My Own Gay Body
I'm not entirely sure when I realized that I was a homogay. Sure, there were intensely clear hints as I grew up: playing gynecologist with female friends, thieving my brother's baggy grunge clothing (wish I'd gone the Angela Chase grunge-route instead), awkwardly dependent relationships with a few female teachers, running through boyfriends more out of boredom than excitement. I developed a massive, heart-tripping crush on a female manager at my first job (I was 17), and that carried me through a handful of boys that tried, in vain, to get my undeterred attention. She must have been my catalyst, as she was the first woman I confessed those churning feelings to; the letdown was gentle and unbelievably kind. (I am still not convinced she is not of my female persuasion, but alas, I imagine I may never know.)
I didn't come out (via a letter I left in my parents' bedroom before I went to work) officially until I had my first girlfriend, and while my mom definitely cried (she says because I wouldn't have a wedding, etc), it just... was. No fight, no disownment, no challenge, no beg for reconsideration. My brother cited that we could now check out girls together. My mom had actually, it turns out, been planning on taking me to lunch and asking me if I was gay. I think she was relieved I headed her off and eliminated the need for that. AND HOW AWKWARD WOULD THAT HAVE BEEN.
I came out at the age of 20. It was a good age for realization and personal gay growth: slightly too young to abscond into the darkness and carnival-esque nightlife of young homogays, and two years past high school, where I never would have emerged as gay. At 20, I was mostly free. I could pick whom I wanted to tell, and deliberately avoid conversations with people that didn't need to know. I wasn't wearing rainbows, wasn't sporting any kind of alternative lifestyle haircut (I waited till I moved to FL before I took the axe to my long hair), wore men's jeans simply for comfort, and had, like, a Phish sticker on my black 1995 VW Jetta. I was gay, I was okay, and the world was still spinning on its axis.
That was 10 years ago. A lot has happened since then: one move to FL and back, a handful of serious relationships, some not so much, a well-rounded trail of heartbreak, completion of my bachelor's degree, getting a Real Job Teaching, meeting the woman of my dreams, lusting after the woman of my dreams for 3 mostly silent years, capturing the woman of my dreams, completing my Master's degree, continuing to Teach.
And to cut through my long-winded chase, that's where all of this is going. The Teaching. To be exact, we're going back to high school.
Why, you ask? Why did I choose to teach high school? Simply, I like teenagers. I truly do. I could not teach elementary level because I am not skilled at math and I don't know what to do with little kids, and I really, wholly do not want to teach middle school because I loathed my own middle school experience and cannot fathom purposely or intentionally going back. Also, I dislike clinginess, and middle schoolers are clingy.
So, high school. I guess, in some ways, I became a high school teacher because I would have loved to have myself as a teacher. I know, ego, but some of that is the gay element. I did not have a single out gay teacher in all my years of public schooling. I also somehow eclipsed this in two different colleges. Wait, that's a lie: one gay male professor as an undergrad. I knew who the lesbian professor was in the English department, but never had her. Oh, I lied again. I did have an out lesbian professor in grad school. But that's generally far more common than in high school, or middle school.
IN FACT. I did have a gay teacher in high school, two perhaps, but they were absolutely, concretely, definitively closeted. So much so that one married a (gay) man. I mean, really.
So here I am -- the gaymo high school English teacher. My first year, I had very, very short hair. I ended up growing it out over three years only to cut it off again last year. While I very rarely outright announce my sexuality (I say "rarely" and mean "practically never"), kids do pick up on it. I am not overtly feminine. I do not wear skirts/dresses/very trendy clothing. I look cute, practical, comfortable, sometimes quite gay. My mannerisms in the classroom are sarcastic, pot-stirring, entertaining, slightly off-the-wall. I am a hardass in the sense that I have high expectations and stick to them. I am learning to use high support with the high control. But I have always been soft on the inside. I will not be manipulated, but I pay attention, and I know when my kids are off. Because of some rough experiences and lessons learned my first two years of teaching, I have a hard time being That Person for my students. I can't be the counselor. A) It's not my job, and B) It's too draining to balance that with teaching. But I do care. It takes a close look to see it, but I do. And they know it. Okay, fine: some of them know it.
Within my caring, I shield myself from them. I have often lied and spun stories about how I am married to a man who lives in another state because of his job. That was the general story for my first two years because so many kids asked, and I didn't know how to deflect. Part of me still believes that these kids don't need to know anything about me, but I falter with that when it comes to the kids who need a good role model: gay or not. Why lie? To protect them? Weird/maybe/I don't know. To protect myself? From what?
From parents. Parents are my biggest fear. I can handle rumors and lies, mostly, but parents are an entirely different game, and one I really, really, really hate playing. I have a lot of fear regarding the stories kids spin to their parents, and that alone often pushes me back into the book-filled closet in my classroom. Now, I have no doubt that most parents, upon meeting me, pick up on my gayness, as most moderately open-minded adults do. That I can't hide, and don't care to. It's the in-between, the kids knowing and disliking/not understanding/fearing, that scares the living shit out of me. I worry about how that translates to their parents, particularly those who are not open-minded.
I'm not saying I should walk in to class on the first day and say, "Hi, I'm Ms. ______, and I'm a homogay." That's not what I'm angling for; do heterosexuals do that? Obvs not. I shouldn't ever have to announce my sexuality because it is not the determining factor in who I am, nor is it something anyone needs to be concerned about. And yet, sometimes, I want kids to know because I want them to see that it doesn't matter. Over the past two years, I have been called out by some of my students. And I have not had a negative response or reaction. When they call me out, and there's a certain comfort level already established, I don't back down, and I don't lie. Consistently, it is my "minority" or "low class" or "already gay" students that call me out -- and they do not care. They'll actually ask me about my girlfriend. It is completely normal, and dammit, it's cute.
Not cute, however, are the words that have recently been thrown around my classroom. Among these are: Homo, Fag, Gay, He-She. And when referring to my beloved Rachel Maddow READ poster: Lez-be-real and Lez-be-honest.
I do not, cannot, let this fly unnoticed. I notice, and I face head first. I will not have an unsafe classroom environment. The response has largely been (feigned) innocence that translates quickly into (purposeful) ignorance. The culprits are all boys, save one girl with the "He-She." The boys have been troublesome. Their ignorance is cutting me in new ways. It's too early in the year for them to have picked up on me being gay unless they picked up on it via one of my former in-the-know students. And none of the comments were directed toward me. Had they been, I would not be writing this as it would have been handled in a very different way. Does that sound ominous? Yeah, good, because I seriously don't know how I would have handled it. Anyway.
Some may view these words as meaningless, insignificant, not harming anyone because they weren't directed at anyone, necessarily, they were just tossed around without thinking about the possible effects on an innocent bystander/listener. I don't. I don't think that, believe that, or ever will. For all intensive purposes, I was the silent gay kid in high school, completely unprepared to come out. I heard those words. They were not directed at me (at least never to my knowledge; I put up a damn good hetero front), but I heard them, and must have felt them in some way. I don't _ever_ recall any teacher standing up against the language. Believe me, I know what I'm dealing with here: ignorant 14 and 15 year old boys who are terrified of anyone thinking they're gay, so they super deflect by using the words in a derogatory way so that everyone knows they don't like gay people, and therefore could not be gay themselves. I get that, I absolutely do. I was the girl in middle school that started a rumor that another girl was a lesbian because I didn't want anyone thinking I was the lesbian (funny how that worked out, of course, seeing as I am the lesbian, and that girl definitely is not). I get the deflection, the self-protection, especially when there's an internal fear that you might be the gay one.
But the difference between me and the teachers of my past is that I won't stand for it. I won't hear the language and ignore it. I will meet it head-on and take it down, vowel by vowel, disarming its power and working everyone back into an environment, even just for 90 minutes a day, where it's safe to be who you are, even if you don't know exactly who that is just yet.
