Yvonne Webb

Al­most overnight, the sim­ple state­ment that "it is okay to be gay" has turned the spot­light on a mod­el Na­pari­ma Col­lege Up­per Six stu­dent, mak­ing him a hero in the eyes of some and a pari­ah to oth­ers.

The young man in ques­tion, con­sid­ered an aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly gift­ed stu­dent by his peers and teach­ers, hav­ing achieved nine dis­tinc­tions at the CSEC Lev­el and who hopes to win an is­land schol­ar­ship, has since gone from be­ing on the "A" list to black­list.

How­ev­er, the young man, who wants to pur­sue a ca­reer in law so he can con­tin­ue to help the dis­en­fran­chised, has sworn not to let this in­ci­dent shift his fo­cus from his ul­ti­mate goals.

He told the T&T Guardian when he made the pro­nounce­ment in op­po­si­tion to an­ti-gay sen­ti­ments ut­tered by a teacher as he spoke at the school's morn­ing as­sem­bly the day be­fore, it was not in­tend­ed to bring the pres­ti­gious in­sti­tu­tion in­to dis­re­pute.

He said he did not en­vis­age the teacher would have been so af­fect­ed by his com­ment that she would have vent­ed be­fore Form Five class­es on that and oth­er is­sues, she hav­ing been chas­tised by her col­leagues for her ini­tial re­marks.

One of the ses­sions, in which the teacher er­ro­neous­ly dubbed him as be­ing gay, his par­ents as "screw ups" and "athe­ists" and threat­ened to take them and their off­springs out if she had a gun, was record­ed (au­dio) by a stu­dent and post­ed to so­cial me­dia.The post quick­ly went vi­ral and has been picked up by main­stream me­dia, putting the in­sti­tu­tion and the teacher un­der a mi­cro­scope.

Is­sues of drug use by stu­dents, some of whom are be­fore the court and whom she iden­ti­fied by name and the mode of dress of fe­male and male teach­ers have al­so been brought to the fore.Some have called for the teacher's re­moval and eval­u­a­tion while sup­port has come from var­i­ous stake­hold­ers.

How­ev­er, some stu­dents have al­so cre­at­ed an on­line pe­ti­tion hop­ing to gar­ner at least 1,000 sig­na­tures in sup­port of the teacher.The stu­dent said his peers smash­ing his phone and la­belling him gay was shock­ing but not un­ex­pect­ed.

"A lot of them think I cause the sit­u­a­tion Miss is in. They are say­ing she is a good teacher and she should not have to face the reper­cus­sion for what she did but all I did was say in my very un­ortho­dox style what a lot of peo­ple (stu­dents and staff) were think­ing but were afraid to voice," he told the T&T Guardian.

Asked why he did it, the young man, the first of four boys for his par­ents, said he and his sib­lings had been brought up by their par­ents to be in­de­pen­dent thinkers, to stand up for what they be­lieved in and to be re­spect­ful.

"She was dis­en­fran­chis­ing and dis­crim­i­nat­ing against a large group of stu­dents, many of which I know are in the school. I don't think that is right.

"If she had gone up there and said the same thing about peo­ple of African de­scent the back­lash would have been way greater than it was," he said.

On Tues­day, the teacher, in­struct­ed by the prin­ci­pal, apol­o­gised at the morn­ing as­sem­bly but said she stood by her words, which were mis­con­strued and mis­un­der­stood. She al­so "apol­o­gised" to the young man lat­er in the day, even though she was ad­vised not to in­ter­act with him.