Pride & Prejudice

By Continued

Morgan Hill, Calif.

As Alana Flores remembers it, the harassment started in the fall of her sophomore year, not long after she entered Live Oak High School here. To this day, she doesn't know what made her a target. She had never told anyone that she was a lesbian. That wouldn't happen until her senior year. And she only "came out" then, she says, because there was no reason not to. By that point, she'd already endured two years of anti-gay abuse from other students, much of it in the presence of teachers, who she claims did little to intervene. "I was subject to daily and fierce, unrelenting harassment," Flores says, "so I just threw my hands into the air and said, 'Yeah, I'm gay.'"

But it wasn't until last spring, nine months after her high school graduation, that Flores decided to fight back. At the urging of a gay teacher at a local middle school, she and four other former and current Live Oak students filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the 9,000-student Morgan Hill school district. In their complaint, the students say they experienced "pervasive, severe, and unwelcome" verbal and physical anti-homosexual harassment on a near-daily basis. School and district officials, they maintain, were well aware of what was going on and yet "repeatedly failed to take appropriate and necessary...