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NEW JERSEY - A Newark school has apologised to a student for censoring a photo in its yearbook of him kissing his boyfriend.
Andre Jackson, a senior at East Side High School, told the New York Times he felt "embarrassed and abused" when he received his yearbook last week and discovered that the photo had been blacked out with a marker pen.
Pictures of heterosexual couples kissing were not touched.
"I was upset," Jackson (18) said.
"I didn't intend to say 'Oh hey, look at me, I'm gay. It was just a picture showing my emotion, saying that I'm happy, you know, whatever."
School officials said the decision to blot out the photo was made by Marion A. Bolden, the Newark Public Schools superintendent.
Bolden told Newark's Star-Ledger newspaper last week that an assistant superintendent had alerted her to the picture.
"I thought that the photo was suggestive," Bolden said.
The New York Times reported that school staff members sat blacking out the photo at a senior banquet last Thursday while students waited to receive their yearbooks.
Jackson, like other students, had paid US $150 ($196) to have his own special page of photos included in the yearbook.
A New Jersey gay rights group, Garden State Equality, last week demanded that Bolden publicly apologise to Jackson and his boyfriend, David Escobales, 19.
"The school district's erasure of this student and his boyfriend is a tragic metaphor of the school district trying to erase the lesbian and gay community from its schools, and we won't stand for it," Steven Goldstein, the chairman and chief executive of Garden State Equality, told the New York Times.
But Bolden said she did not intend for the officials' actions to be taken as anti-gay.
"I'm a superintendent that talks about tolerance . . . I don't have a problem at all."
According to a statement released yesterday however, Bolden now plans to personally apologise to Jackson for the incident.
Quoting the report, the Star-Ledger said Bolden regretted "any embarrassment and unwanted attention the matter has brought to [Jackson]".
"The District takes pride in its diverse student population and supports all our students, regardless of race, gender, ethnic background or sexual orientation," the statement continued.
Newark Public School officials have decided to reissue the book to students interested in an unedited copy.
- NZ HERALD STAFF
