In 2006, Jonathan Niemczak was the first openly gay student council president at St. John’s High School.

“St. John’s is a unique environment because it has a really high drop-out rate. In Grade 7 you will start out with 200 to 250 students in your class and by the time Grade 12 roles around, there will be about 60 or 70 students left.”

Jonathan was also the only ‘out’ male student in his high school. He says he didn’t focus on LGBT issues during his year as student president.

“Since I was freshly out, it wasn’t a priority of mine as president of the school. We had other more pressing issues to deal with. I was concerned that establishing a GSA would only benefit myself.”

But Jonathan recalls how difficult it was to be closeted without any access to LGBT information or support from his school. Before Jonathan came out to his friends and family in Grade 12, he suffered from serious depression.

“I figured it out in Grade 7 when I started forming an attraction to another male student. I knew that in real life that was incorrect and that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“I was already like the limply gazelle on the Serengeti with the lions just waiting for me. I figured if I came out I was done. I might as well just rub myself in marinade and let the lions devour me.”

“It devoured my mental health because every single situation in school I had to analyze because I had to think,‘Is this what a straight student would do?’”

“There were days when I figured I’d fucked up and I did something wrong and that would send me into mass depression. I couldn’t concentrate in school and my grades started dropping.”

The pressure to convince his peers he was straight drove Jonathan to harm himself.

“I participated in cutting.”

Jonathan says his close network of friends during high school was the reason he was able to eventually feel comfortable with his sexuality.

“Support networks can be the difference between life and death, but it’s difficult because it’s hard to create a strong support network without outing yourself at some point.””

“A few of my friends were uncomfortable with it but it was sort of like a don’t ask don’t tell policy around them. I became massively popular with all the girls because they wanted a gay best friend to go shopping with.”

Jonathan wants schools to include LGBT issues in their curricula. He says his own high school experience would have been improved if St. John’s had provided its students with information about all sexual orientations.

“I had a hard time just finding information about being gay. I had to search for everything on my own on the Internet. If there had been more resources I probably would have come out a lot sooner.”

“I had to spend three years figuring out it wasn’t something bad on my own.”