Tag: queer

Love, Zac

Be patient with me, it’s been a minute.

Part of being an adult who grew up closeted and queer, for me, is reading a ton of queer YA fiction as an adult. The stories that were kept from me and labeled gross, perverse, and inappropriate by peers and – by way of their silence – my teachers are stories I relish now. As much as it is about helping the students I serve see themselves in the pages of the books our district’s English teachers feature in their classrooms, it’s about applying a balm to the scars left by shame in my childhood.

This is how I first approached Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015). It was another text to help me somehow feel better about my adolescence. And it was another book to keep on that shelf of my mind for the occasions a caring teacher asked for a recommendation that started with “I’ve got this kid…”

While Albertelli’s Simon is in many ways your standard coming-out/of age-story, it also does what few queer novels had done at the point it was published. It erred more on the side of coming-of-age than coming out. It was more popcorn than tissues. Simon was going to be okay and no one was going to be disowned, beaten, or killed for being queer.

As others have pointed out, Simon is also problematic. While the main character might be othered because of his sexual identity, he’s doing just fine in pretty much every other privilege category. Part of what made the story so warm was knowing his parents were going to be amazingly accepting by the end.

Those problems followed the book into its adaptation to the big screen, albeit with more ethnic variety in the casting than was explicitly stated in the book.

The strengths of both overshadow the flaws. This is why I sat down the other day to start the Disney+-turned-Hulu spinoff of Simon – Love, Victor.

I will not talk much here about the details of Love, Victor, save for the notion that, if any of the above interested you, Victor will pull your heart. I meant to watch an episode. It turned out to be the first and only show I’ve binged since my kids arrived at the beginning of December.

Whereas Simon showed me another queer kid, Victor showed me a queer kid whose path and experiences felt so real and complicated that I found myself sobbing when they got too close to my own.

But that’s not what I’m actually writing about…

And while I really, really, really recommend Love, Victor, it’s not what finally dragged me out of the deep writing slumber to put my thoughts to pixels.

Yesterday, Kristina binged the show on my suggestion and we were texting about it as she wrapped up. I noted, were I still in the classroom, I’d love to do a comparative analysis of the original Simon text and at least a few episodes of Victor to think through how race, class, privilege, religion, gender, and sexuality play out in both pieces of this shared world.

Then, today, as I was playing with this idea that will never happen, I heard this voice in my head say, “But what about the straight kids?”

I’m 39-years-old, and I’ve done some stuff with my life. I am out and proud. To get to the place where I feel comfortable typing any of this has meant putting in some tough work.

With all of that, in thinking about a story I can personally attest reads as truthful and important, I still worried about taking up space of straight people. I recognized the guilt of taking time away from the traditional narrative. I questioned the value of my own story. Still.

In processing all of this, I’ve come to realize my relationship to texts featuring queer characters has been solely focused on mirrors. Never once in all the time I’ve been doing the work have I acknowledged the value inherent in a straight kid reading about a queer kid. And, it makes sense. When those stories were so absent from my own growing up and still too-difficult to find for queer kids coming up now, I get how my brain has put importance on making sure kids (and adults) who feel like they’re living in the shadows can interact with texts that shine light where shame cast a cloud. Kids are killing themselves because these stories are still banned, ignored, or shunned.

But to think only this way is to accept the narratives do not have value as windows and doors. I’m embarrassed not to have thought of this before. It is possible, before today, if you’d asked me if I thought it was okay for a kid to make it through 13 years of public education and never encounter queer characters, I might have said something like, “Not the queer kids.” I would have begged off taking up space or putting explicit value on stories like the story of my life.

It turns out, I am not only applying balm, I’m still learning from these stories too. As you or your colleagues start to plan your syllabi or reading lists for the coming year, you are doing it wrong if you are not including queer characters. You are continuing to tell your students – queer and straight – that queer folx need not be given space on the page or in the world. That lesson sticks.

My Anger and My Fear

I am angry, and I am scared.

I forgot they were shooting at us. In the year since I was granted the right to marry whomever I want and the words, “It is so ordered” were tattooed on my heart, I let my guard down and forgot they were shooting at us. It had been nice living in a foolish state of ignorance about the fact strangers want me dead.

I am worried for the kids like me. In the towns small and large, there are queer kids who haven’t said anything to anyone about what they know makes them different, because, somehow, other people know and ridicule them for even a perceived difference. In too many schools, like mine, that ridicule and vitriol go unanswered by the very adults whose job it is to care for and protect these students. I worry for the kids like me who were maybe hopeful that life after school would be better, because they have seen the world will let things get much worse.

I am crushed by the almost immediate straight washing of the reporting and response to this massacre at a gay club. While it is no less saddening to see Republican congresspeople sidestepping any acknowledgement that members of the LGBTQ community were killed in Orlando, it’s not surprising. To see headlines remove the word “gay” in news reporting, though, hurt and surprised. It eased the road to, “We are all Orlando,” which hurt my heart in ways I can only imagine are similar to the hurt my friends of color feel every time someone proclaims, #AllLivesMatter.

I am stung by the fact that this overt act of homohatred also illuminated the institutionalized policies of homophobia that prevented so many survivors, friends, and family of those injured in the attack from donating blood. Compounded by the fact these arcane rules were born out of a health crisis representing one of the most horrible failures of a government to protect its citizens.

All of this is to say keep your thoughts and prayers. Send your words and actions.

If, at some point you let a child or adult in your care say something derogatory about an LGBTQ person, you helped pave a path to queer-identifying kids believing they are less-than.

And then, when they saw someone actually shooting at them in a place that has, throughout history been a symbol of safety and togetherness, they put two and two together and realized the danger they felt in your classroom was much bigger in the wider world.

You may say “We are all Orlando,” but that’s not all we are.
We are the ugly tacit approval of everything that led to the killing of 49 members of my community being shot at a gay club in Orlando last weekend.

Don’t think and pray. Do and say.

That is what I’m feeling.

Queer Teacher

I never felt comfortable being queer and a teacher. From student teaching in Illinois to my first years in Florida to working at SLA – while vastly different in their levels of acceptance, none of them felt completely safe. None of them got to see all of who I was.

As much as I’m sure this was informed by growing up in a largely intolerant small, rural school, it wasn’t all that. It wasn’t all baggage. It was also knowing I needed to check when moving from one place to another to find out if I was part of a protected class in my new location. When I first got hired to work in Sarasota, my mom wrote an email with many exclamation marks saying she’d checked and that the county had banned discriminatory employment practices based on sexual orientation.

While I’d had no intention of walking into my principal’s office to say, “Here are the scope and sequence guidelines you asked for, and I’m gay,” it was good to know I couldn’t be summarily dismissed if she found out I’d been dating a guy.

Pause and think about that. By writing this post and outing myself here, I am eliminating the possibility of teaching in 28 states should some industrious principal start to google. Can you say the same about talking publicly about whom you date or marry? If so and you live on the LGBTQ spectrum, it’s not likely we will ever talk about it online. My sexual orientation isn’t listed in my Twitter profile or a part of my about.me listing. It’s not there because I don’t want possible intolerance to get in the way of a free exchange of ideas in the spaces I love. The thing is, though, if you’re straight, it’s only a free exchange of ideas for you, because I give up a part of who I am to connect with you.

I resent that in the same way I resent having to out myself to people when they assume I’m straight and ask if I have a girlfriend. Sometimes, the answer is simply “no” and I let the pitch fly by because I don’t want to have the conversation that starts with, “Oh, you don’t seem gay.” I reply “no” in those moments when my response would be, “You don’t seem like a heteronormative cliché, so we’ve both learned something today.”

In the vein of learning, I would love to have learned who among my teachers growing up identified as LGBTQ. More than that, it would have meant the world to me to hear a teacher say aloud that he or she was an ally, was accepting, wanted to be there for me if I needed to talk. Your safe space stickers on your doors or ally triangles were nice, and I needed to hear you say it out loud. I needed to hear you say something positive about people who were gay so that I, at the very least, knew you knew we existed.

I tried to do this in my classrooms. From talking about Ryan White so that kids knew HIV/AIDS weren’t synonymous with being queer, to choosing books that had gay characters who weren’t merely tokens or getting their heads bashed in for coming out – I tried to build an inclusive space.

I didn’t come out, though. I’m sorry for that. To any former students who could have benefited from me saying it explicitly, I am sorry I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry I let my resentment toward other people’s assumptions and my fear of repercussions keep me from being the role model I wanted to be. Hopefully, this post can still be some small help.

That’s why I’m writing this now, because straight people need help. So, let’s review some things straight people can do to be better people (cause most of you sure have the straight thing down).

Assume someone in the room is LGBTQ. This is different than assuming not everyone is straight.

Use inclusive language. Instead of asking a student if they are going to a social function with what someone of what you perceive to be of the opposite gender, ask if they’re planning on going with anyone or going at all.

Mention LGBTQ people in positive ways. Part of what took me so long to get right with being queer was having Matthew Shepherd as my main touchstone of what it meant to be gay. Think about the lesson implicit in a story about a person whose life came to mean something to people only after he’d been tied to a fence post, beaten, and left to freeze to death.

Call on your unions to champion equity. As I said, 28 states still allow for the dismissal of teachers based on sexuality. If their membership called for it, the teachers unions could at least make this part of the conversation in election cycles.

Out yourself. Give yourself a week of outing yourself as straight when you meet new people or in conversations with people you’ve known for a while but haven’t told you’re straight. If we have to do it, you should at least learn how awkward and annoying it feels.

Know that knowing one LGBTQ person isn’t knowing all or even many. I write this as one queer man, not on behalf of all. In the same way I don’t make assumptions about all members of group X when I meet them, don’t take meeting me or anyone else as having learned what there is to know about someone different from you.

Some people who have known me for a while might have read this post and be surprised or even hurt that we haven’t had this conversation before or that I didn’t explicitly come out to you. I suppose you’re going to have to work through that.