Principal cancelled gay talk

A Bunbury teenager says the city is still a threatening place for homosexual people living and growing up in the region.

Owen Bandura is straight — but after seeing gay friends bullied and teased in the school-yard and wider community, the 16 year-old Bunbury Senior High School student decided to organise an equal rights and ‘‘queerphobia’’ talk at the school.

The original talk at Owen’s school was cancelled after concerns arose the event could be ‘‘hijacked’’.

However it eventually went ahead this week at Bunbury ECU.

The Cross Campus Queer Network said it was turned away from the school on June 6, despite principal Craige Pettit initially approving a plan for the group to give a talk to students.

Andrew Markey said the group had come down from Perth at the invitation of a Year 12 student.

‘‘We organised to go down there in June and we got some sexual health information, some speakers from the CCQN, speakers from Equal Love, and we advertised it on Facebook and students were really supportive,’’ he said.

‘‘We went down there on the morning and we were notified by the principal that we weren’t allowed to talk there, and he had made the decision that morning because there had been a lot of concern from parents that their kids would be hearing that sort of talk, not that it was compulsory.’’

Mr Markey said the group was disappointed at the school’s move to cancel the talk.

‘‘It felt to us that the school had given in to peer pressure, which was the antithesis of what were talking about. We were really disappointed with that,’’ he said.

In a blog post on July 10, Mr Pettit wrote there were concerns the event would be hijacked.

Mr Pettit is currently overseas and could not be contacted for comment yesterday.

Owen said there was still a lot of homophobia around Bunbury.

‘‘In the playground, we’re always seeing people bullied, the word ‘fag’ is used so readily — I’ve seen people go to the edge of depression,’’ he said.

He said homophobia was dismissed so easily and he felt that something needed to be done to draw people’s attention to the issue.

‘‘People were saying: ‘What are these people complaining about now?’,’’ he said.

‘‘They’re not complaining they just want to be treated the same as other people.’’

He said he felt someone needed to stand up and make an issue of something which was mostly being ignored in the Bunbury region.