The relief for roughly 35,000 borrowers was announced Thursday by the Education Department and made through changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which benefits workers such as teachers, nurses and firefighters. Those qualifying for forgiveness have their remaining loan balance eliminated after making 120 qualifying monthly payments.

“These 35,000 borrowers approved for forgiveness today are public service workers — teachers, nurses, law enforcement officials, and first responders who have dedicated their lives to strengthening their communities, and because of the fixes we made to Public Service Loan Forgiveness, they will now have more breathing room to support themselves and their families,” Biden said in a statement.

The public service forgiveness program was created by Congress in 2007, but many borrowers were not able to get the cancellation they had worked towards due to strict rules and mistakes by loan servicers in tallying their payments. Under the Biden administration, some rules were adjusted and retroactively gave many borrowers credit toward their 10 years of payments.

The announcement comes amid legal back and forth over the administration’s larger plans for student loan forgiveness, which faces challenges from Republican-led states. In June, judges in two federal cases opposing the new SAVE plan, which included lowered monthly payments and a faster path to forgiveness, issued injunctions stopping the plan from going into effect.

But shortly after, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay in one of the lawsuits, allowing the Education Department to move ahead with lowered monthly payments.

Biden’s original plan for one-time debt cancellation was overturned by the Supreme Court, which said the move overstepped the president’s authority.

With this latest round of loan cancellation, the administration has now forgiven $168.5 billion in student debt for 4.76 million borrowers, including $69.2 billion for 946,000 million borrowers through the public service forgiveness program.

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But for decades, American schools have been re-segregating. The country is more diverse than it ever has been, with students more exposed to classmates from different backgrounds. Still, around 4 out of 10 Black and Hispanic students attend schools where almost every one of their classmates is another student of color.

The intense segregation by race is linked to socioeconomic conditions: Schools where students of color compose more than 90% of the student body are five times more likely to be located in low-income areas. That in turn has resounding academic consequences: Students who attend high-poverty schools, regardless of their family’s finances, have worse educational outcomes.

Efforts to slow or reverse the increasing separation of American schools have stalled. Court cases slowly have chipped away at the dream outlined in the case of Brown v. Board, leaving fewer and fewer tools in the hands of districts to integrate schools by the early 2000s.

The arc of the moral universe, in this case, does not seem to be bending toward justice.

“School integration exists as little more than an idea in America right now, a little more than a memory,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “It’s actually an idea that a pretty good majority of Americans think is a good idea. But that’s all.”

MORE THAN JUST DIVERSE SCHOOLS

The dream of Brown was never as simple as diversity. It was about equality, and the opportunity that came with it.

From the beginning, funding and integration have been inseparable.

“Whiter schools and districts have more resources, and that is wrong,” said Ary Amerikaner, a former Obama administration official and the founder of Brown’s Promise. “But it is a reality. And that undermines opportunity for students of color, and it undermines our future democracy.”

We remember Brown v. Board as the end of segregated schools in the United States. But stating values does not, alone, change reality. Though the case was decided in 1954, it was followed by more than a decade of delay and avoidance before school districts began to meaningfully allow Black students to enter white schools.

It took further court rulings, monitoring and enforcement to bring a short-lived era of integration to hundreds of school districts. For the students who took part in those desegregation programs, their life trajectory changed — the more years spent in integrated schools, the better Black children fared on measures like educational attainment, graduation rates, health, and earning potential, with no adverse effects on white children.

For a brief period, it seemed the country recognized the deeper remedies required. “All things being equal, with no history of discrimination, it might well be desirable to assign pupils to schools nearest their homes,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in Swann v. Mecklenburg, a 1971 decision that upheld the use of busing to integrate schools in North Carolina. “But all things are not equal in a system that has been deliberately constructed and maintained to enforce racial segregation.”

But not long after, another series of court decisions would unwind those outcomes. Fifty years ago, in Milliken v. Bradley, the court struck down a plan for integrating Detroit public schools across school district lines. The ruling undermined desegregation efforts in the north and Midwest, where small districts allowed white families to escape integration.

Other decisions followed. In Freeman v. Pitts, the court ruled resegregation from private choice and demographic shifts could not be monitored by the court. More than 200 districts were released from court-monitored desegregation plans. By 2007, when the court ruled in Parents Involved v. Seattle Public Schools, even voluntary integration plans could no longer consider assigning students on the basis of race.

“If you have the tools taken away from you … by the Supreme Court, then you really don’t have a whole lot of tools,” said Stephan Blanford, a former Seattle Public Schools board member.

ONE DISTRICT AS A MICROCOSM

The arc of history is clear in the city where the landmark Swann busing case originated.

At its peak, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was considered such a success at integrating classrooms and closing the gap between Black and white students that educators around the country came to tour the district. Today, more than 20 years after a court ruling overturned busing students on the basis of race, CMS is the most segregated district in North Carolina.

While there are no laws that keep kids siloed by race and income, in so many schools that is the reality.

Charlotte’s sprawling, complex busing plan brought Black and white students into the same schools — and by extension, made white children’s resources available to Black students for the first time. The district’s integration program ended when white families sued after their children did not get their top choice of school placement in a lottery that considered race.

Instead, the district created a school assignment process that said diversity “will be based on the family’s decisions.” It left the families of Mecklenburg County, some of whom have always had better choices than others, on their own. In the first year of the district’s choice program, Black families were more likely to try to use the choice plan to pick an alternative school. They were also more likely to get none of the magnet schools they wanted.

In the decades that followed, the district re-segregated. Years of busing had unwound the segregated makeup of the schools, but the underlying disparities and residential segregation had been left untouched.

Charlotte is a place where the divide between affluence and poverty, and the clear racial lines that mirror it, are so stark that people who live there refer to the city in two parts — the well-off “wedge” and the poorer “crescent.” How could anything other than an explicit consideration of those conditions ever hope to ameliorate them?

Solutions to segregated schools exist in this context, often relying on individual families to make choices that are limited by their circumstances. Magnet schools and inter-district transfers — two common policies that may create great individual opportunities — are limited and will always leave some students behind.

Wherever you look, families are divided in how they view integration. For white and affluent families, it can exist as a noble idea, one filled with self-reflection. But for families of color or poor families — those with less of a safety net — the point of integration often is to place their children somewhere better.

Efforts to integrate schools can take two paths, Stefan Lallinger, executive director of Next100, a public policy think tank, says. They either fight around the margins, creating slightly less segregated spaces, or they address the problem head on, which in many parts of the country would mean tackling boundaries deliberately drawn to separate rich from poor.

HOW TO MOVE FORWARD IN A SYSTEM THAT RESISTS?

Amerikaner and Saba Bireda founded Brown’s Promise on the idea of bridging the divide between funding and integration, leveraging state courts to obtain the tools the Supreme Court has taken away from districts.

Their strategy has some precedence. In Connecticut, a 1989 lawsuit in state court resulted in the creation of an inter-district transfer program, which allows students in Hartford to transfer into suburban schools and magnet programs, breaking up concentrations of poverty and racially isolated schools.

“This country had to be moved to integration,” Bireda said. “And unfortunately, 70 years later, we feel like we still need litigation. We need the push of the courts.”

More recent lawsuits have taken place in New Jersey and in Minnesota. In 2015, Alex Cruz-Guzman became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging segregation in Minneapolis and St. Paul public schools. Cruz-Guzman immigrated to the United States from Mexico as a teenager. As a parent, he noticed his children’s schools consisted almost entirely of other Latino students. When he tried to place them in more integrated schools, the family faced long waitlists.

The case wound its way through court for nearly a decade, almost reaching a settlement in the legislature before that bill failed to pass.

Cruz-Guzman recalls people asking why he would join a case that likely would not resolve in time to benefit his own children, who struggled with learning English for a time in predominantly Latino schools. To him, the arc of the case is about the kids whose lives could change in the future.

“It’s not only my kids. My grandkids will benefit from it,” he says. “People for generations will benefit.”

How far those legal cases can reach remains to be seen. Actual solutions are imperfect. But integration is something this country has tried before, and while it lasted, by many measures, it worked.

Anniversaries are moments to stop and contemplate. Seventy years after Brown, the work towards achieving its vision remains unfinished. Where there are no perfect, easy answers, what other choice is there besides trying imperfect pathways that bring about an increasingly diverse country somewhere closer to the promise of Brown?

“What’s the alternative?” Bireda said. “We are headed towards a country that is going to be majority people of color. … We can be a strong multiracial democracy, but we cannot be that if we continue to allow most children in the United States not to go to school with children who are from different backgrounds.”

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Over the past eight years, the process has been used at least 750 times on students. Some are as young as 5 years old.

The state law that allows for these removals, known as petitions for emergency evaluation, is meant to be limited to people with severe mental illness, who are endangering their own lives or safety or someone else’s. It’s the first step toward getting someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

But advocates say schools across the country are sending children to the emergency room for psychiatric evaluations in response to behaviors prompted by bullying or frustration over assignments. The ER trips, they say, often follow months, and sometimes years, of their needs not being met.

Black students are more frequently subjected to these removals than their peers, according to available data. Advocates point to students with disabilities also being removed at higher rates.

“Schools focus on keeping kids out rather than on keeping kids in,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney at the National Disability Rights Network. “I think that’s the fundamental crux of things.”

Schools in Wicomico County agreed not to misuse emergency petitions as part of a 2017 settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice. But while the number of suspensions and expulsions declined, mandated trips to the emergency room ticked up.

Last year, children were handcuffed and sent to the emergency room at least 117 times from Wicomico schools, about once per every 100 students, according to data obtained from public records requests to the Wicomico County Sheriff’s Office.

At least 40% were 12 or younger. More than half were Black children, even though a little more than a third of Wicomico public school children are Black.

In interviews, dozens of students, parents, educators, lawyers and advocates for students with disabilities in Wicomico County said a lack of resources and trained staff, combined with a punitive culture in some schools, are behind the misuse of emergency petitions.

One Wicomico mom, who asked for anonymity because she feared retaliation from the school, recalled the terror she felt when her son’s school called and said they were going to have him assessed for a forced psychiatric hospitalization. When she arrived at the school, she said, her son was already in handcuffs. He was put in the back of a police car and taken to the hospital.

“He said his wrists hurt from the handcuffs,” the mother said. “He was just really quiet, just sitting there, and he didn’t understand why he was in the hospital.”

The practice isn’t just happening in Wicomico.

Recent data shows New York City schools still call police to take children in emotional distress to the emergency room despite a 2014 legal settlement in which they agreed to stop the practice.

A Kentucky school district was found to have used a psychiatric assessment on kids more than 1,000 times in a year. In Florida, thousands of school-aged children have been subjected to the Baker Act, the state’s involuntary commitment statute.

In a settlement with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, the Stockton Unified School District in California agreed to protocols that require other interventions before referring students with disabilities for psychiatric evaluation.

In Maryland, Wicomico uses emergency petitions more often per capita than almost every other Maryland district where data is available.

Baltimore City, for example, last year had 271 emergency petitions from schools, compared with Wicomico’s at least 117, according to data obtained from law enforcement agencies through public records requests. But Baltimore’s student population is five times as large.

Wicomico parents describe struggling to get support for their children when they fell behind on basics like reading and math in early grades. These gaps in learning can lead to frustration and behaviors challenging for teachers to manage.

The Wicomico mother whose son was handcuffed said she fought for years with administrators to obtain accommodations for her child, who is autistic, an experience echoed by other parents. Her son, who also has ADHD, was several years behind in reading by the time he got to middle school. The mother said he was sent to the hospital after an outburst rooted in frustration, not mental illness.

She recalled school officials telling her, “‘He doesn’t have special needs, he just has anger issues.’ They were trying to get him out of the school.”

Her son had grown increasingly discouraged and agitated over an assignment he was unable to complete, she said. The situation escalated, she said, when the teacher argued with him. He knocked a laptop on his desk to the floor, and the school called for an emergency petition. After being taken to the hospital in handcuffs, he was examined and released.

“After that, he went from angry to terrified,” she said. “Every time he saw the police, he would start panicking.”

A spokeswoman from the Wicomico County Public Schools said emergency petitions “are used in the most extreme, emergency situations where the life and safety of the student or others are at risk.”

“(Emergency petitions) are not used for disciplinary purposes and frequently do not result from a student’s behaviors,” Tracy Sahler said in an email. “In fact, a majority of EPs are related to when a student exhibits suicidal ideation or plans self-harm.”

School officials did not respond to questions about why the rate of emergency petitions was so much higher in Wicomico than in other counties in Maryland. The Sheriff’s Department declined to share records that would show the reasons for the removals.

By law, certain classroom removals must be recorded. Suspensions, expulsions and arrests are the most commonly documented indicators of racial disparities in discipline. Schools are required by law to publicly report the data, which often triggers oversight and investigations.

But with the exceptions of Florida and New York City, most places do not routinely collect information on removals from school for psychiatric assessments.

Without that data, there is no way to hold schools accountable, said Daniel Losen, senior director for the education team at the National Center for Youth Law.

“The civil rights of children is at stake, because it’s more likely it’s going to be Black kids and kids with disabilities who are subjected to all kinds of biases that deny them an educational opportunity,” he said.

Families who have experienced emergency petitions say educators who can communicate with their child are stretched thin, and measures that could de-escalate a situation are not always taken. The day her son was sent to the hospital, the mother recalled, the administrator who had consistently advocated for him was out of the building.

In another instance, a middle schooler said the required accommodations for his learning and behavioral disabilities included taking a walk with a trusted educator when he became agitated. The day he was involuntarily sent to the hospital, that staff member was unavailable. He began yelling and spitting when an administrator blocked him from leaving on his own. He said that by the time police arrived, he was calm and sitting in the principal’s office. Still, he was handcuffed and taken to the hospital, where he was examined and released a few hours later.

Because emergency petitions happen outside the standard discipline process, missed school days are not recorded as suspensions. For students with disabilities, that has special consequences – they are not supposed to be removed from class for more than 10 days without an evaluation of whether they are receiving the support they need.

“If you use the discipline process, and you’re a student with a disability, your rights kick in,” said Selene Almazan, legal director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates.

In many places around the country, the resources needed to support students with disabilities are scarce.

On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, lawyers and advocates for families said the spectrum of alternatives for students is limited by both money and geography. Those can include private, out-of-district placements and specialized classrooms for specific needs like dyslexia, for example.

In cases where children need targeted services unavailable in the local district, the district must allow them to be educated outside the school system — and pay for it.

“You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because you’re like, ‘This kid needs more services,’ but you can’t get the school to agree,” said Angela Ford, clinical director at Maple Shade Youth and Family Services, which serves children with emotional and behavioral disabilities in Wicomico.

The 2017 settlement with the Justice Department required the Wicomico district to reduce the significant racial and disability-related disparities in suspensions, placements in alternative schools and other discipline measures.

The district agreed not to use emergency petitions “where less intrusive interventions … can be implemented to address the behavioral concern” and not to use them “to discipline or punish or to address lack of compliance with directions.”

But since the settlement, many parents, teachers and community leaders said the district has seemed more concerned with keeping suspension numbers down than providing support for teachers to help prevent disruptive behavior.

“If we know how to handle and deal with behaviors, then we will have less EPs,” said Anthony Mann, who was an instructional aide at Wicomico County High School last year and is a Wicomico public school parent.

Tatiyana Jackson, who has a son with a disability at Wicomico Middle School, agrees teachers need more training. “I don’t think they have a lot of patience or tolerance for children with differences. It’s like they give up on them.”

Wicomico school officials said ongoing professional development for staff includes the appropriate use of emergency petitions.

“Each school has a well-trained team that includes a social worker and school counselor, with the support of school psychologists,” said Sahler. “All supports that may be beneficial to assist the student are utilized. However, the safety of the student is paramount and the determining factor is ensuring that there is no unnecessary delay in obtaining aid for the student.”

But Denise Gregorius, who taught in Wicomico schools for over a decade and left in 2019, questioned the feasibility of the discipline and behavior strategies taught during professional development.

What the teachers really want, she said, is more support.

After the settlement, which had a two-and-a-half year monitoring period, the number of suspensions and expulsions in Wicomico declined markedly – for Black and white students. But the number of emergency petitions, which don’t appear in state statistics, has ticked up.

Other measures of exclusionary discipline remained high, including school arrests. In 2021-22, Wicomico had 210 school-based arrests – the second highest number in the state, while they were 15th in student enrollment. More than three-quarters of the children arrested were Black and 80% were students with disabilities.

“Monitoring the numbers doesn’t bring you the solution,” said Losen, from the National Center for Youth Law. In many districts, “the problem is more than what they’re doing with discipline.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Some Wicomico parents and educators point to an insular culture in the school district where problems are hidden rather than resolved.

They are frustrated that there is no relationship with the county’s mobile crisis unit, which is often relied on in other counties to help de-escalate issues instead of calling the police.

Jermichael Mitchell, a community organizer who is an alum and parent in Wicomico County Schools, said educators often do not know how to empathize and respond to the trauma and unmet needs that may lead to children’s behavior.

“A Black kid that’s truly going through something, that truly needs support, is always looked at as a threat,” he said. “You don’t know how those kids have been taught to cry out for help. You don’t know the trauma that they’ve been through.”

Studies have found Black and Latino children who have a teacher of the same race have fewer suspensions and higher test scores, but that diversity is lacking in Wicomico County. Wicomico schools have the largest gap between the number of students of color and teachers of color in the state.

Wicomico school officials said they do not discriminate against any of their students.

A Wicomico teenager described a years-long process of becoming alienated from school, with an emergency petition as the ultimate break. He said he was bullied in middle school over a series of months until one day he snapped and hit the student who had been taunting him.

The school called the police. He told the officers not to touch him, and that he needed to calm down. Instead, the officers grabbed him and shoved him into the ground, he said. He was handcuffed and transported to the emergency room. But when he returned, he said the only thing that was different was how he felt about the adults in the building.

“I got used to not trusting people, not talking to people at school,” he said. “Nothing else really changed.”

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This story about emergency petitions was produced by The Associated Press and The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Report cards, which many parents rely on for a sense of their children’s progress, might be missing the whole picture, researchers say. Without that knowledge, parents may not seek opportunities for extra support for their children.

“Grades are the holy grail,” said Bibb Hubbard, founder and president of Learning Heroes. “They’re the number one indicator that parents turn to to understand that their child is on grade level, yet a grade does not equal grade-level mastery. But nobody’s told parents that.”

In the Gallup survey, 88% of parents say their child is on grade level in reading, and 89% of parents believe their child is on grade level in math. But in a federal survey, school officials said half of all U.S. students started last school year behind grade level in at least one subject.

In a report examining grade point averages and test scores in the state of Washington over the past decade, researchers found grades jumped during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many districts had eased their grading policies to account for the chaos and hardship students were experiencing.

Some of that leniency could still be in place, masking gaps in learning that are showing up in standardized tests, but not in grades, said Dan Goldhaber, a co-author of the report and the director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

Districts across the U.S. have invested federal pandemic relief money in programs to get students back on track academically, from intensive tutoring to summer academic programs. But often far fewer students show up than the district had planned, Goldhaber said.

For programs like summer school or online tutoring, where the family chooses whether to participate, “what we see is that it’s only a fraction of the students that are invited or eligible to that are actually participating,” he said.

The Gallup poll findings underscore that trend, pointing to families who may not realize they should take action about their child’s academic performance.

In the poll of more than 2,000 parents of K-12 students, half the respondents say they’ve discussed their child’s academic progress with a teacher. But among parents who know their child is behind grade level in math, the percentage skyrockets: 74% have spoken with the teacher.

Report cards generally don’t convey enough information, said Sarah Carpenter, director of The Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy organization in Tennessee.

“A report card is really tricky in our opinion, because you’re just looking at A’s and B’s and C’s,” Carpenter said. Nowhere on the report card does it say “what reading level your baby’s on, and that’s what’s throwing parents for a loop.”

By talking to parents about issues like literacy and the nuances of grading, families are better able to advocate for their children in the school system and work in partnership with educators, said Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, a parent and founder of the advocacy group Parent Shield Fort Worth in Texas.

“Knowledge is power,” she said. “Parents don’t know what they don’t know. So we don’t want them to blame themselves. But now that you have the information, use the information to demand better and ensure that your child and all children get exactly what they need.”

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The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

He found that in one called “The Family Book,” a 2003 picture book by Todd Parr. It depicts families of all kinds: the traditional nuclear family, but also families with one parent or step-parents, as well as adoptive families and same-sex parents like Brown and his husband.

But across the country, books and lessons that represent different families and identities are increasingly the target of conservative pushback — even when they’re for the youngest of learners. Parr’s book for preschoolers and early readers is often among those challenged by parents and activists.

“It is important my kids are definitely exposed to that,” Brown said. “What these parents are really doing is demonstrating how fragile their worldview is, that a children’s book is enough to shatter it.”

Efforts to ban books have been surging at school and public libraries. Of the bans targeting picture books, about three-quarters are books that address LGBTQ+ themes and roughly half are stories that mention race, said Kasey Meehan, Freedom to Read program director at PEN America.

“There’s legislation out there that could lead to felony offenses and criminalization, (teacher) decertification,” Meehan said. “When you see this threatening environment, more and more we see educators responding in an overly cautious approach, and that shows up in how they think about their classroom libraries.”

Objections to the titles often involve arguments that they are not age-appropriate. In some of the many challenges Parr’s book has faced over the years, opponents have taken issue with a line that reads, “Some families have two moms or two dads,” saying it was not suitable for young children.

Educators and free-speech advocates said the books often simply acknowledge the existence of different identities. That’s crucial, they say, to help young children develop empathy and an understanding of themselves — especially for children whose families include people of color or LGBTQ+ relatives.

The disputes have spilled over into classrooms. In Wake County, North Carolina, a preschool teacher resigned last year after an uproar over flashcards that depicted LGBTQ+ families, to teach colors based on the characters’ clothing.

In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, replaced the state’s early childhood learning director in April over the use of a guide for preschool teachers. The governor denounced the guide as teaching “woke concepts” because of language about inclusion and structural racism.

The book comes from the National Association for the Education of Young Children — the nonprofit professional association for early childhood education, which accredits day cares and preschools. The fourth edition of the group’s “Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book” says in part that children “begin to see how they are represented in society” in preschool and that the classroom should be a place of “affirmation and healing.”

The Alabama official’s ouster was the most prevalent example of how censorship and restrictions on teaching are extending beyond the K-12 sphere into early learning, said Leah Austin, president and CEO of the National Black Child Development Institute.

Research has found that children as young as 6 months old can perceive race-based differences. Limiting content denies children opportunities to learn about themselves, and to relate to other people, Austin said.

For young children, having access to books that interest them is also a crucial factor in becoming strong readers and battling disparities in literacy rates, said Michelle Martin, a youth and children’s services professor at the University of Washington. Although the diversity of children’s books has grown in recent years, representation is still lagging.

Martin recalled growing up in South Carolina, where her parents had to drink from segregated water fountains. As a child, she had little choice but to read books that depicted stories far removed from her experiences.

“There were really limited books that my generation had that reflected who we are,” she said. “Those books are beginning to be much more widely published, and those are the ones that are being targeted.”

In Florida, where Brown and his family live, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has pushed through legislation that bans mentions of gender identity and sexuality in classrooms for all grades, including public pre-K programs. Supporters of the law say parents, not teachers, should be broaching those subjects with their children.

For gay people of his generation, Brown recalled, building a family often felt like a remote possibility. When he and his husband first started dating in 2002, it was illegal in the state of Florida for gay couples to adopt a child.

“It was like a dream, but it’s a dream that’s so far off,” he said. “It’s like, ‘I want to fly like Superman.’ You don’t even really think it’s something you can have.”

The couple revisited the question in their 30s and decided to pursue adoption. Brown said he and his husband know it is inevitable for their sons, now ages 5 and 7, to encounter questions about having two dads.

“These laws are actually not meant to keep people from talking about sexuality,” he said “It is to prevent queer families from being talked about, the queer experience from being talked about. It is very much aimed at us.”