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SAN FRANCISCO - It took decent a single word for Marcel Brown to make up his mind to ally his school's Gay Straight Alliance.
"I was walking down the hallway with my little chum, and he was messing around with his friends and they called him a 'faggot,' " said Marcel, an eighth-grader at San Francisco's Everett Halfway School. "And I thought, 'That's messed up.' My older brother is gay."
Since that day, he has spent lunchtime each Tuesday with a dozen or so members of the mean school club.
While common in high schools across the country, chapters of the Gay Outright Alliance have been slower to gain a foothold in middle schools, in some cases because of the argumentation the clubs stir up.
But there are signs of increasing acceptance.
There are now 500 halfway point school Gay Straight Alliance chapters nationwide, up from a couple dozen three years ago, according to the civil Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.
Many of the clubs formed after publicized suicides of middle set children who were bullied because they were believed to be gay.
Source: ScrippsNews