A Stand for Human Worth

It was an ugly epithet that greeted Jamie Nabozny at school every day for five years.

In the gym, on the school bus, walking into class, in the hallways, in the bathroom, in the cafeteria--over and over, he heard the chant of those who hate gays.

“I’d get on the bus. They would yell [names] at me,� says Nabozny, who at 12 began facing every child’s worst fear: a taunting group of kids each time he climbed the steps onto the bus.

“Eventually, I was switched to the front of the bus, but the older kids told the younger kids at the front that I molested children, so it didn’t help.� Neither did the bus driver, who did nothing.

Jamie stopped riding the bus. He walked five miles a day to school. The abuse got worse. Much worse.

When he was 16, Jamie escaped. Not only the high school, but his hometown of Ashland, Wis. He moved alone to Minneapolis, the nearest big city.

But Jamie did what no other gay young man has done. He sued his high school in federal court in Wisconsin.

Two principals and an assistant principal were found liable for not protecting him: They had allowed him to not only be verbally harassed, but urinated on, mock raped, and kicked unconscious in a school corridor so viciously that he was later rushed to a hospital where surgery was performed for internal bleeding.

Late last year, Jamie Nabozny won a million-dollar settlement.

And the repercussions of the case are rippling across the country--from rural school boards to federal agencies. On the basis of the Nabozny case, even the Department of Justice is considering the broader policy of intervention on behalf of students.

“My first day back from trial, I got calls from four school districts--in Texas, Minnesota, Florida and upstate New York,� says David Buckel, one of the attorneys who represented Nabozny in what he says is the first legal challenge to anti-gay violence in schools. “The impact has gone into every state. Calls are coming from parents who realize they could do something, attorneys with cases they realize can go somewhere.�

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In its landmark ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals applied the Equal Protection Clause to sexual orientation in the school setting, requiring the state to “treat each person with equal regard, as having equal worth, regardless of his or her status.� The court said, “We are unable to garner any rational basis for permitting one student to assault another based on the victim’s sexual orientation.�

The ruling has shaken the mind-set of school boards, says Buckel, staff attorney for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the nation’s oldest and largest gay legal organization.

“In the past, when I was trying to put a stop to anti-gay abuse in schools, quite often my argument had to be that the school educator had to care about the safety of the child. Oftentimes it did not work,� he says. “Now I can add an additional argument: ‘You, Mr. or Ms. Principal, may be personally liable for failing to stop this abuse, and I have precedent to prove it.’

“Asking people to do the right things sometimes is not enough,� Buckel says.

It wasn’t enough in Ashland.

“We begged, we pleaded, we screamed,� says Bob Nabozny, Jamie’s father. “We were in that office so many times. And every time we walked out, they said, ‘We’ll take care of it, we’ll take care of it.’ And they didn’t.�

“Nobody did anything,� echoes Jamie’s mother, Carol, still indignant. “Nothing was ever done to stop those kids from doing what they were doing. It was just institutionalized homophobia.�

Five years later, and even after the million-dollar settlement paid to their son, the Naboznys still suffer the powerlessness and pain of parents forced to watch as their child is “humiliated, tormented and physically battered,� Carol says.

Jamie Nabozny remembers the first scarring episode--a mock rape in summer school while the teacher was out of the room--as well as the surreal reaction by the administration. “It was during the summer between seventh and eighth grade. Boys started whispering in my ear, things like, ‘You’re so cute, we want to go out with you.’ They started grabbing my butt, touching me. One of them pushed me to the floor, got on top of me, and pretended to be raping me,� he says. “The other kids were standing all around me, laughing. I threw him off me.�

He marched into the principal’s office, where he says he was treated like the criminal rather than the victim. “She was upset that I didn’t go through her secretary to make an appointment,� says Nabozny, now 21. “She told me that ‘boys will be boys’ and that if I was going to be ‘openly gay’ I had to expect that kind of stuff.� No punishment was meted out.

And the violence escalated.

In ninth grade, Jamie was pushed head-first into a urinal and urinated on. “I was standing at the urinal. The kid standing behind me pushed the back of my knee causing my knee to buckle, and I fell into the urinal,� he recalls. “The boy standing beside me urinated on me. I was humiliated.�

Soaking wet, Jamie again went to the principal’s office.

“The principal never even came out,� he says. “And the secretary basically just called my father to come get me.�

Nabozny started going to school earlier and earlier to avoid confrontation and abuse. “It was safer, or so I thought,� he says.

The final incident sent him to the hospital.

“I was sitting there, outside the library. Ten boys approached me. One of them kicked the books out of my hands. When I went to pick up the books, he started to kick me, and continued to kick me. I think I blanked out.�

Two days later, he was taken by ambulance to the hospital for exploratory surgery. “The pain had gotten so bad I couldn’t walk,� says Nabozny, who was suffering from internal bleeding and bruising.

Shortly after he was released from the hospital and returned to school, a decision was made for him to leave school and leave Ashland.

“My parents and I met with the guidance counselor, Lynn Hansen, who was the only person at school to support me. She basically recognized that things weren’t going to get any better,� Nabozny says. “She suggested to my parents that they let me go.� He moved to Minneapolis and into a foster home.

“We lost the last two years of his growing up,� Bob Nabozny says. “We lost being able to tell him good night.�

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Bob Nabozny, a carpenter, grew up in Ashland and confronted his own homophobia only after he learned his son was gay.

“It was a real blow to me at first. ‘Not my son.’ I don’t think it would be any different for any father. I felt real hurt and confused,� he recalls. “But when I had to deal with Jamie, I thought I had better start educating myself. I read a lot of books, a lot of literature. When Jamie came home weekends from the city, bringing a friend home or something, I’d listen to their stories.�

Like many parents with openly gay children, his relationship with his son has grown stronger. “The honesty and communication has brought me and Jamie very close together in terms of a father-son relationship. My wife and me and the three boys marched in the gay pride parade in Minneapolis two years ago. It felt great. And the group we marched with, P-FLAG [Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays], got the most applause and attention from the audience and the watchers in the parade.�

The verdict against the three school administrators is vindication for the Naboznys, although they are disappointed that the reprimands weren’t more severe. School officials will not discuss the punishment, but the local newspaper reported that middle school principal Mary Podlesny was suspended without pay for a week, high school principal William Davis received only a verbal reprimand and his assistant, Thomas Blauert, was suspended without pay for two weeks.

Meanwhile, guidance counselor Hansen, who stood up for Nabozny at the trial, says she was forced to move out of her house after phone threats and intimidation, which the FBI is investigating.

But she had no choice, she says: “I couldn’t stand by and watch the abuse and say nothing.�

Ashland School District officials believe Jamie Nabozny’s case has been distorted by the media.

“There’s a Pulitzer Prize for whoever tells the other side of the story,� says Bill Leakey, school board president and owner of a seed company. “The judge didn’t get the opportunity to uphold the verdict [because] our insurance company opted to settle after the jury verdict came in. That ended the process right there. That same judge threw out the case initially; he may have felt the jury’s conclusion was incorrect.�

Leakey says measures to prevent harassment of students are in place. “We’ve corrected the system,� he says, though he offered no examples of how.

“The system is not corrected at all,� counters Hansen, who has filed a harassment claim against the principal at the middle school. “First it was Jamie and now it’s me.�

Bob Nabozny sees his son’s victory ensuring a new vigilance against all forms of harassment in schools.

“It’s going to force all school administrators to open up their eyes to a realization of the different types of abuse that are going on, whether the kids are gay or overweight or skinny or have pimples or wear the wrong kind of shoes,� he says. “It’s there and it’s real.�