Safe Passage
When Sarah Ivy was growing up in rural Kansas and the suburb of Overland Park, she wasn’t exactly beating the drums of gay advocacy. “Even at KU, I didn’t really have any gay or lesbian friends,” she says. “I was asexual. I was oblivious.”
Ivy’s incremental self-acceptance makes her participation in next week’s Makin’ It Safe all the more extraordinary. She and dozens of area youths and young adults, along with supportive organizations, congregate in Loose Park on Monday for a series of readings and skits designed to celebrate the LGBT Youth Violence Prevention Project of Greater Kansas City.
The event “is for the people who are out there getting harassed,” says Ivy, who is now 24. “I want them to have a legitimate reason to complain. I wouldn’t have said anything to anybody if I’d been harassed.”
Like many young people in her shoes, Ivy secretly harbored sexual-identity questions. She remembers friends asking about her sexual orientation during her teen and college years, but she claimed she wasn’t a lesbian. She recalls one incident involving her journal, which contained romantic writing about a certain young woman.
“When a friend found what I had hidden, I denied it and burned the page,” she recalls. “I was scared my secret would get out. And I was trying to convince myself I wasn’t gay. This event is important for youth even if it’s about having support in that moment.”
Sponsored by the Kansas City Chapter of The National Conference for Community and Justice, the effort is one of only three Department of Health and Human Services-funded projects in the country designed to help individuals or organizations that support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youths.
The NCCJ is an organization that, for 75 years, has brought issues of religious bias, racism and sexism out of the closet. But Executive Director Juan Rangel says the organization only began addressing homophobia in the last decade.
“Although the organization has always been progressive in many ways,” Rangel says, “it was time to address heterosexism as a form of oppression. And to address one form is to address all forms.”
