors in Miami-Dade and Broward who made it successfully through their high school years despite the harassment, prejudice and the fear of not just their fellow students, but of school officials and fretful parents (theirs and those of others).

Like their peers, they are simultaneously cool and geeky, awkward and slick, and caught up in the anxieties of their age. Their cultural epicenter is best defined by hip-hop and video games.

However, these students enter adulthood in a time of meteoric change. Viewing their futures with great hope, they said they are certain that they will be able to wed legally and that they won’t have to live in the shadows. But the advances that gay media groundbreakers like “Will and Grace” and Ellen De Generes made are tempered by the stories like murder victims Matthew Shepard and Ryan Keith Skipper. In their graduating year they were rocked by the murders of fellow gay teens Lawrence King, 15, and closer to home, Simmie Williams, 17.

Perreira, Chadwick and Brock graduated from the traditional public education system; for many GLBT students, graduating as an openly “out” student would be impossible, because of intolerance, fear and being turned away from their families. Whether they made it through day school or alternative programs, these--and all GLBT grads--made a difference.


Adam Brock, 18
Cypress Bay High School, Weston

Like every over-achieving high school student, Brock’s resume is impressive. His 4.4 GPA is rounded out with student government, National Honors Society, cross country and track, lead roles in each three high school musicals (“Cats,” “West Side Story,” and “Grease”), managing editor of the high school newspaper, and founding member of the school’s GSA. Top it off with 20 hours a week working at a Starbucks, and Brock is the embodiment of a overloaded teenage life.

He came out of the closet in a newspaper column he wrote in 2006. But instead of getting the hateful reaction he feared, Brock actually won over friends and allies.

“All through middle school I was called gay and I knew I was gay,” Brock remembered. “I was sick of living a double life. Once I came out everyone accepted me. All my friends were there for me.”

His friends’ support became evident when, after he came out in the newspaper, a track teammate began taunting him. “He said ’You better look out we have a gay guy among us,’” Brock remembers. The taunting stopped, however, when Brock’s best friend--a fellow track teammate, who also happened to be the varsity quarterback--stood up for him. Much of the track team and football team jumped on board as well, and by the beginnig of his senior year, things were going so well, he was voted Homecoming King.

“Homecoming showed everyone that you don’t have to be the jock, or the muscle guy,” Brock said. “You can be like any normal kid and it doesn’t matter if you’re gay.”

Brock was featured in the MTV reality show “The Paper,” which depicts the life of the Cypress Bay High School newspaper. He takes great pride in a clip from the show, depicting him melting down in an over-the-top newsroom tantrum, when his column was rejected. Besides airing in the customary heavy rotation on MTV, the clip was featured on the E! Channel’s television spoof “The Soup.”

“I’m a drama queen,” Brock admits. “I freak out when it’s necessary.”

Brock will need to keep his cool this fall when he studies communications at the University of Central Florida. His goals are sensible for an overachiever. He wants to be the managing editor of Newsweek, or a creative director at Vogue. In between, he wants to own a theater on Broadway.


Michelle Chadwick, 18
Dr. Michael M. Krop High School, Miami

Chadwick received great respect at Krop High, as a talented athlete, ROTC leader and a breaker of stereotypes: she played second string defensive end on the varsity football team. Chadwick fondly remembers her first trip on the team bus to a football game: School administrators had requested for Chadwick to ride with the cheerleaders, due to rules that separate the girls from the boys. But the coaches, and her teammates, insisted that Chadwick ride with the rest of her team.

“I really opened a lot of people’s eyes,” Chadwick said. “Everyone knew who I was.”

A self-admitted tomboy, Chadwick excelled in soccer, softball, and cross-country. She said she hasn’t worn a dress sine the fifth grade.

She plans to study at St. Leo College in Central Florida in the fall, but her heart is set on entering the Naval Academy in Annapolis. She is not fazed by the possibility of the military’s Don’t Ask--

Don’t Tell policy about gay recruits stopping her; after talking with a few gay cadets, she was reassured.

“I was nervous,” she said. “I can’t pretend to be somebody else. But now I have no worries. I’m going to have to keep it on the down-low.”

The “down-low” lifestyle of the military will be a sharp contrast to her years at Krop, where she received great support from her school’s very active GSA, as well as a network of counselors. She was also panelist with Safe Schools South Florida’s (formerly GLSEN) seminars that educated school officials and students about tolerance. It is the same vantage she uses when talking about starting a family.

“I can’t wait to be married legally,” she said. “Today it’s more of a realization. Marriage might be far away, but it’s not that far away.”


Yanssen Borges Perreira, 18
Coral Glades High Shool, Coral Springs

As a child growing up in Brazil, Perreira was nearly kicked out of his Catholic school in 2003 when he asked “why can the priests wear gowns and I can’t?”

He then made the switch to public schools when he arrived in South Florida in 2005, where he could be more open with his sexual orientation. But with that openness came taunts from his peers, so he used what he knew--a combination of fashion and activism--and found an opportunity to confront his adversaries.

“My sexual orientation became the motivation to keep me on track and to create change,” Perreira said. “I knew many other teenagers could be going though worse circumstances than me.”

In his junior and senior years, Perreira crafted artful and urgent videos that question freedom and equality in America, while looking at history through a gay lens. He made a five-minute piece for history class last year, where he juxtaposed the killing of Matthew Shepard with images of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

He was also largely responsible for convincing hundreds of students and teachers Coral Glade High in Coral Springs to participate in the annual Day of Silence, held each April to protest the silencing of LGBT students due to harassment, bias and abuse in schools. Perreira was a leading voice in the statewide GSA movement, and was one of about 14 students who traveled to Tallahassee in March to lobby state legislators on the importance of passing the anti-bullying bill.

He keeps a famous quote by Gandhi close to his heart.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world,” Perreira said, quoting Gandhi. “Its personal meaning to me is that you should take action on what you want to change and not just be passive and wait for others.”

This summer he is traveling to Brazil to begin a business venture with his father, after which he hopes to enroll at Pace University in New York.

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