Queer Youth v. the State of California: Interrogating Legal Discourses on the Rights of Queer Students of Color RIGOBERTO MARQUEZ University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, California, USA ED BROCKENBROUGH University of Rochester Rochester, New York, USA ABSTRACT For nearly 2 decades, lawsuits filed on behalf of students who have endured anti- queer bias in schools have resulted in favorable verdicts and settlements for the plaintiffs, thus spurring an increasing number of school districts across the United States to establish antidiscrimination policies and other initiatives to protect stu- dents from homophobic harassment. While these legal victories mark an important turn toward creating safe schooling environments for all students, they also reveal an inattention to the intersections of multiple identities and oppressions that can mediate the harassment experienced by queer students. Drawing upon critical scholarship on queers of color, or a queer of color critique, this article interrogates the absence of race in legal discourses on the rights of queer students in California. Through its focus on the intersections of race and sexual orientation, this article considers new forms of knowledge on queer youth of color that not only may inform legal protections on their behalf, but also may shape the efforts of school districts and community stakeholders to improve the educational experiences of queer students of color. On February 12, 2008, Brandon McInerney fatally shot Lawrence King, an openly queer 1 and effeminate classmate, at E. O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, California (see Figure 1). King’s death fueled renewed attention to the plight of queer kids in schools, sparking candlelight vigils in his honor (Saillant, 2008) and pleas for acceptance of queer youth by prominent figures like Ellen DeGeneres (Silverman, 2008). That year’s National Day of Silence, an annual remembrance of victims of anti-queer violence, was dedicated to King, and a Newsweek article declared King’s death “the most prominent gay-bias crime since the murder of Matthew © 2013 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto Curriculum Inquiry 43:4 (2013) Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK doi: 10.1111/curi.12021