Olivia B. Waxman / The Brooklyn Ink

How one Catholic middle school in Brooklyn is addressing the high attrition rate of boys in the school.

It’s a brilliantly sunny Wednesday at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep, a co-ed Jesuit middle school in Crown Heights, and all of the ten students in detention are boys.  The clicking sound of mechanical pencils and the clatter of pens tapping on desks drown out the cheers of their fellow classmates blowing off steam at recess in the neighboring church parking lot. Today’s troublemakers are copying the phrase “Respect means treating others as I want to be treated” ten times into their notebooks—a scene reminiscent of Bart Simpson writing his transgressions on the chalkboard at the beginning of each episode of The Simpsons.

Brian Chap, 29, who is well over six-feet tall, towers over a couple of youngsters who are still bickering about who pushed who in line on the way to class. The new principal has a tall order ahead of him: addressing the high attrition rate of boys at the school.

“When I looked over the attrition rates of both boys and girls—those who started in the fifth grade compared to those who graduated—in some cases over 50% of the boys did not graduate,” said Rev. John J. Podsiadlo, S.J, President of New York Nativity, which runs Brooklyn Jesuit Prep and two other middle schools: Nativity Mission Center on the Lower East Side and St. Ignatius School in Hunts Point in the Bronx.  Originally there were 25 students in the Class of 2011—12 girls and 13 boys—but only five of the boys graduated, according to data provided by the school.   Similarly, this year’s graduating class started with 23 students—10 girls and 13 boys—but now there are only six boys left.  While some withdrew because their families moved out of the neighborhood, most of them were dismissed because of repeated behavior or academic problems, like failing classes, according to Chap and the school’s counselor, Laura O’Brien.

Rapscallions like Bart Simpson are at every school, of course, not just at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep.  Nationwide, boys are expelled at three times the rate of girls, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.  They are also twice as likely to be suspended from school. Peg Tyre, author of The Trouble with Boys, points to the nationwide literacy gap as proof that boys are lagging perilously behind girls: girls in public and nonpublic schools boast higher average reading scores than boys at all grade levels, according to the Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  More women than men are graduating from high school, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.  And women are twice as likely as men to earn bachelor’s degrees by age 23, according to a report published by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics in February.

If anything, Brooklyn Jesuit Prep is part of the solution.  The goal of Nativity schools is to “break the cycle of poverty” and close the racial achievement gap among low-income students in New York City by offering an accelerated middle school program that prepares them for top high schools and post-secondary schools.  Brooklyn Jesuit Prep is virtually free to its 85 students in grades 5 to 8; parents pay $75 a month, thanks to private donations. Nativity schools’ success rests on its model of longer school days, with mandatory after-school activities and optional study halls.  In addition, all students are required to attend a Summer Leadership Program at Fairfield University, which combines academic classes with recreational activities. New York Nativity boasts that its eighth graders score higher on New York State exams than their peers.

So why are some Brooklyn Jesuit Prep boys still struggling to make the grade?

One reason: “Our days are from 7:15 in the morning to 4:30 pm at least, so the days are a lot longer,” says O’Brien, who also works in admissions.

The longer school day can be a strain on many of the boys who start Brooklyn Jesuit Prep three to four grade levels behind, she explains.  A significant change in workload from elementary school to middle school can make it difficult for students without a solid academic background or firm grasp of reading to keep up, according to Nancy Lesko, former middle school teacher and professor at Teachers College at Columbia University.

“Girls may be somewhat more likely to be passively tuning out, whereas boys may be somewhat more likely to act out, and I think it’s that acting out that gets them in trouble and leads to disciplinary suspensions,” Lesko says.  “The acting out is talking out of turn, moving around in your seat, not being physically contained or being able to concentrate and stay with something for a while.”

And the more teachers correct them, the more likely they are to snap.

“We create a behavior dynamic where boys, by virtue of the fact that they move around a little bit more than girls, are often seen as behavior problems,” Tyre says, “and so we shower them with negative attention in those early years, and I think the downstream effect of that negative attention and that lack of skill in literacy creates a kind of perfect storm by middle school and boys begin to disengage. The demand for a rigid code of behavior creates a lot of negative attention for boys, and I think they get sick of it.”

Some feel pressured to be the man at home as well, not just at school.

“Most of the boys who got kicked out were raised by their mom alone,” says Irene Locario, 51, who is starting her fourth year as a teacher at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep. “Your mom can tell you to be successful, but when you hear it from your dad, there’s something powerful about that for them. We don’t have a lot of male teachers in this school.  Most of the teachers are motivated females, but the boys need to see more of their kind, more male teachers of color.”

Chap and other teachers claim that, in the past, the school may have been too hard on the boys and didn’t give them enough of a chance before dismissing them.  With seven years of experience at all-boys schools under his belt—six years at St. Ignatius Loyola Academy in downtown Baltimore and one year as principal at the all-boys Nativity Mission Center—Chap hopes to promote a better understanding of how boys behave.

“My hope coming in is that we can recognize that these behaviors are boys being boys,” he said.  “It’s not boys completely rebelling against us. We can’t just say, ‘We can’t handle this student,’ because we can. We have that capability.  But it takes time.”

His plan for retaining boys draws heavily upon the theories of Michael Gurian, an author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently and The Minds of Boys, who stresses that girls and boys need to be taught in single-sex classes because their minds work differently.  Girls, for instance, can sit still and concentrate on a lecture for longer, while boys are naturally more restless and need more space to learn and to do more hands-on activities.  By separating the sexes, Gurian argues teachers can teach boys and girls in the ways that work best for them.  And for middle school boys going through the topsy-turvy hormonal changes of puberty, single-sex classes provide a safe environment for them to express themselves and work on their academic weaknesses without the pressure or distraction of trying to impress their classmates of the opposite sex.

Yet an article in the September 23rd issue of Science magazine, “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling,” argues that there is no scientific evidence that children benefit from single-sex classes more than co-ed classes.  After reviewing data from large-scale studies, the authors determined that stories championing the successes of single-sex education are just that—anecdotes without any science to back them up.  In fact, they argue that separating boys and girls just teaches children that the sexes are different rather than empowering them, promoting gender stereotypes and sexism.

“Whenever you segregate people you create more in-group liking and more out-group hostility,” says Diane Halpern, the Trustee Professor of Psychology and Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College and director of membership for the American Council of CoEducational Schooling.

Chap still believes that single-sex classes enable his school to build self-confidence among boys—especially among the ones who are struggling—and help them “develop as people without measuring themselves against someone else.”

He adds, with a smirk, “I spent most of eighth grade trying to get the girls’ attention.”

To accommodate boys’ shorter attention spans, Chap encourages teachers to divvy up each 45-minute class period into three 15-minute blocks so that the students can move around and recalibrate. Chap likes to play a quick game of “Simon Says” in his eighth-grade algebra class to help the boys focus on their listening skills. At the beginning of class, Locario makes her sixth graders move their elbows to their opposite knees 30 times to get them thinking.  Breaks could also be as simple as letting them take a ten-second stretch, walk around the room swinging their arms from left to right, or move the desks into a different position. To give the boys more time to move around in the outdoors, Chap has implemented a sports period on Tuesday afternoons, when they go to Mount Prospect Park to play soccer and flag football and run cross country.

Tyre also believes in motivating boys on the field, but she stresses the importance of motivating them to succeed in the classroom, especially those who come from underprivileged backgrounds.

“If a school is in a low-income area and serving black and Latino kids, it should try to create a positive identity around academic achievement,” says Tyre, “like, ‘It’s cool to be in school,’ as opposed to, ‘It’s cool to have your pants hanging down and to have your hat backwards and to be a screw-up.’”

That is why Locario starts every class with an inspirational pledge. The boys stand in a straight line and recite, “I am somebody. I am capable. I am loveable. I am teachable, therefore I can learn.  I am going to use my time wisely because it is precious. I am bright. I am somebody.”  Then they read the quote of the day, “Enthusiasm ignites greatness,” off the whiteboard and explain what it means to them.

“Who they become depends on them,” Locario says. “If you don’t affirm to them that they’re responsible, they’ll look to outside forces, like the detention center in the real world . . . or the gang leaders and drug dealers.”

Lesko sums up the secret to getting through the trials and tribulations of middle school: “Being successful in middle school and beyond is really sticking with it, right?” A poster in Chap’s office embodies this patience and commitment: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”  Brooklyn Jesuit Prep is sticking with the boys, one detention, sports period, and inspirational quote at a time.

Mon, Nov 21, 2011
By Olivia B. Waxman

Henry Schoolfield teaches 7th and 8th grade social studies at Salve Regina. (Photo by Olivia B. Waxman / The Brooklyn Ink)

 

At the beginning of September, Salve Regina Catholic Academy (nursery-8) opened its doors, a brand new Catholic school in East New York that formed from the merger of three struggling schools—St. Rita’s and St. Michael’s in East New York and St. Sylvester’s in City Line. Boasting more than 730 students, it is now the largest Catholic school in the Diocese of Brooklyn (which also includes Queens).

To Alvida Cordoba, 62, the librarian for the 4th to 8th grades, the consolidation of the schools becomes more real as she consolidates the three schools’ book collections, unpacking boxes of books and putting them on new bookshelves.  Her children attended St. Michael’s, whose building on Jerome Street now houses Salve Regina, and she’s been working in the building for 23 years in various volunteer and part-time jobs.

She misses her children’s alma mater. Gingerly, she picks up one volume and flips to the back.  “I have to stamp the books with the new school name, and it’s not St. Michael’s anymore,” she says wistfully.  “I pull out the old cards in the back of each book, and it’s like saying ‘goodbye.’”

Just as Cordoba meticulously integrates the schools’ books, administrators at Salve Regina are working to integrate the three different communities to form an entirely new community and identity.  It’s not an easy task.

St. Rita’s, St. Michael’s, and St. Sylvester’s had to merge because they faced declining enrollments, according to William Geasor, the principal of Salve Regina, who was also the principal of St. Rita’s for 34 years.  He says that four years ago St. Rita’s had about 600 students, St. Michael’s had 450, and St. Sylvester’s had 280.   Last year, St. Rita’s student population dropped to about 450, St. Michael’s to 280, and St. Sylvester’s to 190.  As enrollments fell, tuition increased, making it more difficult for families to afford to send their kids to the schools.

In order to ease the financial burden on current families and encourage enrollment, the administration decided to set Salve Regina’s price tag at $3,600, the same amount as the tuition at St. Rita’s and the lowest rate of the three schools.  Ninety-five percent of children at Salve Regina come from St. Rita’s and St. Michael’s, which were only four blocks apart, while only 30 students come from St. Sylvester’s, which was 15 blocks away.  St. Michael’s also became the logical place for the new school because it had two buildings, both an elementary school and a high school (which closed in 1976), that could fit all of the new students now and in the years to come.

“There were eight schools in this neighborhood six years ago, and by last year, we were down to three,” Geasor says. “Some of the children in the building now have already been in three different schools before this year, so we’re trying to provide stability.”

Since 2005, 28 schools have closed in Brooklyn, according to Stefanie Gutierrez, the press secretary of the Diocese of Brooklyn. Yet this phenomenon is not unique to Brooklyn Catholic schools. Since 2000, elementary school enrollment has dropped nationwide by around 35% in the nation’s 12 urban dioceses, and 1,755 schools merged or closed, according to the National Catholic Educational Association.

Salve Regina Catholic Academy in East New York is now the largest school in the Diocese of Brooklyn. (Photo by Olivia B. Waxman / The Brooklyn Ink)

 
Declining Catholic school enrollment is the result of the changing demographics of the church, which has created a kind of “perfect storm,” according to Joseph O’Keefe, S.J., a professor at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education who specializes in urban elementary schools.  More traditionally Catholic families—Irish, Italian, Polish communities—have been moving out of cities and into the suburbs.  There has also been an “exodus” of white, affluent Catholics, and an increase in the number of Catholic immigrants and Hispanics, a population that “does not have the wherewithal to afford Catholic school.”  Catholic schools are also more expensive to operate now that they are almost entirely run by lay (non-religious) people, who have to be paid more than nuns who take a vow of poverty.

Since 2008, in light of these demographic changes, the Diocese of Brooklyn has been consolidating the smaller parish elementary schools into larger, regional academies so that schools can meet their overhead costs. The idea is that it is more economical to manage bigger schools than a patchwork of small schools. So far there are nine academies in Brooklyn (17 in the entire Diocese), and the Diocese hopes all parish elementary schools will turn into private Catholic academies by 2017.

“The biggest challenge is building trust and building community among the people,” says Tom Chadzutko, the Superintendent of Schools.

O’Keefe, who has consulted on Catholic school mergers in Boston, emphasizes that simply merging struggling schools is not enough.

“If you take three failing schools and put them together, you get one failing school,” he says. “You want to bring the best of the traditions and culture of the schools that have merged, but you really want to create something new.”

Some innovations can be as simple as school spirit.  Right off the bat, Salve Regina instituted a new uniform as a visual reminder to students that they go to a different school now.  At first glance, one cannot tell who went to St. Rita’s or who went to St. Michael’s in the bustling sea of blue and gray plaid skirts, navy blue pants, and pale blue polo shirts with Salve Regina emblazoned in gold stitching.  “We didn’t want them to bring their self-identity from three different schools and have three different schools present in the building,” Geasor said.

The administration has also integrated nearly all of the classes and after-school activities from the three schools—from St. Rita’s Spanish language program to St. Michael’s robotics club—and added new baseball and basketball teams. Roxanna Elder, 39, Salve Regina’s assistant principal and former assistant principal at St. Rita’s, said the faculty spent the entire summer getting ready for the new year without extra pay; some didn’t even take vacations.

Pooling resources has allowed the school to provide more federally funded special education classes for students struggling in reading and has also given the school the opportunity to purchase new technology like SMART Boards for almost every classroom.  Thanks to donations from Petro Oil, the school will also have a new state-of-the-art science lab, but for now the room is just a graveyard of cardboard boxes filled with textbooks and equipment from the three schools’ science programs.

Some students and teachers are still getting used to how big Salve Regina is.  There are so many new students that the school had to add extra 5th grade and 3rd grade classes last month.

“I’ve gotten lost in Salve Regina a couple of times,” St. Rita’s alum Jsmine Adams, 12, admits bashfully, with a giggle.

Eugenia Colon, 48, a parent of a Salve Regina student, thinks the school feels a little more “crowded” now, but she sees the merger as a necessary evil. “There’s more kids, but the school stays open,” she says.

As the school has grown, so has the faculty’s workload.  Teachers used to have 15 to 20 students in each class, but this year they have about 30 students per class.  “When I taught at St. Michael’s, I saw 60 students a day,” says Henry Schoolfield, 49, who teaches 7th and 8th grade social studies. “Now I see 180 students a day.  The second you hit the front door, it’s like getting on a rollercoaster.”

All of the teachers who worked at the three schools had to apply for jobs at Salve Regina.  According to Elder, the academy’s new board of directors determined how many teachers should be hired. The superintendent’s office interviewed candidates and made recommendations to Geasor, who made the final decisions.  Out of the 42 teachers who taught at the three schools, Salve Regina hired 28 of them.  Of the rest, half of them didn’t make the cut and the other half just didn’t apply for jobs at the new school.  Two out of the three principals are at Salve Regina, including Sister Peggy Merritt, the former principal of St. Michael’s, who stayed on to be the new director of development.  Overall, most of the remaining teachers knew each other going into the new school year from participating in workshops and grading state tests together.

While the administration at Salve Regina has been trying to integrate as many elements of the three schools as possible, some things have had to give—like recess.  Students from St. Michael’s, for instance, used to get half an hour for lunch and half an hour for recess at their old school. Geasor says that recess does not fit into the schedule because the school day is six-and-a-half hours long, and the state requires students to be in class for six hours a day.  He is willing to extend the school day to seven-hours, but he wants to let parents decide.  In the meantime, he encourages teachers to give students 15-20 minute breaks at the end of classes or take them to the gymnasium to blow off some steam.

However, 8th grader Julian Wilson, 13, still feels like he doesn’t have enough time to socialize outside of the classroom.

“I don’t get to see my friends anymore,” he says, “and I can’t go to after-school activities because I have to get home to watch my little brother, so I only have 15 minutes at the beginning of the day to talk to people.”

Other conspicuous signs of the transition are the boxes tucked away in the corners of classrooms, and the extra desks, chairs, and monitors sitting in the hallways.  The dimly lit corridor connecting the gymnasium to the cafeteria is like a ghostly shrine, with photographs of students, teachers, and families from St. Michael’s taped to the white, peeling walls.

“People become very attached to schools, especially Catholic schools because they aren’t just where you go to school, but a lot of your religious formation happens there,” O’Keefe says. “They’re also multi-generational. People have gone to those schools before.  You have to allow people to grieve.”

Schoolfield allows students to vent in his social studies class.  “I’ve let them talk about their feelings whenever the issue of their old schools comes up,” he says. “Most of the kids cried.  All three communities were devastated, and because I’m a teacher, I see the devastation.  A school closing is like asking you to leave your home.”

In the meantime, physical education teacher Casey Seawright, 31, who taught at St. Rita’s for seven years, says the key to making the students feel at home in the new school is getting their names right. And that’s no small feat for someone who teaches all 730-plus students.

“But the minute you know a child’s name, they feel like they’re a part of something, whether they’re from St. Rita’s, St. Michael’s or St. Sylvester’s,” he says.  He looks over his shoulder at the herd of restless 8th graders waiting to start gym class.  “I mean, by Christmas, I should know all of their names. Hopefully.”

Here are two excerpts:

As the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Board of Trustees voted Monday to raise tuition, students and professors took to the streets in protest.  For nearly four hours, protesters rallied outside Baruch College, marched around the block and stormed Third and Lexington avenues.

The shouts and jeers didn’t stop the Trustees from raising tuition $300 annually for the next five years. Currently, the in-state price tag of CUNY’s four-year colleges is $5,130, but by 2015, undergraduates will be shelling out $6,330 per year.

In July, the New York State legislature authorized CUNY and State University of New York to raise tuition $300 annually for full-time, in-state undergraduates at the senior colleges over the next five years, and proportionately for graduate, doctoral, and non-residents at the senior and community colleges, beginning fall 2011. New York politicians and CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein have hailed the planned tuition increases as a step that provides stability and much-needed revenue to a university whose operating budget has been slashed by $300 million in the last four years.

“In some years there were very steep tuition increases—15, 20, even 30 percent—while in other years, sometimes over a period of consecutive years, there would be no tuition increases,” Goldstein said in an Aug. 9 statement. The hikes are expected to generate $50 million in revenue for CUNY just after the first year. Whether students will pay the tuition increases depends on how much aid they receive from the state’s Tuition Assistance Program; students who receive the maximum amount will not have to pay the new tuition, for instance.

But CUNY students are not the only ones feeling the pinch. A College Board study published last month found that average tuition and fees at public four-year colleges nationwide have grown faster than those at private universities for the fifth straight year. In fact, several CUNY schools boast some of the lowest net prices among public, four-year colleges across the country, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s College Affordability and Transparency Center.

Yet, even the most modest increases may be too taxing for a student body that is already cash-strapped. Fifty-four percent of CUNY undergraduates come from families that make less than $30,000 annually, and nearly 60 percent rely on state and federal financial aid to pay for school, according to the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents CUNY faculty. Forty-four percent are first-generation college students, and 74 percent are students of color.

Andrew Katz and Olivia Waxman asked CUNY students and professors about the sacrifices, if any, they’ll have to make now:

Tue, Nov 8, 2011
By Olivia B. Waxman

Photo: Jim MacMillan/AP

President Obama’s announcement late last month that American troops in Iraq will return home by the end of the year may be bringing the eight-year war to a close. But it is not sitting well with some of Brooklyn’s Iraq war veterans.

“If we leave without our goal being completed, if the Iraqi people can’t take care of themselves, then all of these years have been wasted,” says Ivan Hernandez, 24, from Sheepshead Bay, a Marine who served two tours in Iraq between 2006 and 2010 with the 1^st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion.  He now works as an operations support analyst at Citigroup.

Christopher Lewis, 34, an exterminator from Gerritsen Beach who was stationed in Sadr City with Task Force 141 from 2004 to 2005, also has mixed feelings about Obama’s announcement. Lewis is worried that a rapid troop withdrawal could mean a return to the violence between Iraqis.

“A lot of us feel like our job isn’t done there,” he says. “These people don’t know how to protect themselves.”

He is also concerned about America’s safety. “The fewer people who stand on the front lines,” he says, “the more likely the terrorists are going to come here.”

Most of all, he does not want Americans to forget about the war after it ends.  “People are now going to turn around and say it’s over,” Lewis says.  “America needs to be reminded of the war every day, not just for 10 seconds on the news.”

John Gentile, 39, of Sheepshead Bay, who served in the Air Force from May 2007 to September 2007, worries about the fate and future of Iraqi children.

“I have two young kids, and the kids there are just like your own,” he says. “My wife would send me used clothes to give to them.  If we leave, then we’re cutting all of the children short.”

He believes that troop withdrawal will not end America’s involvement in Iraq. “I see us back in a couple of years from now,” Gentile says, “and in worse condition.”

Fri, Dec 23, 2011
By Olivia B. Waxman

View The Five Brooklyns on a map

Meet The Brooklyn Peaches from Olivia B. Waxman on Vimeo.

True Prep builds upon Birnbach’s first foray into prep lit, The Official Preppy Handbook (1979), which sold nearly 2 million copies and topped The New York Times bestseller list. The original guide waxed eloquent about the “virtues of pink and green” and “etiquette in Connecticut,” and taught readers how to mimic a tony “Boston Brahmin” accent and the “Locust Valley Lockjaw.” Though the original Preppy Handbook dubbed Hamilton the 2^nd most “outstandingly preppy” college in the country (after Babson College) and noted its “unusual proportion of [men] under 5’10”,” the Hill is nowhere to be found in this update.

In the same playfully irreverent tone that borders on satirical, Birnbach and Kidd discuss how the preppy lifestyle has evolved in the last thirty years and offer advice on keeping it classy in the 21^st century.  Who would have thought that preps, known for draping their cable-knit sweaters over their shoulders, would be so taken with polyester fleece?

As America’s J.Crew-clad First Lady and “thin, black, preppy basketball-playing lawyer” President demonstrate, you do not have to be a WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) to live the life.  Nowadays, preps are as diverse as the selection of patchwork belts at Vineyard Vines.  In a contemporary twist, the book highlights the most popular African-American prep resorts and includes a map by literary critic Edmund White that illustrates where to find preppy gays in America: Washington, D.C., is “gay preppy central,” we learn, while Yale is “definitely the gayest of the Ivy League universities.”

You do not even have to be born into a preppy family anymore. True Prep authors encourage adoption: “This baby from an orphanage––God knows how far away––will now be privileged.  She will get to play field hockey and tennis. She will get to learn Mandarin Chinese in the third grade . . . and best of all, she will summer.”

While the kinds of preps have changed, the kinds of schools they attend have not.  True Prep details the most exclusive ones and their illustrious alumni, in case you are curious about what prep schools Steve Carell (Middlesex), Lisa Kudrow (Taft), and Bill Nye (Sidwell Friends) attended.

Preppy Hamilton seniors might want to check out the list of preppiest careers.  Apparently, not-for-profit jobs are more prep than private sector jobs because “any job that helps people really far away (micro-financing in Africa, feeding children in Haiti, and so on) is incredibly prep.”

Birnbach and Kidd especially bemoan the “noise pollution that’s broken down civilized society”: i.e., cell phones.  Young prepsters’ attachment to 21^st century technology seems as gauche to aged prepsters as wearing socks with Gucci loafers. “Texting (and its dirty cousin sexting) are eroding our capacities for charm, wit, good listening and spelling,” True Prep asserts. “Don’t dare LOL.”  Plus, mobiles open up fashion faux pas. “Blackberries or cell phones should never be suspended from your belts (That includes you, President Obama.).” Facebook, too, must be managed carefully, for “Big Mummy is watching.”

And for those who tune into the popular show Gossip Girl for a window on Manhattan’s Upper East Side social scene, the book, for the record, deems the characters too sleazy and not classy enough to be true preps: “Please, all of you, keep the corduroys on, the cameras out of the bedroom, and think of England.”

But while Hamilton may not meet Birnbach’s and Kidd’s standards of prep anymore, try counting the number of Continentals in Barbours and wellies on Martin’s Way when the weather gets colder.  Don’t know what those are?  Check out True Prep.

The Gay Republican group GOProud will host its Homocon 2010 convention in New York City on September 25. Headlining this bash will be none other than “the right-wing Judy Garland” and conservative author Ann Coulter.

“Our gays are more macho than their straights!” the event invitation declares, apparently comparing gay Republicans to straight Democrats.

“This will be a party that celebrates gay conservatives,” Christopher Barron, chairman of the GOProud board, told TPM. “The gay left has done their best to take all the fun out of politics, boycotting and protesting one thing after another. [Homocon] is our effort to counter that.”

Coulter seems to be an odd choice to headline the event. In the past, she’s gotten in trouble for dropping the gay equivalent of the f-bomb in public. She called 2008 presidential candidate John Edwards a “faggot” at the March 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington D.C.: “I was going to have a few comments on the other presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot.’”

At the time, Edwards fired back on his campaign website: “Ann Coulter’s use of an anti-gay slur yesterday was un-American and indefensible.”

The Log Cabin Republicans, another gay conservative organization, also denounced Coulter afterwards. “Coulter’s words are not worthy of this event or our nation’s political dialogue,” President Patrick Sammon said in a statement.

Coulter tried to clarify on Fox News: “‘Faggot’ isn’t offensive to gays; it has nothing to do with gays,” she explained. “It’s a schoolyard taunt meaning ‘wuss,’ and unless you’re telling me that John Edwards is gay, it was not applied to a gay person.”

The GOProud’s Barron accepts that. “She came out and said that she was not calling him gay,” he said. “She said it would have been an insult to gay people to call him gay.”

Liberals in this country want to view conservatives in a narrow prism, but we are a tolerant, accepting group. The fact that she’s doing an event for a traditional conservative group speaks volumes for how she feels about gay people.

Here’s the invitation: