Date: Sunday, December 28, 1997
Edition: THIRD

STUDENTS LIVE ON A `STRAIGHT EDGE' - GROUP CHOOSES A DRUG-FREE LIFESTYLE AND IS SOMETIMES RIDICULED BY OTHER STUDENTS.

By DENNIS ZEHNER
Of The Morning Call

Staci Luton gets ambushed almost every day.

As the 17-year-old junior at Allen High School and Lehigh County Vocational-Technical School walks into class, her fellow students see her nose ring and her black carry bag, which she has decorated with the words "STRAIGHT EDGE" and the letter X, the symbol of the lifestyle she has chosen.

Often, her classmates are ready to pounce on her.

Choosing to live a straight edge lifestyle -- which requires abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs and casual sex -- has never been easy for people like Staci.

In a typical encounter, she says, a student will yell, "What's wrong with me?" because he or she drinks or smokes or does drugs.

Another student might ask, "Why don't you do drugs?"

As Staci walks into the cafeteria at lunch time, she would often see other students crossing their arms in an X formation in sarcasm and yelling, "Smoke crack!"

She has been spit upon while crossing the street, she says, and has had meat thrown on her in class.

"I find myself going into a classroom and having to debate maybe eight people," Luton said.

Luton, like many other young people in the Lehigh Valley area, has chosen to live the straight edge lifestyle and deal with ridicule and negative stereotypes.

"They think just because I'm straight edge that I'm trying to force my beliefs on others," Luton said.

Local straight edge advocates said a Dec. 7 Associated Press report of violence among radical teens claiming to be straight edge in Utah, Ohio, Texas, Washington and California did not represent who they really are, calling The Morning Call and writing Letters to the Editor.

"We're trying to do something positive and newspapers and other people are turning it and making us look bad," Luton said.

Local straight edge followers say those who use violence are an unfair representation of what they are all about.

"I think it's (the violence) just ignorant," said Eric Potts, 17, of Upper Saucon Township, who is proud to call himself straight edge. "You choose that lifestyle but you don't try to force it on other people."

Eric's younger brother, Ryan, who also follows the lifestyle, agrees.

"They took matters into their own hands," said Ryan Potts, 15, "and straight edge kids just don't do that."

While there have been no major reported incidents of violence from straight edge people in the Lehigh Valley area, there is some fear there may be some in the future.

Luton said she knows of a couple of teens who are fed up with the bad reputation straight edge students receive from their peers and are ready to fight back.

"There are people with messed up ways of thinking and I don't like that," Luton said. "There are always people like that in minority groups."

Andy Forbase, the lead singer of the local straight edge band Rancor, said there are those in the northeastern United States, such as the band Earth Crisis out of Syracuse, N.Y., who promote a violent lifestyle.

Earth Crisis coined the lyric, "A firestorm to purify."

"They're telling kids to go and burn down and firestorm these places (which use animal products)," said Forbase, 20, a June graduate of Emmaus High School.

Local straight edge people say those who turn to violence, while not representative of their lifestyle, do provide them with problems.

"Those few bad people in the straight edge movement who fight back give us a bad name," Luton said.

While the straight edge lifestyle has come under scrutiny, it has grown and gained more acceptance through the area over the years.

Easton's Lafayette College has a Straight Edge Club that claims more than 100 members and has its own living unit on the third floor of Farber Hall, a campus dormitory which houses 18 of the club's members.

While the club considers itself to be "nontraditional" -- in that many of its members do not fit the stereotype of white kids who wear tattoos and piercings and dye their hair and listen to hardcore and punk rock music -- it still holds to the basic tenets of the lifestyle.

"We are dedicated to providing alternatives to drinking and substance abuse on campus," the club's mission statement states. "Our goal is to show, by example, that we can all have fun without alcohol, or other mind-altering substances."

While other area colleges -- including Muhlenberg College, Allentown College and Lehigh University -- offer substance-free housing, only Lafayette has a straight edge organization.

Justin Birch, 22, a nursing student at Northampton Community College, said a lot of people lose touch with the lifestyle after high school.

"I think a lot of people stop being straight edge when they go to college," Birch said, "because all of the pressures to be in a frat and stuff. Most activities include drinking."

Local high schools, such as Emmaus, have been known to have small communities of straight edge youth.

Forbase said in 1994 the school had a group of 20 or so straight edge students. However, Forbase said the group had dwindled to five students by the time he graduated.

Many high school straight edge students spend their free time listening to hard-core music and going to music shows.

"It's a thing we do," said Forbase, who started his band roughly two years ago with friends from high school and a friend he met at a show. "We go to shows instead of getting drunk."

Local straight edge followers said they do feel the pressures and ridicule of peers. However, they try the best they can to take it in stride.

"To me (the lifestyle) is more important," said Eric Potts. "It doesn't get frustrating because I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world."

"I focus on the positive things," Luton said.

Focusing on positive things is even harder this time of year for Staci. During Christmastime in 1994, her family lost its center of gravity, her grandfather, Donald Stenger, to lung cancer.

Since then, Staci and her family "hardly" celebrate the holiday. They feel Stenger was their "Christmas spirit."

To Staci, who has lived with her mother since her parents divorced when she was 5, Stenger was a concrete father figure.

Stenger, who smoked up to a pack of cigarettes a day since his early teens, died Jan. 6, 1995, at 63.

It was at that moment when Staci decided to adopt the straight edge lifestyle.

"I've seen somebody die of an addiction," Luton said. "He was dying of a habit he couldn't kick. I'm never going to put my family through that."

And so Staci will continue to walk the halls of her school, finding herself the center of debate and the subject of ridicule, hoping people will come to understand her lifestyle as a safe alternative to normal high school and college life.

"Compared to everything else teen-age kids are doing and all of the things that college kids are doing," Luton said, "I think we're the best thing going."