Denver Public Schools (DPS) has partnered with a University of Colorado group to make a documentary promoting LGBT views to children.
The film, titled Reclaiming the Narrative: A Documentary About LGBTQ+ Youth, includes the perspectives of 16 LGBT-identifying students from 13 high schools in the district. These include students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other similar identities.
The trailer for the documentary, available on YouTube, starts with somebody saying, “I want to be the role model for kids that look like me – another brown, queer, gay boy.” Another person in the trailer adds, “Gender is also so much more beyond male and female.”
DPS says the project is an attempt to “reframe and disrupt detrimental narratives” by highlighting the “joy and celebrations of intersectional identities” among LGBT youth, according to a report from Parents Defending Education.
“Their stories paint a broader and more nuanced picture of LGBTQ+ youth,” the DPS website says. “While recognizing some of the challenges LGBTQ+ students face in schools, their stories reframe and disrupt detrimental narratives with moments of joy and celebrations of intersectional identities. Denver Public Schools and A Queer Endeavor are confident the film – which will be the foundation for a new professional learning opportunity for educators in Colorado and beyond – will provide educators with a deeper understanding of the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth.”
Meanwhile, a Denver Public Schools employee wrote in an email to the Trans Educators Network (TEN) last week that the film accurately captured the lives of these students.
“Last year, our district partnered with A Queer Endeavor, a center for GSD [Gender and Sexual Diversity] in education for teachers at the University of Colorado Boulder to create a documentary about what’s really missing in LGBTQ+ professional development, the voices of youth themselves and portraits that aptly capture the dynamic complexity of their lived experiences as smart, funny, complicated, whole humans who have embodied knowledge, ideas, and advice to inform how to make schools places of possibility,” the employee wrote, according to PDE.
The DPS Program Manager for LGBTQ+ Equity Initiatives, who identifies as a “transmasculine, genderqueer educator,” led the initiative to create this documentary.
A Queer Endeavor, the organization at the University of Colorado Boulder that DPS partnered with to produce it, aims to promote LGBT themes in schools.
“A Queer Endeavor builds partnerships with school communities to make ‘unworkable’ the silence that surrounds topics of gender and sexual diversity in education,” the organization’s website says. “Drawing on critical, queer, and anti-oppressive perspectives, we design and facilitate professional learning experiences for teachers, counselors, school- and district-leaders, and youth-serving adults.”
The full documentary does not appear to be publicly available online.
Tom Joyce – The Lion
Tom Joyce is a freelance writer covering politics, sports and culture. This piece first appeared in The Lion, a publication of the Herzog Foundation