The Toxic Culture of All Boys Catholic Schools

Joseph Slicker (he/him)

A lot of ink has been put to paper about the discrimination and bigotry that young members of the rainbow community face. And rightly so—the school environment has not been, and in many cases continues not to be, a welcoming space for queer kids. This is doubly true for religious schools whose oft-professed values of kindness and acceptance, to put it politely, don’t exactly match up with the actions of the churches that sponsor them.

The school experience I’m here to talk about, though, is not that of the ‘out’ teen at odds with a conservative school’s worldview, or even of someone who hides their identity because of that same pressure. I want to talk about my experience, and the experiences of people like me, who could only consciously question their sexuality or gender after leaving that environment, and the long lasting impacts of the culture and ideology of those institutions. Specifically, I want to dive into the often toxic cultures of all-boys catholic schools—the misogyny and homophobia that infuse everyday interactions and speech, and how the lasting impact of those ways of thinking obscured my own truth from me for far too long.

The Catholic Church has a, uhhh... poor track record on LGBT+ issues. But this piece isn’t a critique of The Church or Christian beliefs (though I have my opinions). Instead, I want to specifically talk about the underlying ideologies of the schools, which are shaped, in my reckoning, as much by conservative political ideology and their rigidly gendered structure as by Catholic doctrine. So, where to even start?

Before interrogating the ideology of these institutions, we should begin by looking at their structure as strictly gendered spaces. The question of why the schools should be divided by sex is one that they are constantly in response to. It’s a question that pops up in the news every few years, but, in my experience, is also a question which the schools seek to answer in classroom discussions. They make a lot of arguments which seem different on a surface level, but that really all point to the same thing. They all claim that men and women are fundamentally different, and need to be kept separated in order to learn and work well. The problem is we live in a patriarchal society, so this myth of ‘separate but equal’ fails to ring true, and instead it becomes the seed—within the young men who are subject to it—of a toxic masculinity which defines itself in opposition to a conservative image of the feminine. The consequences of this are wide ranging and frankly dangerous to the women and girls who, under its influence, are othered and presented only in the context of sex. Early in my final year of highschool a number of my classmates raided the Facebook live stream of a protest hosted by a number of girls schools calling for better consent education. They spammed “no means yes” and other quips making light of sexual assault, alongside a variety of right-wing hashtags from the time. I mention this incident because I can prove it happened, but we all know that much worse never made it to the light of day.

This way of thinking also presents in the boys it takes hold of as a sort of paranoia. It turns their schools into a panopticon, as the students (and concerningly many of the teachers) police each other for what they imagine to be effeminate behaviour. Basically any display of vulnerability, emotional or otherwise.

Here, the weight of catholic teaching shows itself. When I was in school it was normal to use “gay” (and worse) as insults, but the compulsory religious studies courses that often reiterated arguments about “the sanctity of marriage” or the natural hetrosexual relationship infuse these apparently playground insults with a real sense of moral judgement. A religious studies teacher once told my class that he doesn’t hate gay people, he just likes them less than ‘normal’ people. Now I’ve never been a religious person, but I can’t deny the role that those lessons played in reinforcing my use of slurs in casual conversation, used as tools of dismissal. I have to wonder how many ideas, and how many people, I have dismissed using those words. I wonder how deeply those words affected their targets, and I wonder what I could have known about myself had the queer and the feminine not been dismissed as weak and immoral. 

Those associations weighed heavily on me, even if for a long time they were subconscious. I’ve always been bi; it is unavoidably who I am. But those associations stopped me from claiming that for myself for far too long. I knew how I felt, but I could not marry my image of myself with what my feelings were ‘supposed’ to make me. I had internalised an image of what it meant to be queer that had very little relation to the reality of the queer experience.

A friend I spoke to, a trans woman, said that she feels that if she had attended a co-ed school rather than a catholic boys school she almost certainly would have realised she wasn’t cis earlier than she did. She said “At [our school] there was no education regarding the queer community whatsoever, so to me trans people were more of a fantasy than an actual reality. With the severe lack of diversity in that sphere, it never even clocked in as a possibility for me.”

I suppose I’m one of the lucky ones really; I accepted who I was when the paradox of wanting to fuck Tom Holland while also being a ‘straight’ man became too much. But that said, there was a long time when I maintained that double-think, and it’s an unfortunate fact that many more will maintain that paradox for the rest of their lives. And really, that’s the aim of these Institutions.

There are a small minority who really do believe that queer people make up an incalculably small fraction of the population. Men like the teacher who, in response to one student publicly coming out at my school proclaimed “I don’t know why they have to make such a big deal about it, it’s not like there’s any others here.” But these are outliers; whether it’s verbalised or not, these institutions know that queerness is much more prevalent than their student bodies would publically suggest, and so they are built to repress those feelings in their pupils. They might be limited in what a teacher can say in a classroom, but they breed an environment and a culture which teaches boys to police each other and themselves in both thought and action.

A common refrain at my particular high school was that the school aimed to “create good, Christian men”, and “successful citizens”. Other catholic schools will similarly espouse their desire to mold their students into better people in God’s image. The problem is that, as an institution, the schools have a very narrow vision of what that means.

I left high school four years ago, and it’s taken all of that time for me to reach this point of consciousness about the subconscious ways of thinking I was brought up in. It wasn’t a journey I made alone. It might not have been possible without access to the kinds of education that university offers which were sadly missing from my secondary education, and it’s a journey I owe to a number of excellent teachers and lecturers, and to some very good friends. I hope it’s a journey that the boys I was educated with also make, for their own sake, and everyone else’s. And to the RE teacher that told me I was lying for saying that I could ever love a trans person, from the bottom of my heart, absolutely get fucked.