Students receive an education in forgiveness

Teaching tolerance: Holmes students receive an education in forgiveness

By Anne Ternus-Bellamy | Enterprise staff writer

At 14, he nearly died at the hands and razor-tipped boots of a gang of skinheads who targeted him because he was gay.

More than 30 years later, Matthew Boger is now half of a double bill at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, speaking about the hate crime that almost killed him. His partner on the bill? The worst of his attackers - the man who delivered the final blow that knocked Boger into unconsciousness.

It's an extraordinary tale of hate and forgiveness, and one Boger brought to Holmes Junior High School last week.

Boger survived, of course. And 30 years later, he is now the former general manager and still a consultant for the Museum of Tolerance, where he regularly tells his story to visitors - a story that was featured on NPR and on Oprah Winfrey's show, and is now also the subject of a book, 'Freaks and Revelations,' published in November.

Because Boger didn't just survive. While working at the Museum of Tolerance many years after the attack, he slipped into a conversation with Tim Zaal, a former skinhead who regularly spoke at the museum about his experiences as a self-described 'uncontrollable racist.'

In the course of that initial conversation, the two almost simultaneously realized that Zaal was the very same skinhead who had delivered that last, near-fatal blow to Boger's head many years before and got away with it.

'All I felt at first was shock,' Boger told students last week. 'I had to just walk away. What came out later was all of the anger and all of the hatred. I wanted to make him pay.'

Instead, though, the two began giving a joint presentation at the museum - a sort of tag-team storytelling of who they were back then, how they came to be in that alley that day and how they came to be the adults they are now.

That message is in large part what led Holmes teachers Jeanne Reeve and Lisa Mowry to bring Boger to Holmes last week, after securing funding from the Holmes PTA.

The two English teachers, along with colleague Kathy Bryant, had been taking their eighth-graders to the Museum of Tolerance for the past five years. But the economic downturn - combined with the expense of such a trip - forced them to be creative this year.

'We decided to bring a piece of the museum here instead,' Reeve said. In addition to two assemblies at Holmes, one each for the eighth and ninth grades, Boger also spoke to students at Davis High School on Thursday.

During a lengthy question-and-answer period, many of the questions students posed came back to the issue of forgiveness and how Boger could possibly forgive someone who tried to kill him. When Boger asked the eighth-graders how many could forgive someone who did what Zaal did to Boger, just a few hands went up.

They also asked about the fact that Boger's mother had thrown him out of the house when he was just 13 years old, after he revealed he was gay. She never to spoke to him again, and his siblings never welcomed him back into their lives.

That, he told students last week, 'was as painful as the boots and blades.'

'I want you to remember that too: Words hurt just as much,' he said.

This article originally appeared in the Davis Enterprise on February 23, 2010. The complete story is available to subscribers at http://www.davisenterprise.com.