A week ago my 36 housemates and I celebrated the one-year anniversary of the opening of our house. Our student-run cooperative, the Oscar Wilde House, is the first and currently the only gay/lesbian co-op on any university campus in the country. After the party, my good friend Michael and I sat around in the living room of the house talking about our childhoods. Michael went to Catholic schools in Riverside (southern California) whereas I grew up in Stockton and attended public schools. But through these and other major differences of location, some of my friend's descriptions of being an outcast as a child - of being ridiculed, ignored and unhappy - very much paralleled my own memories. My conversation with Michael made me curious about the childhood experiences of my other friends so I decided to question a few of them and came up with disturbing results: it seems that most of my friends and housemates suffered similar experiences of ridicule by their classmates and experienced feelings of shame and fear toward themselves. To some people these experiences caused a severe loss of self-esteem; others felt as if they did not wish to continue living. But to all, these experiences produced a large sense of confusion about who they truly were; the experiences profoundly set these people's lives back and took away their childhoods because their childhoods were, for the most part, quite miserable. My formal education at present is a sum of 12 years in the Lodi Unified School District and a semester at the University of California at Berkeley. Although I'm not yet an expert on Berkeley after one semester, I think I'm very qualified to discuss the quality of education in Lodi Unified and I will say that, in my opinion, education in Lodi Unified is quite superior. Many of the things I was taught since first grade I still carry with me today (no joke - reading, typing, tying my shoe, writing), and when I arrived at Berkeley I found myself extremely well-prepared. But there was one thing that the district never prepared me for - one thing that school failed me in and threw me out to the wolves to face alone: I'm gay. And no teacher ever told me it was all right to be gay. Nor did any teacher bother to tell my classmates/demons that it was all right to be gay; classmates who, on a daily basis, laughed at me, threw things at me, caused me to cry, humiliated me with harsh words like "faggot," destroyed my self-esteem, made my life a living hell, and caused me to wish for death every day. When I was in seventh grade, my sex ed/health teacher read a question that a student (not me) put in her anonymous question box. The question asked if it was normal to have feelings toward the same sex. I'll never forget her answer: "Well, it's sometimes normal for awhile. But eventually most people should grow out of it." Her words were burned into my head forever and I decided then never to let my true feelings come out to anyone because, to a 12-year-old, teachers are always right. This decision forced me into a shell - my own private little hell full of shame, self-doubt and sadness - for more than four years. It took soul searching, tears and a lot of energy to bring me out of this shell. About a month and a half ago, I came home and saw a newspaper article on the House Bulletin board that described how the Department of Education stated that gay students are not abnormal. Across the article, one of my housemates wrote a big "Duh" in red pen. It made me laugh. But it also made me think about my seventh grade health teacher and made me realize that LUSD earned a big fat "F" when it came to treating gay and lesbian students with dignity and when it came to diversity because no one was there to help me and many others out of the hell created by our peers and ourselves. Is LUSD still earning that "F"? And how about other districts around the country? Are gay and lesbian students still suffering? Is any school teaching gay and lesbian kids that they're all right? Is any school teaching straight kids that gays and lesbians are good people and should not be ridiculed? I doubt many are. And if they aren't, then they must begin to if they really care about their students. Because no child should want to die when he's 12.