GRIS-Montréal, témoin et acteur de l’évolution des attitudes des élèves du secondaire envers la diversité sexuelle

Our article explores changing attitudes among students who attend workshops offered by GRIS-Montréal, an organization dedicated to fighting homophobia and to raising awareness of the realities faced by homosexuals and bisexuals in the school system. In the context of four separate surveys conducted between 2001 and 2017, secondary students between the ages of 12 and 18 (average age of 15) completed 7,122 questionnaires. To begin with, the results show that a larger number of students now acknowledge feelings of sexual attraction other than those for the opposite sex. Furthermore, over the course of 15 years, young people have grown increasingly comfortable with all of the issues raised by the questionnaire. But although comfort levels with most issues increase during the transition to adulthood, with a particular change occurring between the ages of 14 and 15, comfort levels with gay and lesbian rights actually decrease with age. And while the gender of the respondents does not affect comfort levels with lesbians, boys are significantly less comfortable with gay men. The article concludes by discussing the essential role of GRIS-Montréal in addressing the needs of young people with respect to increasingly sophisticated conceptions of sexual orientation and gender, as well as the challenges posed by these changes.