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Three Years Later, A Different World
by Benji Whitman
In 2012, I was a graduate student in Kent State’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and a part-time writer for the Ohio monthly Gay People’s Chronicle. I covered the school board fight in Lima, Ohio, for that publication, and now, three years later, the Advocate is curious as to what’s happened in that town. Frankly, so am I.
I flew into Cleveland and rented a car, mainly so I could experience the same drive I took twice in 2012. I drove first to the building where the school board met back then, the old Lima City Schools central offices. The building’s empty now; a quick search on Google informed me that they’d built new offices and moved over the winter holiday a few months ago. A ‘for sale or lease’ sign sits in front of the building, and grass is threatening to overtake the sidewalks that the enthusiastic members of McKinley High School’s PFLAG group decorated with chalked slogans.
Time moves on.
So I went into downtown Lima and asked my phone to direct me to the nearest Starbucks. Still nestled inside the hospital, it was fairly empty, and I struck up a conversation with the two baristas. One of them turned out to be the manager, asking why I was in town. When I explained my purpose, she laughed.
“Oh, has it been three years already? I guess it has. Charles here is in PFLAG.” She looked almost conspiratory. “Some of them need a job more than others, you know? I found Noah, but he brought me Casey, and then there was Maci, and she brought Charles.”
“So has there been controversy since then?”
“Oh, there’s probably always going to be a few idiots,” she said. “But out in the community, no. Most people are too busy being proud of the Karofsky boy. First out player in NCAA football! We have other things to think about now. Other reasons for our town to be on the map.”
And that seemed to be the response I got everywhere. How did a contentious issue that divided a community fade into the background so quickly? I started walking around town, talking to the teenagers that passed, and a strange image emerged.
I should talk to Taylor Lange, they said. He’s the senior class president and Prom King, they would each explain. Oh, and Alicia Brown, too, but she’s not his girlfriend. The names were familiar but I admit I had to go back and look at my notes from three years before.
Taylor Lange. The freshman who outed himself as trans in front of the school board meeting. He and two of his friends were ambushed less than two months later in a stairwell, the only fight on McKinley campus during the 2012 school year that resulted in an expulsion. There wasn’t any discussion about the fact that Taylor was trans, though, not in any of the conversations I had. No one messed up their pronouns. And he was senior class president?
Alicia Brown. Her older brother was in PFLAG, too, and their mother spoke at the April 2012 school board meeting. Head cheerleader and according to most of the students I spoke with, “HBIC.” Her boyfriend was in the class of 2014 and plays football at OSU; her best friend, a fellow cheerleader, is Taylor’s girlfriend. The same Maci that the Starbucks manager mentioned? Maybe.
I went to McKinley the next morning and spoke with Principal Figgins briefly, getting permission to be on campus, and then was directed to one of the PFLAG faculty sponsors.
“Oh, we have several students whose parents moved into the school district so their children could attend Lima City Schools,” Ms. Pillsbury-Schuester, the guidance counselor, explained to me. “We have a few others that apply for transfers from nearby districts. PFLAG has grown enormously, of course; they meet weekly now and last year, Casey and Taylor set up a buddy system of sorts, to help the underclassmen.”
What I quickly realized was that PFLAG was something of a group to be a part of. Plenty of students told me that “sometimes” they go to PFLAG, “depending on the meeting topic – and the food!” as one girl put it. One junior elucidated: “All the popular kids are in PFLAG. Especially the senior class. Taylor and Alicia and Maci and Taylor’s two best friends and their girlfriends? Everyone wants to be their friend. There’s a reason Taylor and Alicia were this year’s prom royalty.”
When I tried to find Taylor to interview him, though, I was informed that he, along with Alicia and twenty-eight other students, was in New York City, competing in the national show choir competition. The 2012 PFLAG group included all twelve members of the 2012 “New Directions” nationals–winning glee club at McKinley, which I remembered from their dramatic entrance to the final school board meeting, and the rumors in the hallways were that this group, in 2015, had a good chance of winning for the first time in three years. This was big, exciting news, and McKinley seemed to be anxiously awaiting the results.
Frankly, I felt like I’d stepped into some kind of alternate universe. I was quickly reassured that yes, football was still popular and that yes, football players and cheerleaders were near–universally admired. The difference was that the football players and the cheerleaders and other athletes were involved in PFLAG.
I ended up emailing a list of questions to Taylor Lange, because I was curious. How does someone who is trans end up as senior class president and Prom King, especially at a school in rural Ohio? (I can diss Ohio; I’m from Ohio.)
The policy change, he wrote back, made all the difference. More and more kids are out every year, he told me, and then explained that after the administration started to realize what was going on, it began to make even more of a difference. He’s an articulate young man, headed to Oberlin in the fall on a merit scholarship, and I’m going to let his words close the article.
“We had a tremendous example in the class of 2012, and we didn’t want to let them down with PFLAG or anything else. I don’t think most of them realized how much we looked up to them. The kids in glee club, David Karofsky, a few other seniors – we wanted to make them proud. PFLAG started meeting weekly, the policies were enforced, and everything started snowballing. One of them had cautioned us to remember that it’s ‘alphabet soup’ not ‘G soup’, so to speak, and we tried to take that even more to heart. We’re not perfect; we all have our biases. But some of the class of 2012 made ‘It Gets Better’ videos, after they graduated. None of us have to make those. It already is better.”