Newark school officials black out picture of a gay student’s kiss

East Side High School graduate Andre Jackson is suing the Newark Public Schools district after a 2007 incident in which administrators blacked out a photo of him kissing his boyfriend in his yearbook. The school did not not censor photos of heterosexual students kissing.

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.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jackson. “There is no rule about no gay pictures, no guys kissing. Guys and girls kissing made it in.”

East Side’s is like most high school yearbooks. About 80 pages in the roughly 100-page tome is dedicated to class photos, formal shots of seniors, candids and spreads dedicated to a variety of sports teams and academic clubs.

The back of the book is a collection of tributes where students designed pages filled with pictures depicting them with their families, girlfriends and boyfriends, and friends.

Rules for publication of the pages prohibited shots of gang signs, rude gestures and graphic photos, said Benilde Barroqueiro, an East Side senior graduating with Jackson.

“You know, it couldn’t be too provocative. No making out, no tongue,” she said.

Students were surprised when they opened their books and found Jackson’s picture had been covered with marker, Barroqueiro said.

“He purchased the page and fell under the rules,” she said. “If they want to kiss, that’s their page. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it.”

Superintendent Marion A. Bolden then  issued an apology to the student, Andre Jackson, according to a statement released by the district on Monday.

“The decision was based, in part, on misinformation that Mr. Jackson was not one of our students and our review simply focused on the suggestive nature of the photograph,” the district said.

“Superintendent Marion A. Bolden personally apologizes to Mr. Jackson and regrets and embarrassment and unwanted attention the matter has brought to him,” according to the statement.

The district said it would reissue an “un-redacted version” of the 2007 yearbook to any student of East Side High School who wants one.

Bolden, through a spokeswoman, declined a request for an interview.

Jackson planned an afternoon news conference with Garden State Equality, a gay rights group, which has condemned actions taken by the district last week.

“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.