Graduating high school is a time to celebrate how far you’ve come, and reflect back on your teen years . It’s a time when you enter adulthood with all the lessons you’ve learned so far.
But for a high school class president, his commencement speech became a coded message, after his school forced him to eliminate parts that talked about his sexual orientation.
Zander Moricz gave a commencement speech about his “curly hair” earlier this week.
Moricz, graduate and class president of Pine View School in Osprey, Florida, delivered a speech on Monday about his experiences as an openly gay student , using his curly hair as a euphemism for his sexuality.
He was pressured to change his speech by the school board.
He posted a thread to Twitter where he talks about the fact that his principal told him they’d cut his mic and end his speech if he talked about his activism or sexuality.
Moricz is his school’s first ever openly gay class president.
This is in the wake of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
The “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which many have taken to calling the “Don’t Say Gay” bill , was signed into law in Florida this past March. It restricts Florida school’s abilities to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity.
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Moricz is a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against the bill.
At 18, Moricz is the youngest public plaintiff in the lawsuit. His Twitter thread mentions that this was one of the topics he was barred from talking about in his speech.
He has been active in advocating for LGBTQ+ rights.
In the viral Twitter thread, Moricz also discusses how he organized a Say Gay walkout, despite the fact that his school did everything they could to shut it down.
In the end, he censored his speech so that the ceremony could go on.
“There are going to be so many kids with curly hair who need a community like Pine View, and they won’t have one. Instead, they’ll try to fix themselves so that they can exist in Florida’s humid climate.”
Moricz spoke to Good Morning America about the speech and his concerns surrounding it.
” There was a lot of hate and a lot of fear surrounding the speech about what people were going to do if someone was going to react poorly because it was really present in the community — that hatred and that fear — and so I was worried and I knew that there was a potential to cut the mic.”
In the end, though, he received a lot of support during the ceremony.
“To have a standing ovation like that and a response like that from all of these people was amazing,” he continued. “It was really a great finale for four years of high school.”
In fact, it wasn’t just his school community that supported him.
Moricz’s original Twitter thread amassed hundreds of thousands of likes, comments, and Re-Tweets. And 10,000 Say Gay stickers were sent out around Florida, worn by members of Moricz’s school community, and in schools around the state.
Despite not being able to say gay, Moricz delivered a clever and amazing speech.
But, as he said to Good Morning America , “I shouldn’t have had to be [clever] because I don’t exist in a euphemism. I deserve to be celebrated as is.”
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
