With public funding approved by the Ministry of Culture and the government of São Paulo, the NGO E-Jovemwill be opening the first gay school in the country in Campinas this coming March. The idea is to provide a safe place for gay teenagers to express themselves, while also learning and promoting gay culture.
The school will offer free extracurricular courses on dancing, TV and web, and editorial production of fanzines. Dozens of students, homosexual and heterosexual, have already applied for the courses this year, which will all be taught by volunteers selected by E-Jovem. A drag queen course and other programs are already in the works for next year.
While certainly controversial to some, I love the project and hope that it proves to be very successful in Campinas so that other cities may follow. Would such a school every be possible in the US?
1 comment:
Wow!
I lived in Brasil in 72-73, and Campinas was the town they joked about. I had thought it was just silliness, but I guess there are jokes about SF, and I came to live in SF long ago because I thought of it as a queer mecca. (In the community, queer is a positive shorthand for lgbt.)
The photos they include are interesting. In your face, with two boys kissing. I like that, and I can't imagine that in an ad for a U.S. school. We do have a few schools here like that, in LA and NYC at least. But they'd show the kids holding hands, not kissing.
I also noticed that there were no girls in the photos. What's that about?
Thanks for sharing this!
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