When Stuart Chen-Hayes visited his home town in Park Forest, Illinois, this past March, he was welcomed by high school students who are too young to remember the 1960s and ’70s when he was growing up.
Chen-Hayes was the first presenter for Live Out Loud: The Homecoming Project at Rich East High School. In this program, successful adults from the LBGT community connect with students through a local Gay-Straight Alliance to offer support and resources to students.
“They were born in the late 1990s and had no connection to my experiences as a young boy or a teen,” Chen-Hayes said. When he grew up, the town was primarily white, but today the demographic is mostly African American.
“So as an anti-racist white man married to a man of color with a mixed race child, it was especially powerful to return to a community of color and speak about my life journey as an ally.”
“I was emotionally and physically abused in elementary school and no adult ever intervened. I was not a traditional masculine boy. I was not into sports; I was into the arts. I did all sorts of things that were gender variant from the expectations of what it meant to be a traditional boy,” Chen-Hayes said.
“I also shared that I was determined to have a successful life and show the bullies that they couldn’t harm me after high school,” said Chen-Hayes, who now holds a PhD from Kent State, and works as a counselor educator at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He has written numerous publications and recently co-authored the book, “101 Solutions for School Counselors and Leaders in Challenging Times.”
“I shared stories from the rest of my life and how I’ve come so far since then. I felt empowered to inspire the students in the audience and thrilled to share my journey. They were so engaged, laughed at every one of my jokes, and the light in their eyes told me that I’d made the right decision by including that lecture on my itinerary. My son got to visit with them at the end and their questions for the son of two gay dads were profound,” Chen-Hayes said.
One of the difficult stories he shared was about being taunted by the high school football coach when he couldn’t run a mile in freshman gym. That same coach mocked him in front of the football team after school.
“We have an epidemic of haters in sports in the U.S. The firing of the Rutgers basketball coach [Mike Rice] for physical and emotional abuse is only the tip of the iceberg. His homophobia was caught on tape, but plenty of others have done it without getting caught. So that kind of hate is still all too prevalent and hidden, and often not discovered until it’s too late to intervene. It’s great New Jersey has such a strong anti-bullying law, but all states don’t and that law sure doesn’t reach to abusive college coaches.”
Today Chen-Hayes is working to eradicate the kind of abuses he described through his role of school counselor educator at Lehman. He said he was naturally attracted to academia, in part, because he comes from a scholarly family. His father was a school librarian and sociology teacher for 24 years, and his mother had two successful careers, first as a botany professor, and later as a medical librarian.
“As a counselor educator focused on transforming the preparation of school counselors, my life’s work has been in two areas of inquiry: transforming school counseling focused on equitable academic, career, college access, and personal/social competencies for every K-12 student and effective counseling and advocacy for LBGT children, adolescents, and families in schools. “
Since Chen-Hayes became involved in LBGT issues, he has been developing counseling guidelines and giving presentations for over two decades and has worked in collaboration with his husband, Lance, for 18 years. They have presented at National Conference for Educators on LBGTIQA Youth: Supporting Students/Saving Lives in San Diego for several years. Their son Kalani, a fifth grade student at Princeton Friends School, has presented with them for the last three years, speaking on behalf of young people who are struggling with LGBT issues or who have been victims of violence.
In 2010 Chen-Hayes spoke at a memorial for Tyler Clementi in Ridgewood. “We have gay kids committing suicide in part due to hate and homophobia. As gay dads raising a child, we had powerful reactions to what happened to Tyler Clementi. I spoke at the memorial as a Plainsboro resident who condemned what occurred and who has found Plainsboro to be a town that is usually welcoming of diversity-more so than others in New Jersey and the USA. However, we’re the only out gay dads in Plainsboro as far as we know, and we wanted [to represent] the linguistic and ethnic/racial diversity that matches our family found here in Plainsboro.”
“Kalani has been welcomed wherever he has gone by his peers, and they have always been affirming of our family,” Chen-Hayes adds. “Sometimes they’ve had questions, and he’s good at answering them.”
His husband, Lance, born in Taiwan, has been a physical therapist in New Jersey for more than 25 years, with experience working with both elderly people and children. Lance and Stuart met in 1995 through a personal ad in a Chicago alternative newspaper. They have been together ever since their first date, on a cold January night when the wind chill reached –22 degrees.
When their son Kalani became part of their family, Lance drew on his experience of child development. “Our son is able to be who he really is. Development is a life-long experience, and we are growing with our son,” Lance said.
Personal growth has not been limited to the dads. When the couple decided they wanted a child, Stuart’s sister offered to bear their son. “My sister volunteered to be our surrogate, so our son is genetically ‘both’ of us,” Chen-Hayes said. Stuart’s mother, Lois Hayes, a proud grandparent, lives with Chen-Hayes family in their Plainsboro home.
“The reason we speak at public events and conferences is to educate people that kids need support from teachers and educators,” Lance said.
One of the popular presentations Chen-Hayes gives to educators is “LGBTIQQ2STZ 101: What do all these letters mean?”
Literally, they stand for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, Two-Spirit, and Tong Zhi.
Chen-Hayes elaborates in the presentation. “If we don’t acknowledge the difference between sex and gender, how can we expect kids to understand this? Sex is biological including genitals, chromosomes, and hormones. Gender is our internal experience of masculinity/femininity and how we express it.
“Defining terms is a good way to characterize the skills counselors need to be effective and affirming in working with the full range of sexual orientation and gender identity and expression,” Chen-Hayes said.
One of the lesser known terms in modern culture that Chen-Hayes discusses is Two-Spirit, an indigenous expression for third gender. Two-spirits can balance the masculine and feminine. Acknowledging Two-Spirit is a powerful way of claiming and reclaiming the indigenous tradition found in many communities, especially in the Southwest before this land became part of the United States. The Zunis, in particular, see the Two-Spirit person as someone to be revered. They were the healers, the shamans, the counselors. To a large extent, the Two-Spirit tradition has been Christianized and colonized away, but it is still alive today.
Another lesser known term, Tong Zhi, which can be translated as comrade, is the term used in Chinese culture for LBGT. It refers to people who are same-gender attracted or are in the gender identity spectrum.
Another phrase Chen-Hayes discusses is Intersex, a person with both sets of genitalia. Most of us are on a spectrum, Chen-Hayes said. We are not biologically 100 percent anything. Chromosomally, hormonally, there is a lot more variation within individuals than you would think.
The conventional perceptions of what it means to be masculine or feminine is a result of social constructionism. Although biology plays its part, we are strongly socialized into our roles, he said.
Chen-Hayes refers to the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, (KSOG) which expands upon the work of Alfred Kinsey. KSOG is a system for describing a person’s sexual inclinations on a scale of 0-6 based on sexual attraction, behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, lifestyle, self identification. The grid also acknowledges that people change during their lifetime, so a person’s past, present, and ideal future can be different.
“This is very helpful and useful. It shows that nobody is a zero or a six. There is really a range. Sexual orientation is not just behavior. It’s all these other pieces working together,” Chen-Hayes said.
The more commonly used terms include lesbians, women who are attracted to women; bisexual, people attracted to both genders; gays, men attracted to men; and transgender(ed), people who identify with the opposite sex and who might or might not have received medical services to alter their bodies. Queer, when used by someone within or as an ally of the LBGT community, is an empowering term. Questioning includes people who are inquiring about their identity and expression.
The letter A, which is not defined in this particular presentation, stands for ally, someone who supports the LBGT community.
The Chen-Hayes family has found at least a few allies in the Plainsboro area. Having moved from Monroe Township, they find their home in the new town center to be “a good match for a city guys who felt stranded in the suburbs.”
They have made close friendships with some of their neighbors and business owners and they have become regulars at Romeo’s Pizza. The family is a Friend of Plainsboro library and they frequent its public programs. They enjoy Plainsboro’s ethnic diversity, often visit the Plainsboro nature preserve and other parks, and Princeton’s Labyrinth book store.
Back in 2010, Chen-Hayes was hoping to send Kalani to the proposed Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS), which never won final approval.
Today their son attends the Princeton’s Friends School and is being tutored in Mandarin. He previously attended Mandarin immersion schools in Taiwan and the U.S. “Our goal with each of these schools has been early-age intensive language immersion and focus on progressive, creative, inquiry-based teaching and learning,” Chen-Hayes says.
Kalani, who is now nine years old, speaks and reads Mandarin fluently. The whole family will visit Taiwan this summer, where they will give a presentation in July for the Taiwan LBGT Family Association.
Whether reaching out to communities in California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, or Taiwan, Chen-Hayes’ message is the same:
“In my role of educator, I have a vision,” he said: “A world that supports all kids, especially LBGTIQA questioning children and adolescents, as well as the children of LBGT parents, both at home and at school.”
