Kevin Jennings is a writer, a teacher, and a leader in the fields of K-12 education and civil rights. A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Kevin Jennings graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he delivered the Harvard Oration at the 1985 Commencement. He became a high school history teacher after graduation. He became the faculty advisor to the nation’s first gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at Concord (Massachusetts) Academy in 1988, launching his life on a path dedicated to seeking to make sure schools become places where young people learn to value and respect everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

As more and more educators and students began contacting him for help, Kevin saw a need that wasn’t being met and in 1990 founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a local volunteer group in the Boston area bringing together LGBT and straight teachers, parents, students and community members who wanted to end anti-LGBT bias in the state’s K-12 schools. In 1992 Kevin was appointed to co-chair the Education Committee of the Governor’s Commission on Gay & Lesbian Youth by Massachusetts Governor William Weld. He was the principal author of its report Making Schools Safe for Gay & Lesbian Youth, whose recommendations were adopted as policy by the Massachusetts State Board of Education. The Commission led the fight that made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation against public school students and to establish a statewide program to insure educational equity on issues of sexual orientation in 1993.

Kevin left Boston to come to New York that same year as a Joseph Kingenstein Fellow at Columbia University, from which he received his M.A. in 1994. Upon graduating from Columbia, Kevin left teaching to set about building the all-volunteer GLSEN organization into a national force. Under Kevin’s leadership, GLSEN has made safe schools into a national issue, increased the number of students protected from harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity by over 600%, and grown the number of GSA’s from under 50 in 1995 to over 3,000 today. GLSEN programs like GSA’s, No Name-Calling Week, and Day of Silence are now commonplace in America’s schools. Kevin was named to Newsweek magazine’s “Century Club” as one of “100 people to watch in the new century” and is also the recipient of the Human and Civil Rights Award of the National Education Association.

Along the way Kevin earned an M.B.A. from NYU’s Stern School of Business in 1999, authored six books (one of which, Telling Tales Out of School, won a Lambda Literary Award) and helped write and produce the documentary Out of the Past, which won the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary. Kevin serves as Fundraising Chair for the Appalachian Community Fund, where he established the Alice Jennings Fund to help low income and battered women have the opportunities his own mother was denied as a girl and woman from Appalachia. In his spare time, he plays left wing for the New York City Gay Hockey Association and enjoys walks with his partner Jeff and their golden retriever, Amber.

Blog Entries by Kevin Jennings

Recruit, Recruit, Recruit!

Posted August 27, 2007 | 08:32 PM (EST)


It's back to school time and religious fundamentalists in Texas are salivating. Why? Because of what the Houston Chronicle terms the "insidiously named Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act," which has given them a license to recruit new believers in schools.

This new law requires Texas school districts to adopt...

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Gay Pride 2007: The Love That Dare Not Shows Its Face (In Newark, Anyway)

Posted June 24, 2007 | 03:45 PM (EST)


medium_Andre.jpgSo it's 2007 and people in blue states like New Jersey and New York say it's fine to be gay. Well, don't tell that to Andre Jackson.

Apparently, Andre Jackson is a pretty typical, normal high school kid. A senior at Newark's East High,...

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Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Posted May 11, 2007 | 05:50 PM (EST)


"To equate Bible study groups and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes with Gay-Straight Alliances is tantamount to comparing the Sistine Chapel with a strip joint." - Kenric Ward, opinion page editor of the Vero Beach Press Journal, in TCPalm.com

Oh my.

For the past several months in...

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Fighting for Freedom in Philadelphia: Barbara Gittings, 1932-2007

Posted April 29, 2007 | 06:09 PM (EST)


I spoke yesterday at a memorial service for Barbara Gittings in Philadelphia. Many of you may not recognize the name of this legendary activist, which is too bad because, as he put it in his remarks, my friend Matt Foreman (Executive Director of NGLTF, the National Gay & Lesbian Task...

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When Will We Learn?

Posted April 21, 2007 | 01:59 PM (EST)



A further insight into Cho's background comes from high school classmates in suburban Washington who say he was bullied and laughed at over his Korean accent and shyness. When called on in class, they say, he would hang his head in silence.

-MSNBC report

Leave it to a...

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Surgery, Silence, and Skipping School

Posted April 17, 2007 | 07:27 PM (EST)


whitesq.jpg

Six students followed 15-year-old Anthony Hergesheimer as he walked home from school two weeks ago in Pueblo, Colo. After yelling anti-gay slurs at him during several passes in their car, one of the six students got out of the car and threw an object, breaking...

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Locker Room Bullies

Posted March 22, 2007 | 01:53 PM (EST)


"We're not trying to downgrade anyone else."

Indianapolis Colts Coach Tony Dungy trying to explain why his active support for a same-sex marriage ban is OK is somehow not a statement against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in USA Today.

I've always been a New...

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Mean Spirited Meddling and Mischief in Mormon Country

Posted March 18, 2007 | 01:41 PM (EST)


"History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."--Karl Marx

They're baaack!

Ten years ago, Utah's legislators had an apoplectic fit and tried to ban all student clubs when students at Salt Lake City's East High School started a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) student club...

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What the Hays? Florida Legislator Proves Need for a Real Safe Schools Bill

Posted March 17, 2007 | 07:14 PM (EST)


Earlier this week, some Florida high school and college students, many of them LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender), went to Tallahassee to make the case for the "Jeffrey Johnston Stand Up For All Students Act," which takes aim at harassing and bullying behaviors in the state's schools. One...

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Holy Communion in Wyoming: Who Would Jesus Serve?

Posted March 14, 2007 | 02:03 PM (EST)


Judge not, that ye be not judged... Why beholdest thou the mote that is in they brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?... Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye."

Matthew 7: 1, 3, 5

A lesbian couple named...

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Pigs, Grunts, and Ann Coulter

Posted March 6, 2007 | 03:59 PM (EST)


"'Faggot isn't offensive to gays; it has nothing to do with gays...It's a schoolyard taunt."

Ann Coulter on Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, March 5, 2007

"What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?"

Alice Jennings (1925-2002), innumerable occasions

Oh Ann. You've got to be kidding....

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Snake Oil for Sale!

Posted February 7, 2007 | 02:26 PM (EST)


"He [Reverend Ted Haggard] is completely heterosexual."
--Rev. Tim Ralph to the Denver Post

So Ted Haggard is completely heterosexual. And I am the Queen of England.

I'm sorry, you don't have a three-year affair with another man if you are "completely heterosexual." Mr. Haggard cannot use...

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What Did You Do During the War, Mom?

Posted February 5, 2007 | 08:17 PM (EST)


"This is a baby. This is a blessing from God. It is not a political statement." Mary Cheney on the subject of her pregnancy, New York Times, February 2, 2007

Poor Mary. Poor, poor Mary. So deluded. So much in denial.

Mary Cheney, the expecting lesbian daughter of...

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