Student Opinion: Navigating Queerness in a Jesuit High School that Condemned It.
This work is based on Peter Beardsley’s. minidocumentary “Invisible”. This is the first documentary he has published to Youtube, and is actively working on a final version.
Queer student issues are becoming increasingly contentious and increasingly political. Support for transgender students, LGBT+ inclusive education, and other topics which should be matter of course, are instead being used as wedge issues in national headlines and state legislatures. Florida’s recent “Don’t Say Gay” bill, along with other proposed bills across the country, is proof of this trend.
My heart goes out to the queer kids who have to go through school at a time when their very existence is politicized, because four years ago I was a queer student as well— at a Catholic school called Jesuit High School in Sacramento, Califonia.
Pundits often claim that public schools “indoctrinate” students into being more accepting of LGBTQ+ individuals, which isn’t true. At my private Catholic high school I experienced real indoctrination. I and other queer students were told that our identities did not exist, that they were illegitimate, that they were against God. I want to tell our story so that this generation of queer will not be lost in the flurry of news, and to give you, the reader, a personal experience to latch onto in a time when the news often feels intangible and unreal.
As a queer student at a Catholic high school, I felt invisible. Although the religious environment of a catholic school is the reason many parents choose to send their children there, myself and other queer students found that it fostered a culture of silence about being queer that left many students feeling alone and unheard at one of the most formative times in their lives.
“High school anywhere - public school, private school - it’s so judgmental. But a religion that does not accept who you are made it so much harder.”
Jesuit was my first experience with Catholic education, and though I came from a religious background, my experience as a queer student was stifled and confused. After graduating, I reached out to other queer students from Jesuit, and through conversations I had with them I realized that not only had we experienced many of the same things, but that many of us felt neglected, ignored, and dissatisfied as a result of our time at the school.
“There was no room for self-expression, there was no room to explore yourself, there was no room to try to become the person you felt you were meant to be, there was no information to help you figure yourself out. Because it wasn’t about figuring yourself out at that school - it was about becoming who they told you you were supposed to be.”
Religion underscored many of our experiences. Although one of the stated goals of Jesuit High School is that its students graduate religious, no student that I talked to developed a positive relationship with religion - let alone Christianity - during their four years at Jesuit. In fact, some of them felt it had been weaponized against them.
Catholicism condemns homosexuality as “intrinsically immoral,” and changing one’s gender, according to the Vatican, “seeks to annihilate the concept of nature.” Queer kids recognize the irony of a religion that preaches unconditional love yet discriminates against queer people.
“Why would I be accepting to a religion that hates me, or to people who hate me?”
The same-sex environment, lauded by our school to promote academic excellence, confounded transgender students. They had little exposure to the opposite sex and few channels to explore their gender identity. Day in and day out they were confronted by an academic environment that expected them to appear and present as male, regardless of their individual identity.
“If I had figured out my gender identity before I graduated high school, I’m not sure what I would have done.”
As a single-gender school, Jesuit is unequipped to educate students who cease to identify as male during their time there. The policy is dated, and is the legacy of a school founded in the 1940s. But it isn’t the only policy that excludes queer people. Until 2016, students were prohibited from taking same-sex partners to dances.
“It got to the point where I was hating myself and hating to be alive.”
It may seem like a small thing, but by banning same-sex couples, Jesuit placed its entire institutional weight against the idea that same-sex attraction was legitimate, that it was acceptable to be expressed in public. Policies like that, written and unwritten, persist in Catholic schools across America.
“I would not want to go to a school that tries to hide me, or prevent me from expressing myself.”
All of this created an environment of shame and fear that paralyzed queer students like myself. We were afraid to come out to our peers. We hid what we were going through from adults. We kept our identities as deep inside ourselves as we could bear. For many of us, this began a struggle with guilt, mental health, and self-acceptance that continues to this day.
I want—need people to know that the treatment of queer students is not an abstract issue for politicians to debate or demagogues to weaponize. It is a real, tangible issue with lifelong consequences. The shame and fear that students experience as a result of being cloistered in institutions which do not protect or support them has real impacts on their mental and physical health.
When politicians and pundits, and even journalists rail against “indoctrination” in our schools, recognize the words for what they are, an attempt to drive a wedge into an already divided society. Regardless of your politics, remember that there are real people at stake, real students deserving of love and attention, and respect.
And to the queer students who will read this, I want you to know that you are not alone. And even if adults, even if your school, even if your church refuses to acknowledge that you exist, you deserve to be accepted. And you deserve to be loved.
Peter Beardsley is a Biology and Spanish student at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is interested in writing and visual arts and is hoping to pursue a career in journalism
