English teacher Jason Hinojosa will moderate a one-hour Country Day Queer Voices panel on Jan 12 at 1:30 p.m. in the Matthews Library. All seniors will be attending the panel, but Hinojosa encourages interested students of other grades to attend, too.
The panel is being held to supplement “The Laramie Project,” a play about the aftermath of the murder of a gay man, Matthew Shepard, in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998. Hinojosa teaches the play to his Advanced Topics English classes.
Hinojosa began inviting members of the Sacramento LGBT Community Center to hold a panel with students. The panel was held twice in person and on Zoom in 2021 due to COVID-19.
This year, the LGBT Community Center canceled due to COVID-19, but Hinojosa decided to hold the panel with members of the Country Day community.
“I think it could be really powerful,” Hinojosa said.
Panelists include six students, including at least one from each grade in the high school.
Questions for the panelists will be generated by Hinojosa and students in his AT English classes.
“I’m hoping that we can humanize a social issue,” Hinojosa said. “When you put an actual human face to an issue or to an identity, I think it changes things. So I’m hoping people grow in empathy as they listen.”
— By Ethan Monasa
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Ethan Monasa’s article on the panel discussion at SCDS on January 12 regarding the LGBT community is , I think, a timely issue for these students. I had a younger brother who was gay, and as a family we were aware in the 1960’s that he had a different social group as an adolescent. He had opened up to me, his older sister, that even in grade school he had felt more attracted to his male classmates and older men. Our family members were accepting of his homosexuality when he was in his twenties except for our father. Since these feelings and sexual experiences often start in the prepubescent ages, the issue may need to be openly discussed sooner than most parents may think. I want to applaud this English teacher and SCDS for humanizing such a controversial topic. Patricia Vason Mickler