What Happens When a Virginia Middle School Shut Down Its LGBTQ+ Student Club After Facebook Outrage
I was wiping peanut butter smudges off my kitchen counter last April, packing my 7th grader’s lunch for the next day, when my local parent Facebook group blew up. The post was from a mom with a kid at Spotsylvania County’s Battlefield Middle School, sharing the news: the school had just given official approval for a GSA – a gay-straight alliance, an LGBTQ+ student club – after a group of 8th graders requested it. By the time I refreshed the page 10 minutes later, there were 120 comments, and the post had been shared more than 200 times.
Most of the comments were angry. People called the club indoctrination, said it was pushing a political agenda on kids who weren’t old enough to understand, and threatened to vote out every school board member who approved it. I know that area well; my neighbor Sarah’s 13-year-old daughter Lila, who came out as bisexual the year before, had already signed up to join. Sarah texted me an hour after the post went up, saying Lila had already gotten three messages from relatives asking if she was “being brainwashed at school.” A week later, the school board voted 4-2 to reverse the approval. The club was shut down before it even held its first official after-school meeting.
I went over to Sarah’s house that night to bring dinner and let our kids play. Lila was curled up on the couch, picking at a rainbow sticker she’d drawn to tape to the club’s meeting room door. She kept repeating that it wasn’t what everyone was saying. “We weren’t gonna talk about sex,” she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “We just didn’t want to have to hide when we talk about our girlfriends, or when Jake gets misgendered in math class. We just wanted a place to sit.”
Most of the people leaving angry comments on that Facebook post didn’t have any connection to a queer kid their kid’s age. For them, the club was just a political talking point, something to get mad about ahead of the next school board election. They didn’t know Lila, or Jake, the 7th grader who gets called slurs in the hallway every day after PE. They’d never sat in a middle school cafeteria and watched a kid eat lunch alone because no one will sit with them.
That’s the part that gets lost in all the social media outrage, isn’t it? Most people commenting have never been to a middle school GSA meeting. I volunteered as a chaperone for one at my kid’s school three years ago, and the first meeting we spent 40 minutes debating the best slushie flavor and making fun of the principal’s bad tie. One kid cried for 10 minutes because he’d just come out to his dad and hadn’t heard back, and the rest of the kids passed him a bag of gummy bears and sat with him. No one gave a lesson, no one pushed an agenda. That’s what middle school clubs are, no matter what their focus is: just kids looking for other kids who get them.
I’ve talked to a lot of parents and teachers lately who ask what they can do when this kind of thing happens in their town, when fear on social media shuts down a space kids need. A lot of people think you have to fight a big, expensive school board battle to make a difference, but that’s not the only way.
For teachers, one small, low-effort thing you can do that doesn’t need board approval is put a small sticker on your desk that signals you’re safe – it can be a pride sticker, or just a small sign that says “All are welcome.” A friend of mine who teaches 7th grade social studies leaves her door open during lunch one day a week, and any kid who wants to get away from the noise or drama in the cafeteria can come sit, eat, draw, or play quiet phone games. She doesn’t call it a GSA, she doesn’t make a big announcement, but the kids know. Word gets around. That’s enough for a lot of kids who just need a break from teasing.
For parents, the most concrete thing you can do is ask one simple question out loud, that most of us never bring up. Instead of just posting on Facebook arguing one way or the other, sit down with your kid at dinner and say, “Have you ever seen anyone get picked on at school for being gay or trans?” or “If you ever needed a place to talk about stuff you didn’t want to bring up to me or your other friends, would you know where to go?” That question doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t require a school board vote, and it tells your kid (and any other kids they might talk to) that you’re safe. A lot of queer middle schoolers don’t ask for help because they assume everyone else is against them, just like what they see on the news. That one question can change that.
After the club got shut down in Spotsylvania, a group of local parents and retired teachers got together to book a small meeting room at the downtown public library. Lila and the four other original kids go every other Friday after school. Sometimes they get pizza, sometimes they work on homework, sometimes they plan for the next school board meeting. Last month, they had a game night and eight more kids showed up, most of them allies who just got tired of seeing their friends picked on.
It’s not an official school club, though. It’s not advertised in the student handbook, it doesn’t get a spot at the back-to-school club fair, so there are still kids sitting alone at lunch who don’t know it exists. I still see the arguments popping up on the parent Facebook group every few weeks, one side yelling about tolerance and the other yelling about indoctrination, the whole thing cycling round and round.
The kids aren’t waiting for the fight to end, though. They’re just meeting in the library, eating cold pizza, talking about the latest Netflix show, and giving each other a place to sit. That’s all they ever wanted in the first place. The fight’s still going, the outcome’s still uncertain, but for the kids who know where to go, there’s at least a space for them right now.
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