On the first day of September 2022 I received through Facebook Messenger a link to an article in a magazine called The Atavist entitled “Fault Lines”. It was sent to me by an old friend from high school, and it involved a lawsuit against the LAUSD and our former alma mater. He informed me that one of his cousins who attended the school after we graduated was also one of the victims referred to in the article as “Jane Doe” and that while he believed her story, he also couldn’t believe how long the abuses chronicled in the article had been going on.
The abuses in question were inappropriate sexual relationships between members of the teaching staff and underage students. Four members of the faculty were named; three were teachers and one was an administrator who may have covered up accusations and allegations over the course of many years. Two of the teachers are no longer alive, leaving the remaining two defendants to make no comment as the suit continues.
Of course, the implications of this are far-reaching and timely, being in the wake of #MeToo and other attendant scandals in the cultural landscape. I didn’t hesitate to post the link on Facebook, waiting for comments and reactions to the piece. As expected, many of my colleagues and fellow alumnus were shocked, outraged, saddened, and devastated by the content of the article.
I’ve been asked by a few people, both privately and publicly, about my feelings concerning the matter. I have refrained from giving any in-depth comments regarding this because I wanted to take the time to absorb it. But I already knew before I began to write anything down that whatever my statement ended up being, it wouldn’t really resemble anything my former classmates may be thinking.
My experience is unique, and also something I am not ready or at true liberty to fully divulge. I have my reasons, and coming off the heels of a traumatic, life-altering death in my family… well, it goes without saying that I want to be careful with what and how I share my feelings on all of this. I do want to be candid, frank, and transparent about my stance in this matter, but I’m at the age where I also don’t want to spill my guts in a potentially toxic atmosphere only to have it used against me as some weapon for people who want to score points for their own personal agendas, or worse: taken as evidence that somehow I support certain behaviors or actions that enable people who prey on others to prosper.
In short: anyone who doesn’t like what I have to say about my high school teachers having sex with their students and the culture that looked the other way while it happened… I really don’t care what you think anyway, and never have.
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Our high school was unique. The teachers in the Humanities Magnet that I attended in the early ‘90s weren’t your average overworked, underpaid, stressed-out public servants. They could be considered “cool” in that they wore their hair long and dressed like hippies and treated the kids as sort-of equals and didn’t talk down to them and created a curriculum that emphasized social issues and what could be now thought of as “being woke”… indeed, nowadays when I hear talk about “critical race theory” being some brand new indoctrination, I scoff at the notion that this is something recent. We were being taught these kinds of things back then, and we loved it.
I didn’t go to this school unaware of what was going to be taught either. As Highly Gifted Magnet students, there weren’t a lot of options for us when we left junior high: it was either the Humanities Magnet in Reseda, or the Magnet high school in North Hollywood. Most of my classmates in junior high were going on to North Hollywood; I chose the Humanities program because several of my junior high English teachers felt I’d do well there. They specifically recommended that I attend it based on the strength of my writing skills. There’d be a lot of essay writing and they felt that I would have an advantage in this type of setting.
“It’ll be like college prep,” one teacher told me near the end of ninth grade. (I didn’t enter high school until my sophomore year) “By the time you get to higher education you’ll already be ahead of the curve.” Little did she know that I had no plans of going to college.
I’d already rejected the idea of becoming some sort of professional before I even set foot in high school. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to graduate; dropping out was something I seriously entertained. But I figured I’d give the Humanities program a shot because, hey— what else did I have going on? My parents had recently divorced and I was 16 years old with no job, no extensive education, and a severe distrust for all authority.
The distrust was tied to the discord in my family that led to the divorce. It wasn’t just a situation where my parents didn’t love each other anymore. Boundaries were broken, lies were uncovered, activities exposed. I woke up one morning and the world had been turned upside-down. Black was white, the sky was green and the grass was blue. Nothing was as it seemed, and therefore nothing mattered anymore.
Without getting into details, you can rest assured that the ugly secrets that had been uncovered did not directly affect me: I wasn’t the victim of any hands-on abuse. Rather, I had to watch as the fabric of the already-unstable safety net of my whole family unraveled before my eyes. I was forced to sympathize with people who committed terrible crimes and who also were raised in traumatic circumstances that compelled them to act out and take advantage of others. In the course of a few months my entire worldview had been turned inside-out, and what’s worse is that the shame of these revelations made it impossible to confide in anyone around me.
So when I got to the Humanities Magnet, the last thing I wanted to deal with was some self-styled “cool teacher” who wanted to be my buddy. I was willing to write the essays and speak up in class when I thought I had something to say, but I was never going to let anyone in.
*\*
My family was very religious, and although I had been raised in church and read the Bible often, I also challenged what I was taught and always had difficult questions to ask. So when the truth about my family became known to me, the first thing to go was any affiliation with organized religion. It was all hypocrisy to me now.
My family also had its share of criminals and junkies. A lot of people had done time or left in handcuffs or had to be bailed out. One of my uncles had been stabbed to death and the cops did nothing to help. This and many other incidents led to a major hatred for the LAPD and the justice system. Long before Rodney King and rap groups like N.W.A, I was already not a big fan of the police. So that was strike two.
The rumors about my Humanities teachers started swirling within weeks of our arrival. I knew some of the older class, and they talked a lot. Word got around. Insinuations and suspicions rose and ebbed, and of course this was the ‘90s so our awareness of such behavior was limited and primitive. Yes, it was creepy, but it also wasn’t verifiable. Nobody had any smoking guns that pointed the way to the guiltiest parties.
Still… for me, that was strike three. In my mind, society had already struck out. I was on my way to pitching a no-hitter.
It wasn’t always like that. I mentioned my junior high teachers… they encouraged me to write. They fostered that talent within me. They praised me and gave me hope that maybe I could write for a living and be successful as an adult. And they were human, too: one of them was openly gay and also happened to be one of the most popular teachers at our junior high. So it was shame when he took a long leave of absence and then one day we found out accidentally that he’d died of AIDS.
Despite that intrusion of hard reality into our adolescent lives, I still felt like the teachers looked out for us. One of the counselors must have known about my home situation and took it upon herself to try and keep me out of harm’s way. She even had me serve as a student TA for a teacher who reminds me of Morgan Freeman in hindsight. He knew my situation too, and he was understanding and helpful. I owe those junior high school teachers a lot— they actually cared. I felt it. It was real and sincere.
I was relieved of those illusions after my family self-destructed. I went into high school with a major chip on my shoulder, and no amount of cool posturing was going to get through to me. I literally lost total faith in every institution available to me.
I wasn’t going to fall for anyone’s smooth talk anymore.
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Not only did I resolve to embrace antisocial tendencies, I also made a clean break from my junior high peers. I didn’t hang out with anyone who knew me before we became sophomores. Looking back on it, I think there was a deliberate hostility on my part due to the fact that I couldn’t really explain what was going on with me. Or more to the point: I didn’t want to open up. That is some scary stuff for a teenager to deal with, and truth be told no one my age was equipped to deal with what I would’ve laid on them.
I did make friends as the school year started, but I don’t recall being the one who initiated any of those first conversations and interactions. I sort of kept company with the small circle of friends that migrated with me from the old school, but that didn’t really mean anything: I had become a master at being alone in a crowd. Standing next to people at lunch time didn’t mean connecting with them. It just meant that I wasn’t chased away either.
I did make it a point to speak up in class. I looked forward to that. I was going to troll the faculty as best as I could, decades before the label “troll” was even coined for kids like me. I wanted to be a thorn in the sides of the teachers for whom so many of my so-called friends and fellow classmates held in such pliant reverence.
Instead of regular old history, we had a class called Social Institutions. It was taught by one of the teachers named in the article in The Atavist. He had long hair and a beard but he didn’t remind me of Jesus. He just came off as someone’s older brother’s hip friend.
He took my joking and sarcasm in stride. I could tell he was at a loss with how to deal with me. I didn’t disrespect him outright but I refused to play nice as well. I think his opinion of me may have changed once he read my essays, but I can’t be sure. He probably just wrote me off as a smart-ass with a bone to pick with the world. He didn’t have to lift a finger to accommodate me, and I didn’t go out of my way to curry his favor.
He tolerated me.
I remember going to a protest down the street that this teacher attended. It was a McDonald’s in Northridge, and afterwards he came up to me and said that everyone was going to go to Falafel Palace afterward and that I was invited to come along.
I grimaced and replied, “You’re gonna protest that too?”
He almost laughed. But he wasn’t fazed. We all made our way over there, and I even sat down and broke bread with him and had a conversation. But I could tell he was bored with me. At the time I didn’t know what it was but I think I know now what was going on: I had nothing to offer him. I wasn’t who he wanted to talk to. I wasn’t fawning over his every word and he wasn’t terribly interested in my general negativity. I guess the best you can say is that from that moment on we negotiated some sort of truce or cease fire, even though he wasn’t really out to get me.
Early on in his class, he wrote a statement on the chalkboard for use in a lesson:
LANGUAGE IS POWER
That statement stayed with me for the rest of my life. It is something I still think of to this very day, whenever I need to talk my way into or out of a situation. Whenever I see someone spitting game, whether it be a street pimp or a corrupt politician or a slimy salesman, I think of that sentence. It became nothing short of a mantra, and at a time when I desperately needed to feel some sort of control in my life, those words did the trick.
So thank you, Mr. Coleman, for giving me that. You may have saved my life. I am grateful for it. I owe you that much. But it’s a good thing I wasn’t a vulnerable teenage girl, or else you may have given me something else that I probably would not have wanted.
Maybe that’s not fair to say, seeing as he also had friendships with many male students that didn’t cross any lines. But I guess that was the thing— I didn’t want to be friends with him. I liked him as a teacher, and he wasn’t a jerk to me. I just didn’t want to be friends with my teachers. Any of them. Not even the cool ones.
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My 10th grade home room teacher was a dead ringer for Sean Connery. He was a passionate middle-aged Italian man who taught Art History and gained my respect by writing a lengthy critique of my first essay that I turned in when school began. His essay was an essay itself. It was clear that he had things to say and wanted to disabuse me of any bullshit notions I was dallying with during those days.
He also was kind of nuts. He was prone to sudden loud outbursts followed by profuse and plaintive apologies to the class for flying off the handle. It was really entertaining. He reminded me of Stacey Keach in the movie “The Ninth Configuration”, someone perilously close to the edge of sanity and barely composed, a hair’s width away from going berserk and taking everyone within range with him.
And yet, I warmed up to him over time, along with a small handful of teachers over the course of my time in the program. I think the faint whiff of lunacy was what drew me in. We never felt unsafe in his presence; he was obviously going through some personal turmoil in his life that occasionally spilled into his professional life but never derailed it. It humanized him in my eyes. He wasn’t too far off from me, in some weird estimation.
Most importantly, despite his willingness to shoot the breeze with me and other kids, he maintained a boundary between himself and his young charges. I’m sure he was friendly with his students, but there was a line drawn that he refused to cross. He didn’t seem interested in trying to cozy up to us. He just wanted us to appreciate the beauty of art and the history of the human creative impulse.
He wasn’t named in the article, and that doesn’t surprise me at all. I can’t imagine that he would’ve been the type to date students or try to “groom” them for anything other than their future education and prospects.
At a time when I was wary of anyone or anything trying to pigeonhole me into a role I didn’t accept, his example made an indelible impression upon me. And somewhere buried in my personal papers, I still have a copy of the essay I wrote that he critiqued extensively at the beginning of the school year. I should find it and read it again, because it will remind me of what I came to that school for: to learn how to be a better person regardless of the chaos that was ripping me apart inside. He might have known a single thing about me as a person but he still managed to reach me and strike a nerve that left a mark on me that remains a part of who I am today.
He did his job, and I thank him for it. I often wonder what has become of him. Did he pass away? Or is he still alive, and possibly shaking his head as he reads about what his colleagues did, and how he may or may not have known what was happening when he was employed there? Does he feel any guilt, any sense of responsibility? Did he try to take a stand but felt himself going up against some Sisyphean task of trying to bring attention to all of the bad things and finally just left in disgust and a notion of self-preservation?
Surely he couldn’t have been the only teacher who felt that way… and if that article is to be believed, he wasn’t.
*\*
The main culprit in that article was a teacher who held a lot of sway at the school when our class attended the Humanities program. If any teacher could embody the spirit of that curriculum, if anyone was the agreed-upon face of that whole movement, it was him. He also had long hair and dressed casually and his demeanor was approachable and friendly.
He was cooler than the rest in that he let students ditch through his classroom window, which faced the street and allowed for perfect getaways. He also had a reputation for being more hands-on than the others. We heard the rumors, and more than a few girls that I knew personally (including a few that I had dated) had some sort of story about his advances.
So why did we not say anything? Why did we not make some noise in the manner that he and the other teachers were instructing us to do when we went out into the big bad world to do battle against the powers that be?
My only answer is that we were kids, and our defenses were lowered by the need for his approval. Even I found myself coming to him with a selection from the late Hunter S. Thompson that referenced something he taught us in class regarding the Whittier police riots in the late ‘60s; he read it and thanked me for bringing it to his attention. I felt like I’d contributed something other than just snarky comments and petulant snottiness.
I didn’t have Mr. Miller as a teacher until my junior year, and by that time the chip on my shoulder had been whittled down considerably. I still did things like run an underground newspaper that was critical of everything around me, but the edge had worn away and I had mellowed out due to my life getting more manageable. I no longer thought about dropping out of school. I started playing music with a group of friends that I made over the course of a year, one of those friends being the person who eventually sent me the article in The Atavist.
With a forum like my underground magazine and a larger group of friends to relate to, it would’ve made sense for me to use the persistent rumors as a springboard for pointed attacks on what I perceived as just more grown-up hypocrisy doled out to us impressionable young sponges soaking up academic lessons in race relations, institutional sexism, and heartless corruption.
But I didn’t. I think it was because, even though we all sensed that there was something rotten going on behind the scenes, these adults were engaging in some sophisticated cognitive dissonance with us. They were simultaneously giving us the tools to grow our consciousness (and consciences) and breaking the rules and trust they were so fervently establishing.
This is what is the most confusing thing for my former classmates in light of the allegations and accusations. The conflict between someone you admire and their reprehensible actions is seemingly insurmountable. In this day and age, we can’t give quarter to those who betray the trust we put in them. Whether it’s the likes of Bill Cosby or Bill Clinton, when the private lives of so-called exemplary pillars are exposed for public consumption, it leaves us feeling demoralized and cynical. We feel hoodwinked, defensive, humiliated, even foolish for having had the wool pulled over our eyes.
*\*
I don’t feel this confusion. I entered the fray with my illusions shattered and my sense of what the world was like rearranged for the worst. Even as the decades have passed, it not only doesn’t surprise me that the roosters have come home to roost but it doesn’t make me feel that bad. That’s because I already had a primer on gaining valuable life lessons from irreparably flawed people.
Of course, I am evolving every day. I do not lack compassion for the victims, and I don’t feel the need to defend these monsters for their grotesque overreaching. I believe the Jane Does, and I support their actions, and I believe that there must be some justice done to right the wrongs inflicted upon innocent teenagers.
But I also have had to reconcile these issues with my own flesh and blood. Relatives and close family friends who ruined lives also helped me improve mine. It is an ache that runs deep in my bones, seeping into my veins, sometimes poisoning my thoughts with unnecessary bile.
Perhaps this is also the final lesson that we have to learn from the program, that things are never black and white, that underneath the surface lie things that we are never meant to see, and if we do see them we have to learn to live with them the same way we have to learn to live with grief and tragedy and heartbreak.
I like to brag that I read all of the required reading for our Humanities classes well before I attended the program. I was familiar with Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Vonnegut, Kant, Sartre, Camus, and countless others before we were assigned their times for grades. Well, I’m going to brag some more: I was well-versed in this nausea that sets in when learning that your heroes can be inspiring as well as total scumbags, long before the rest of my peers.
And believe me, it’s nothing to brag about.
No one wants to feel that way. None of us look forward to that day when the masks are taken off and we see that our emperors were naked the whole time and we chose not to see it.
I am fortunate in that I didn’t have to learn about my teachers being predators the hard way. I was not victimized, I was not abused. I don’t mean to come off as callous, or pointing a finger like Nelson from “The Simpsons” and taunting everyone with a smug “Ha Ha!” I am not gloating or reveling in some weird victory that has no meaning for anyone else.
I can’t honestly say that I knew it all along and that I didn’t care about Mr. Miller or Mr. Coleman or that I alone am able to navigate this strange new world with aplomb. I never knew any of the other characters in this tragic farce. I feel no pride in not speaking up about it even though I had no hard proof. All I know is that I am somehow better equipped for all of it thanks to the horrible conditions and traumatic episodes of my life that brought me to where I am today: somewhat brain-boggled and dazed by how it’s all going down.
It’s taken me a while to collect my thoughts on this, because I wasn’t sure how I was going to address it. I’m certainly not being brave by blogging about it. Too much time has passed for it to be anything other than me venting and getting a few things off my chest.
It boils down to this: those teachers deserve what they get, if they get any sort of comeuppance at all. Miller is dead, and there’s no guarantees that any sort of recompense can be made for those who were abused.
But they also did a lot of good, and that’s the tough pill to swallow. These shitty human beings also educated us and taught us to go out there and take the likes of them down.
Can you imagine if that had been our final exam when we were seniors? How mind-blowing would that have been if we’d walked into Miller’s classroom the day before we graduated and had been told that we had to verbally dress him down for his sins? Would any of us been able to do it? And if we had been able to, how would we have felt?
Of course, that’s not how life works. People don’t recognize their flaws and just surrender themselves and take responsibility for their actions. They bide their time and hope it all goes away. And that’s why they don’t really deserve our sympathy and compassion.
But we can remember the positive things even as we learn about the negative things. We can hold two conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time and it doesn’t have to be bold hypocrisy or a shameful contradiction.
Because that’s life, and we’ve been living it, and it doesn’t ever stop, and there’s no such thing as closure, even if lawsuits get filed and people get their due. It just goes on and on and we hope we can do better in the future.
And I think of this quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose “Notes From Underground” we read in class, but this quote comes from his most famous novel, “The Brothers Karamazov”:
“The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”
