High School Controversial

摘要

It was only first period at mckinley High School in Baton Rouge when 17-year-old Leslie-Claire Spillman sensed that something was wrong. The door to her classroom burst open, a girl jumped in and yelled, "It's time!" Spillman soon heard students murmuring and slamming lockers in the halls. As she edged her way outside, she realized that all the commotion was about-her. "No Gay Clubs!" the kids were chanting as the crowds began to grow thicker and meaner in the halls. Spillman is the openly bisexual cochairman of the Gay-Straight Alliance, a group she and her friend Martin Pfeiffer, also 17, had fought for six months to form. They had started with the school's principal and battled all the way to Louisiana's East Baton Rouge Parish School Board. But the morning's mini-melee was tougher than any of those fights. A girl walked up to Spillman and said, "Watch your back. I'm going to f---ing beat your a--." One of Pfeiffer's teachers barricaded him in a classroom. When it was all over, the school suspended 36 anti-gay protesters. Yet that didn't make it any easier for Spillman and Pfeiffer. "The kid lives in a pressure cooker," says Pfeiffer's mom, Molly. "I don't know how he gets up every morning."