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From The New York Times, June 24, 2007

School Officials Black Out Photo of a Gay Student’s Kiss
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

NEWARK, June 23 — It started with a kiss.

Andre Jackson, a senior at East Side High School, leaned over his boyfriend’s shoulder one day several months ago and kissed him on the lips. He took a picture of the smooch with his digital camera.

Like other students, Mr. Jackson later paid $150 to have his own special page of photos in the school yearbook. He decided to include the picture of the kiss, to make not a political statement, but a personal one.

“I didn’t intend to say, ‘Oh hey, look at me, I’m gay,’ ” said Mr. Jackson, 18. “It was just a picture showing my emotion, saying that I’m happy, you know, whatever. It was to look back on as a memory.”

On Thursday evening, when the seniors gathered at a restaurant here for the Senior Banquet, students received the yearbooks they had bought for around $85. But the picture of Mr. Jackson kissing his boyfriend was gone. School officials had blacked it out. Roughly 250 yearbooks were distributed, and all of them had a black-marker splotch covering every inch of the photo.

“I was upset,” Mr. Jackson said. “I was hurt. I felt embarrassed and abused.”

He and another student said the photo was blacked out at the restaurant by several teachers and the principal, Mario Santos, as the yearbooks were being handed out to the seniors when they entered. The other student, Benilde Barroqueiro, said a teacher told her: “It’s not that we want to do this. It’s that we have to do this.”

Saturday, after The Newark Star-Ledger published an article about the controversy, Mr. Jackson’s blacked-out kiss became the subject of debate, outrage and inquiry.

The decision to blot out the photo was made by Marion A. Bolden, the Newark Public Schools superintendent. Ms. Bolden said that an assistant superintendent had alerted her to the picture on Thursday afternoon. “I thought that the photo was suggestive,” Ms. Bolden said.

She said she made her decision without seeing the entire yearbook, and looked at only the one page.

The thin, hardcover yearbook, titled “Take Another Look,” features many pictures of the Class of 2007, including several of heterosexual couples embracing and kissing. On the page immediately opposite Mr. Jackson’s, a young man and a young woman kiss on a couch, his hand on her leg as she sits on his lap.

A New Jersey gay rights group, Garden State Equality, demanded that Ms. Bolden publicly apologize to Mr. Jackson and his boyfriend, David Escobales, 19, of Allentown, Pa. The group is also calling on Ms. Bolden to redistribute the yearbooks with the photo of the kiss included, describing the decision to black out the picture as “homophobic” and “unlawful.”

“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,” said Steven Goldstein, the chairman and chief executive of Garden State Equality.

Ms. Bolden said she did not intend for the officials’ actions to be taken as anti-gay. “I’m a superintendent that talks about tolerance,” she said. “I don’t have a problem at all.”

She said she felt that the photo was provocative for a high school yearbook, regardless of whether it showed heterosexual or homosexual kissing. But she said it was a decision that was made too quickly and without taking into consideration other couples’ pictures. She said she was told on Thursday that neither of the men were students, adding that she would have been more hesitant to black out a picture of a student.

“It looked like two men kissing,” she said. “To me, it looked fairly illicit. It was pointed out as problematic, so maybe I read more into it.”

Ms. Bolden said she wanted to meet with Mr. Jackson and apologize if necessary. “He was personally hurt,” she said. “That bothers me very much.”

Mr. Jackson said he came out when he was 16 and that he and Mr. Escobales have been together since October. Mr. Jackson is graduating on Wednesday, and he plans to attend Berkeley College here.

It was unclear Saturday if the school would redistribute the yearbooks.

Mr. Jackson said he threw away his in disgust. “I didn’t feel right,” he said. “What I wanted to see wasn’t there.”