Jack Petocz stands up to book bans, ‘Don’t Say Gay’ and Ron DeSantis
bill — as objections to it reverberated across social media after its introduction in January.“It was all over my Twitter feed,” Petocz told LGBTQ Nation in an interview from his home in Flagler County, Florida.For a lot of young people, the objections would have stopped with a social justice Tweetstorm.
For Petocz, it was just the beginning of a real-time mobilization in which he would quickly become a student leader, recognized across the nation for his political acumen and courage.“Students were asking for advice on how to organize their own rallies and how to deal with school administrators.
So very quickly, it got really big.” — Jack PetoczPetocz believed instinctively from the hard experience of coming out to his family and classmates that House Bill 1557 was wrong.
The “Parental Rights in Education” bill bans classroom instruction on “sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through grade 3, which effectively outlaws students or teachers from talking about something as commonplace as same-sex parenting or marriage.“I started by retweeting, but then I read the bill and got into the nitty-gritty of it and felt like I needed to take tangible action,” Petocz said. “At first, I was just planning to organize a student walkout in my school district, but as soon as I put out the flyer on Twitter and Insta, I was flooded with DMs from all over the state.
