Best American Magazine Writing 2013

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Brittany admired Sam’s courage, and tried to mimic her insouciance and stoicism. So Brittany was bewildered when one day in November 2009, on the school bus home, a sixth-grade boy slid in next to her and asked quaveringly, “Did you hear Sam said she’s going to kill herself?”

  Brittany considered the question. No way. How many times had she seen Sam roll her eyes and announce, “Ugh, I’m gonna kill myself” over some insignificant thing? “Don’t worry, you’ll see Sam tomorrow,” Brittany reassured her friend as they got off the bus. But as she trudged toward her house, she couldn’t stop turning it over in her mind. A boy in the district had already committed suicide just days into the school year—TJ Hayes, a sixteen-year-old at Blaine High School—so she knew such things were possible. But Sam Johnson? Brittany tried to keep the thought at bay. Finally, she confided in her mother.

  “This isn’t something you kid about, Brittany,” her mom scolded, snatching the kitchen cordless and taking it down the hall to call the Johnsons. A minute later she returned, her face a mask of shock and terror. “Honey, I’m so sorry. We’re too late,” she said tonelessly as Brittany’s knees buckled; thirteen-year-old Sam had climbed into the bathtub after school and shot herself in the mouth with her own hunting rifle. No one at school had seen her suicide coming.

  No one saw the rest of them coming, either.

  Sam’s death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a “suicide cluster,” adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion; suicidal thoughts had become catchy, like a lethal virus. “Here you had a large number of suicides that are really closely connected, all within one school district, in a small amount of time,” explains Reidenberg. “Kids started to feel that the normal response to stress was to take your life.”

  There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied. The tragedies come at a national moment when bullying is on everyone’s lips, and a devastating number of gay teens across the country are in the news for killing themselves. Suicide rates among gay and lesbian kids are frighteningly high, with attempt rates four times that of their straight counterparts; studies show that one-third of all gay youth have attempted suicide at some point (versus 13 percent of hetero kids), and that internalized homophobia contributes to suicide risk.

  Against this supercharged backdrop, the Anoka-Hennepin school district finds itself in the spotlight not only for the sheer number of suicides but because it is accused of having contributed to the death toll by cultivating an extreme antigay climate. “LGBTQ students don’t feel safe at school,” says Anoka Middle School for the Arts teacher Jefferson Fietek, using the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning. “They’re made to feel ashamed of who they are. They’re bullied. And there’s no one to stand up for them, because teachers are afraid of being fired.”

  The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district’s policies on gays are not only discriminatory but also foster an environment of unchecked antigay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, maintaining that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all students. “We are not a homophobic district, and to be vilified for this is very frustrating,” says superintendent Dennis Carlson, who blames right-wingers and gay activists for choosing the area as a battleground, describing the district as the victim in this fracas. “People are using kids as pawns in this political debate,” he says. “I find that abhorrent.”

  Ironically, that’s exactly the charge that students, teachers, and grieving parents are hurling at the school district. “Samantha got caught up in a political battle that I didn’t know about,” says Sam Johnson’s mother, Michele. “And you know whose fault it is? The people who make their living off of saying they’re going to take care of our kids.”

  Located a half-hour north of Minneapolis, the thirteen sprawling towns that make up the Anoka-Hennepin school district—Minnesota’s largest, with 39,000 kids—seem an unlikely place for such a battle. It’s a soothingly flat, 172-squaremile expanse sliced by the Mississippi River, where woodlands abruptly give way to strip malls and then fall back to placid woodlands again, and the landscape is dotted with churches. The district, which spans two counties, is so geographically huge as to be a sort of cross-section of America itself, with its small minority population clustered at its southern tip, white suburban sprawl in its center, and sparsely populated farmland in the north. It also offers a snapshot of America in economic crisis: In an area where just 20 percent of adults have college educations, the recession hit hard, and foreclosures and unemployment have become the norm.

  For years, the area has also bred a deep strain of religious conservatism. At churches like First Baptist Church of Anoka, parishioners believe that homosexuality is a form of mental illness caused by family dysfunction, childhood trauma, and exposure to pornography—a perversion curable through intensive therapy. It’s a point of view shared by their congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, who has called homosexuality a form of “sexual dysfunction” that amounts to “personal enslavement.” In 1993, Bachmann, a proponent of school prayer and creationism, cofounded the New Heights charter school in the town of Still-water, only to flee the board amid an outcry that the school was promoting a religious curriculum. Bachmann also is affiliated with the ultraright Minnesota Family Council, headlining a fundraiser for them last spring alongside Newt Gingrich.

  Though Bachmann doesn’t live within Anoka-Hennepin’s boundaries anymore, she has a dowdier doppelgänger there in the form of antigay crusader Barb Anderson. A bespectacled grandmother with lemony-blond hair she curls in severely toward her face, Anderson is a former district Spanish teacher and a longtime researcher for the MFC who’s been fighting gay influence in local schools for two decades, ever since she discovered that her nephew’s health class was teaching homosexuality as normal. “That really got me on a journey,” she said in a radio interview. When the Anoka-Hennepin district’s sex-ed curriculum came up for reevaluation in 1994, Anderson and four like-minded parents managed to get on the review committee. They argued that any form of gay tolerance in school is actually an insidious means of promoting homosexuality—that openly discussing the matter would encourage kids to try it, turning straight kids gay.

  “Open your eyes, people,” Anderson recently wrote to the local newspaper. “What if a 15-year-old is seduced into homosexual behavior and then contracts AIDS?” Her agenda mimics that of Focus on the Family, the national evangelical Christian organization founded by James Dobson; Family Councils, though technically independent of Focus on the Family, work on the state level to accomplish Focus’s core goals, including promoting prayer in public spaces, “defending marriage” by lobbying for antigay legislation, and fighting gay tolerance in public schools under the guise of preserving parental authority—reasoning that government-mandated acceptance of gays undermines the traditional values taught in Christian homes.

  At the close of the seven-month-long sex-ed review, Anderson and her colleagues wrote a memo to the Anoka-Hennepin school board, concluding, “The majority of parents do not wish to have there [sic] children taught that the gay lifestyle is a normal acceptable alternative.” Surprisingly, the six-member board voted to adopt the measure by a four-to-two majority, even borrowing the memo’s language to fashion the resulting district-wide policy, which pronounced that within the health curriculum, “homosexuality not be taught/addressed as a normal, valid lifestyle.”

  The policy became unofficially known as “No Homo Promo” a
nd passed unannounced to parents and unpublished in the policy handbooks; most teachers were told about it by their principals. Teachers say it had a chilling effect and they became concerned about mentioning gays in any context. Discussion of homosexuality gradually disappeared from classes. “If you can’t talk about it in any context, which is how teachers interpret district policies, kids internalize that to mean that being gay must be so shameful and wrong,” says Anoka High School teacher Mary Jo Merrick-Lockett. “And that has created a climate of fear and repression and harassment.”

  Suicide is a complex phenomenon; there’s never any one pat reason to explain why anyone kills themselves. Michele Johnson acknowledges that her daughter, Sam, likely had many issues that combined to push her over the edge, but feels strongly that bullying was one of those factors. “I’m sure that Samantha’s decision to take her life had a lot to do with what was going on in school,” Johnson says tearfully. “I’m sure things weren’t perfect in other areas, but nothing was as bad as what was going on in that school.”

  The summer before Justin Aaberg started at Anoka High School, his mother asked, “So, are you sure you’re gay?”

  Justin, a slim, shy fourteen-year-old who carefully swept his blond bangs to the side like his namesake, Bieber, studied his mom’s face. “I’m pretty sure I’m gay,” he answered softly, then abruptly changed his mind. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait!” he shouted—out of character for the quiet boy—“I’m positive. I am gay,” Justin proclaimed.

  “OK.” Tammy Aaberg nodded. “So. Just because you can’t get him pregnant doesn’t mean you don’t use protection.” She proceeded to lecture her son about safe sex while Justin turned bright red and beamed. Embarrassing as it was to get a sex talk from his mom, her easy affirmation of Justin’s orientation seemed like a promising sign as he stood on the brink of high school. Justin was more than ready to turn the corner on the horrors of middle school—especially on his just-finished eighth-grade year, when Justin had come out as gay to a few friends, yet word had instantly spread, making him a pariah. In the hall one day, a popular jock had grabbed Justin by the balls and squeezed, sneering, “You like that, don’t you?” That assault had so humiliated and frightened Justin that he’d burst out crying, but he never reported any of his harassment. The last thing he wanted to do was draw more attention to his sexuality. Plus, he didn’t want his parents worrying. Justin’s folks were already overwhelmed with stresses of their own: swamped with debt, they’d declared bankruptcy and lost their home to foreclosure. So Justin had kept his problems to himself; he felt hopeful things would get better in high school, where kids were bound to be more mature.

  “There’ll always be bullies,” he reasoned to a friend. “But we’ll be older, so maybe they’ll be better about it.”

  But Justin’s start of ninth grade in 2009 began as a disappointment. In the halls of Anoka High School, he was bullied, called a “faggot,” and shoved into lockers. Then, a couple of months into the school year, he was stunned to hear about Sam Johnson’s suicide. Though Justin hadn’t known her personally, he’d known of her, and of the way she’d been taunted for being butch. Justin tried to keep smiling. In his room at home, Justin made a brightly colored paper banner and taped it to his wall: “Love the life you live, live the life you love.”

  Brittany couldn’t stop thinking about Sam, a reel that looped endlessly in her head. Sam dancing to one of their favorite metal bands, Drowning Pool. Sam dead in the tub with the back of her head blown off. Sam’s ashes in an urn, her coffin empty at her wake.

  She couldn’t sleep. Her grades fell. Her daily harassment at school continued, but now without her best friend to help her cope. At home, Brittany played the good daughter, cleaning the house and performing her brother’s chores unasked, all in a valiant attempt to maintain some family peace after the bank took their house and both parents lost their jobs in quick succession. Then Brittany started cutting herself.

  Just eleven days after Sam’s death, on November 22, 2009, came yet another suicide: a Blaine High School student, fifteen-year-old Aaron Jurek—the district’s third suicide in just three months. After Christmas break, an Andover High School senior, Nick Lockwood, became the district’s fourth casualty: a boy who had never publicly identified as gay, but had nonetheless been teased as such. Suicide number five followed, that of recent Blaine High School grad Kevin Buchman, who had no apparent LGBT connection. Before the end of the school year there would be a sixth suicide, fifteen-year-old July Barrick of Champlin Park High School, who was also bullied for being perceived as gay, and who’d complained to her mother that classmates had started an “I Hate July Barrick” Facebook page. As mental-health counselors were hurriedly dispatched to each affected school, the district was blanketed by a sense of mourning and frightened shock.

  “It has taken a collective toll,” says Northdale Middle School psychologist Colleen Cashen. “Everyone has just been reeling—students, teachers. There’s been just a profound sadness.”

  In the wake of Sam’s suicide, Brittany couldn’t seem to stop crying. She’d disappear for hours with her cell phone turned off, taking long walks by Elk Creek or hiding in a nearby cemetery. “Promise me you won’t take your life,” her father begged. “Promise you’ll come to me before anything.” Brittany couldn’t promise. In March 2010, she was hospitalized for a week.

  In April, Justin came home from school and found his mother at the top of the stairs, tending to the saltwater fish tank. “Mom,” he said tentatively, “a kid told me at school today I’m gonna go to hell because I’m gay.”

  “That’s not true. God loves everybody,” his mom replied. “That kid needs to go home and read his Bible.”

  Justin shrugged and smiled, then retreated to his room. It had been a hard day: the annual “Day of Truth” had been held at school, an evangelical event then sponsored by the antigay ministry Exodus International, whose mission is to usher gays back to wholeness and “victory in Christ” by converting them to heterosexuality. Day of Truth has been a font of controversy that has bounced in and out of the courts; its legality was affirmed last March, when a federal appeals court ruled that two Naperville, Illinois, high school students’ Day of Truth T-shirts reading BE HAPPY, NOT GAY were protected by their First Amendment rights. (However, the event, now sponsored by Focus on the Family, has been renamed “Day of Dialogue.”) Local churches had been touting the program, and students had obediently shown up at Anoka High School wearing day of truth T-shirts, preaching in the halls about the sin of homosexuality. Justin wanted to brush them off, but was troubled by their proselytizing. Secretly, he had begun to worry that maybe he was an abomination, like the Bible said.

  Justin was trying not to care what anyone else thought and be true to himself. He surrounded himself with a bevy of girlfriends who cherished him for his sweet, sunny disposition. He played cello in the orchestra, practicing for hours up in his room, where he’d covered one wall with mementos of good times: taped-up movie-ticket stubs, gum wrappers, Christmas cards. Justin had even briefly dated a boy, a seventeen-year-old he’d met online who attended a nearby high school. The relationship didn’t end well: The boyfriend had cheated on him, and compounding Justin’s hurt, his coming out had earned Justin hateful Facebook messages from other teens—some from those he didn’t even know—telling him he was a fag who didn’t deserve to live. At least his freshman year of high school was nearly done. Only three more years to go. He wondered how he would ever make it.

  Though some members of the Anoka-Hennepin school board had been appalled by “No Homo Promo” since its passage fourteen years earlier, it wasn’t until 2009 that the board brought the policy up for review, after a student named Alex Merritt filed a complaint with the state Department of Human Rights claiming he’d been gay-bashed by two of his teachers during high school; according to the complaint, the teachers had announced in front of students that Merritt, who is straight, “swings both ways,” speculated that he wore women’s clothi
ng, and compared him to a Wisconsin man who had sex with a dead deer. The teachers denied the charges, but the school district paid $25,000 to settle the complaint. Soon representatives from the gay-rights group Outfront Minnesota began making inquiries at board meetings. “No Homo Promo” was starting to look like a risky policy.

  “The lawyers said, ‘You’d have a hard time defending it,’” remembers Scott Wenzel, a board member who for years had pushed colleagues to abolish the policy. “It was clear that it might risk a lawsuit.” But while board members agreed that such an overtly antigay policy needed to be scrapped, they also agreed that some guideline was needed to not only help teachers navigate a topic as inflammatory as homosexuality but to appease the area’s evangelical activists. So the legal department wrote a broad new course of action with language intended to give a respectful nod to the topic—but also an equal measure of respect to the antigay contingent. The new policy was circulated to staff without a word of introduction. (Parents were not alerted at all, unless they happened to be diligent online readers of board-meeting minutes.) And while “No Homo Promo” had at least been clear, the new Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy mostly just puzzled the teachers who’d be responsible for enforcing it. It read: