Building a sense of harmony

A few months before Luke Bruffee began teaching at Belmont High School, he learned about a Newton elementary schoolteacher who told his students he was gay and found himself thrown under the spotlight, the subject of a fierce letter-writing campaign to have him removed from the classroom.

Bruffee, who is homosexual, followed the drama in Boston's gay press, vacillating all the while about whether he should tell his students and risk similar ire.

Last week, three years after those nail-biting nights of indecision, Bruffee, Belmont High's fine arts teacher and its out-of-the-closet adviser for the gay-straight student alliance, sat in a packed auditorium as the Boston Gay Men's Chorus performed with the high school chorus in what is believed to be the first integrated event of its kind in the United States. The concert drew a standing ovation.

"I'm pretty proud of how far we've come," said Bruffee, who helped facilitate the event. "It's good to be the first, no?"

In Governor Mitt Romney's tony hometown, near the national epicenter of the roiling debate on same-sex marriage, the nonchalance with which Bruffee and his concert was accepted by the student body highlights the vast generational divide between the political class and the class of 2004.

While Romney has fought to "preserve the sanctity of marriage," students at the local high school, a six-minute drive away from the governor's house, barely bat an eye at the concept, what it represents, or for that matter, Bruffee's now three-year-old admission.

"What I learned is that it's really not a big deal here," Bruffee said of the subject.

Belmont High School principal Foster E. Wright added: "I think the kids are all sort of asking why is [same-sex marriage] such a big deal. They don't see a problem. I think this is one of those cases of the children leading the adults."

Though the groundwork for the acceptance of homosexuality began 35 years ago -- the 1969 Stonewall Riot in Greenwich Village marked the beginning of the gay rights movement -- the speed with which attitudes have changed in just the past 35 months surprises even college students today, said Ritch Savin-Williams, a Cornell University professor and chairman of the Department of Human Development. College juniors and seniors are routinely taken aback by the level of acceptance their younger, high school-age brothers and sisters have toward homosexuality.

"The rate of change has absolutely increased in the last few years," he said.

That change can be seen in schools throughout the country -- and so can the reaction. In nearby Bedford, protest flared recently around a rainbow flag displayed at a middle school. And in Acton, some parents have expressed deep unease over the National Day of Silence celebrated last month.

The day, created by a University of Virginia freshman in 1996, asks participating students to not speak for a day to honor gay and lesbian students who have been effectively silenced by fear of harassment or bullying because of their sexual orientation. The observance has spread to 2,700 schools across the country, and increasingly, middle school students are participating.

Area educators say the foundation for this sea change in the schools came in the early 1990s, when a Massachusetts Department of Education study quantified the extent to which gay students were routinely humiliated and bullied. The state mandated and funded programs to make schools safer. Gay-straight student alliances were part of that response and began popping up in high schools around 1996.

Today, GLISTEN, which stands for Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network, estimates there are about 2,000 gay-straight alliances in high schools nationwide. In the last few years, about 20 have emerged in middle schools, including Mount Greylock Middle School Western Massachusetts. A gay-straight alliance in the Belmont Middle School has been discussed, but has not been formed, Wright said.

But Lucia Carrington, the parent of an Acton Middle School student, said middle schoolers are much too young for such groups, for they push an agenda beyond the comfort zone of a lot of parents.

"I don't have a problem that openly gay kids are accepted now," Carrington said. "I'm just looking for age-appropriate behavior. You give them all this information and what are they supposed to do with it?"

"We don't want to just drop off kids off at school and give up control," Carrington said. "There needs to be some sort of give and take here."

When it came to inviting the Boston Gay Men's Chorus to Belmont High School, Bruffee said, he tried to think through that equation before he set the ball rolling. Indeed, it was three years between the concept and the concert.

The idea came to him shortly after he took over as the gay-straight student alliance adviser. Up until that point, all of the events organized by the alliance emphasized the depressing and traumatic aspects of coming of age as a gay person in America, Bruffee said. There were speakers on teenage gay suicides, abuse, and bullying. But no one was celebrating the joy of the culture.

"It was all just so heavy," he said.

Bruffee discussed the idea of a concert with his partner, a part-time musician with the chorus, and they pitched it to the director, who thought about it for a while before responding.

"There's no way it would have ever been possible even five years ago," said Steven Smith, executive director of the Boston's Gay Men's Chorus. "We agreed because we think it's time."

While concerns like Carrington's are still widespread, opinion polls show a shift in attitudes nationwide. According to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington D.C., the level of acceptance of homosexuality has increased dramatically in a relatively short period.

In an analysis released by the institute last month, the percentage of Americans who think homosexuals should have equal rights in terms of job opportunities has increased from 56 percent in 1977 to 87 percent in 2004. And Americans who believe it's OK for homosexuals to be hired as elementary schoolteachers jumped from 27 percent in 1977 to 61 percent in 2003.

At Belmont High School, where, according to the 2000 Census, the median household income exceeds $80,000, age and socioeconomics have combined to further concentrate those trends.

A 2003 CBS/New York Times poll in December 2003, for instance, found that 56 percent of people ages 18 to 29 favored same-sex marriage, versus 14 percent of people age 65 and older. And a 2003 Gallup poll found that while just 46 percent of people from families who earn less than $20,000 believed gay sexual relations should be legal, that number jumped to 71 percent of people who come from families that earned more than $75,000.

That support was in evidence last week, when Tiana Velwisch announced to 1,200 students in the auditorium of Belmont High School that she is bisexual.

Velwisch, a preternaturally poised senior who will be studying mechanical engineering next year at Olin College in Needham, spoke as part of the school's diversity and tolerance week. Her speech wasn't jeered. There were no snickers, or even any particularly passionate pleas for justice, said students in attendance. The reception was notable mostly for its matter-of-factness.

"You would think I would have a lot to write in response to being one of the few openly gay students at Belmont High School," she began. "But I am I pleased to say that I can't think of a significant time when I've been discriminated against."

Similarly, Bruffee said he wasn't particularly concerned with the students' reaction to the concert or his own coming out. Rather, his apprehension was reserved for the adults.

To avoid problems, all the choral students were sent home with a letter informing parents that their children had been asked to perform with a gay men's chorus and that participation was optional. A couple of students pulled out, Smith said.

When the students began practicing the songs, a piece titled "Everything Possible" created a stir. The song includes the words "Some women love women, some men love men, some raise children, some never do."

The line elicited a rash of phone calls and meetings. Wright was asked to change or omit the lines. He refused.

"As far as I'm concerned there nothing wrong with those words," said Wright, an avuncular man wearing a blue sweater vest and steel-rimmed glasses one day last week. "I'm an old English teacher and I have lot of respect for the author's words. I said, 'No way, if we change these, where do we stop?' "

The confidence to rebuff that pressure, Wright said, has come only after laying years of groundwork in the school and the community. Wright is retiring in June after 25 years as principal and has built a strong base of support. "People trust me," he said simply.

Wright also has a keen ear to the ground. The positive portrayal of homosexuals in the media and on television shows like "Will and Grace" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" has made Wright's agenda much easier to advance, he said. "If I were going to write my own epitaph, it would be 'His school was safe for all kids,' " Wright said.

And because it is now safer for gay teens to come out of the closet, they are doing so earlier and earlier.

Through the early 1990s, homosexuals typically were age 19 and had moved away from home by the time they came out, said Savin-Williams, the professor at Cornell. That age has dropped to around 16 today.

In urban areas, like Boston, youths typically come out around 15, and "it's not uncommon for a 13-year-old to label herself or himself gay and disclose that to others," Savin-Williams said.

Velwisch didn't even wait that long. When she was 9, during a trip to Provincetown, she said to her mother, simply: "Mom I'm bisexual," Velwisch said last week. "My mother said, 'That's nice, honey.' I was out to everyone when I first got to high school."

That acceptance created confidence, she said. Enough to mail the governor an invitation and a pair of tickets to the performance a few weeks before the concert. The governor declined to come. His spokeswoman said he had a previous engagement.

Velwisch shrugged her shoulders at the rejection and grinned. "Whatever," she said.

Douglas Belkin can be reached at dbelkin@globe.com.