Confronting Homophobia at School: High School Students and the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles

Abstract

This study discusses student responses to curriculum taught by the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles to choral students in local high schools. The Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles's A-LIVE Music Project brings live music and standards-driven curriculum to high school youth with the express purpose of teaching content in innovative ways and encouraging students to think critically and reflect personally. This study summarizes open-ended qualitative questions from pre- and post-assessment surveys, and investigates how students bring to school their constructed meanings of gender, race, sexuality, and class, and how the implementation of the Project changed students’ views of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and classism.

KEYWORDS:

• Homophobia
• music
• music education
• prejudice reduction
• secondary education

Notes

1. At present, only gay male composers are used in the AMP curriculum in an attempt to provide a one-to-one connection with the gay male singers performing their music. However, GMCLA is constantly evolving their curriculum so that lesbian composers, the Civil Rights Movement generally, and music reflecting the diversity of the students in the schools themselves will become a more focused and purposive component of subsequent presentations.