The Gay/Lesbian Teacher As Role Model

Humanist, March, 1999 by Kenneth Pobo

Pointed at, whispered about, from one unknown country to another."

--MUTSUO TAKAHASHI

Many teachers, myself included, aren't comfortable with the idea of being a role model, someone to whom students (presumably) can look as they gain knowledge and learn to define themselves in and out of the classroom. What lessons are they learning when they look at me at the front of the room at 8:00 AM through last night's hangover or this morning's erased sleep? What can they tell about me at 11:00 AM when I waltz in and say--as if I were a favorite literary game-show host--"Can anyone tell me why April is a time for inventory in W. D. Snodgrass' poem?" A hand goes up and we're off and running.

Running is, in fact, how I spend much of my day. There he goes, our role model, with holes in his black socks and ugly shoes. I say a hello and move on.

And moving on is how I've spent much of my academic life. First there was undergraduate life--I was a geek-in-embryo for four years. Graduate school--an adolescent geek teaching my classes by day, coming out by night, slowly, half butterfly and half cocoon. Then I became an instructor, my Ph.D. a magic onion shedding its skinlike layers of "authority." And finally, a tenure-track job, the big goal, the closet where I sat with my onion and worried.

I was determined to stop moving, to find T. S. Eliot's still point in the turning world. I got tenure. The world still turned. The point disappeared. The closet remained.

I learned the rules of the game well: who to smile at even when I loathed them, what functions not to miss, how to finesse angry students out of complaints, how to paper over my mouth with forms and academic conference proposals.

While I was learning these things, what was I teaching my students? I teach former football players, big-hair women from New Jersey, and loads of suburbanites, often the first students ever to attend college in their families. Most distrust diversity of any kind. In Chester, Pennsylvania, where I teach, the students express fears about "Chesterites" (African Americans) coming over to "our" school and committing thefts, rapes, and murders. Evil is almost always "out there." It's "them," never "us."

For most of them, an openly gay teacher is not someone they expect to encounter. And, to some extent, why should they? If no teachers are truly "out," even if some are open secrets, the students will pretty much go with the presumption of heterosexuality--which they often equate with authority: the magic onion.

In a journalism class this semester, one of my few openly gay students posed this question to some of her classmates for an assignment on interviewing skills: would students accept an openly gay teacher? Most students reacted with hostility, fearing gay teachers--be they female or male--would hit on them or teach "pro-gay propaganda." One student responded, "I know there are gay and lesbian teachers here. I think they should be true to themselves and maybe a little of that would rub off on the students. Maybe it would make it easier on them, or harder, but when they hide in the closet it makes me think they hate themselves."

That student has a good point. Homosexual teachers know that, by and large, academic systems and structures reward the closet and punish the person kicking at its door. Many heterosexual teachers may feel, "Why make such an issue of my sexuality? It's nobody's business." Yet their wedding rings and casual remarks about a "husband" or "wife," in the classroom and out, suggest that sexuality in America is everybody's business, that institutionalized heterosexuality constantly makes an issue of sexuality.

Perhaps I am a role model in that I don't wear a wedding ring. Perhaps I am a role model not from the answers I can supply but from the questions I can raise.

The closet, though, is also a role model. Whenever a teacher feels shut up, censored, and believes that the result of not being shut up or censored is either violence or unemployment, he or she has essentially one option: silence. To protect themselves, some tightly closeted teachers censor their own syllabi and discussions--to the point of presenting inaccurate and homophobic information about the course material studied.

To avoid the suspicion of being gay, perhaps in a discussion of Walt Whitman, the Calamus poems and the homoeroticism which infuses all of Leaves of Grass are ignored. How many literature teachers--lesbian, gay, bisexual, or straight--teach Emily Dickinson as a frustrated straight woman wearing white and waiting for one of four male suitors to "rescue" her while she writes her marvelous and secret poems? Are arguments such as this posed by Adrienne Rich's investigation of Dickinson's sexuality figured into the discussion of Dickinson's work or just discreetly left out?

The closeted English teacher may be keeping the writers she or he is teaching --often with such passion and admiration--locked in the closet. When a writer's sexuality influences his or her works, can we leave such inquiry out of our presentations--at least at the college level--and still feel we are honestly grappling with the work? Or does a presentation that incorporates silence give students the impression that there are some questions better not asked about writing, some questions with which the role model is uncomfortable? By keeping gay-identified work out of the classroom, do we even give students a chance to ask questions? Aren't we enforcing a ban of silence on them as well?