Teaching lesbian

As Clare tries to reach out over what she saw, it becomes apparent that their lives are intertwined in ways that go beyond a simple student-teacher relationship. As teachers across the country begin the school year, they face over number of anti-LGBTQ+ education laws and ramped-up attacks by conservatives. Every conversation, every wide-eyed look and every child with a million questions reminds me why it is so important that I am visible as a lesbian, why I need to ‘usualise’ my life as being just like every other family and make LGBT lives part of our everyday narrative.

Finally, I’m the lesbian I needed to see and who my classes need to know. A founding teacher at the Facing History School in Manhattan, Haines discusses her experience being an out lesbian, white, middle-class teacher over her year career, as well as approaches she recommends to LGBTQ educators she coaches and how she deploys intersectional thinking to support members of her school community.

“Is it true you’re a lesbian? Will you talk to us, too?” I repeated my request that they think about appropriate questions and agreed. That night I collected a few pictures of myself with my partner and daughter, cooking and hanging out at the playground, and one of our extended family. I t was my first semester of college at a small state university for people who didn't get into their top choice.

I wasn't particularly interested in school, but I was even less interested in making a career for myself as a bagger down at the local Walmart. At least until I met the woman who would be my creative-writing professor. She made being a Walmart bagger seem like a fine option. My teacher, who I'll call Sandy, wore too-big sweaters, dowdy leather clogs, and no makeup. She looked, most mornings, like she'd picked out her outfit from a pile on her floor.

Worse, she usually had a Jeanette Winterson paperback tucked under one arm. She was the first openly gay woman I'd ever met. It may seem unbelievable that I could reach legal adulthood never having met a lesbian, but I'd grown up in a town with a population of less than 3, just over the hill from where Deliverance was filmed.

Preview of Article: ‘My Teacher

Most of the women in my holler would never admit to an attraction to anyone outside their husbands, except maybe for Jesus and Dale Earnhardt. Until college, the only time I heard the term "lesbian" was when it was in the form of a question. I never understood this, why I , of all people, was so falsely and unfairly pegged as gay. Sure, I had a bowl cut and was completely uninterested in boys, but this was Why would you be into boys when women's soccer was finally in the Olympics?

I mean, sure, I might have occasionally had feelings about women, but that was normal. Everyone has crushes on their girlfriends—right? Stereotypes are dangerous, but sometimes they are also true, and Sandy had "dyke" written all over her face. Besides, her sexuality was written into our course syllabus. Our reading list was entirely women who slept with women or looked like they did, from Virginia Woolf to Dorothy Allison, from Leslie Feinberg to Judith Butler.

I was appalled by the whole thing, but especially by my teacher, who I was sure spent all of her nights home alone petting her 45 cats. I never attempted to hide my disdain. I strolled in late and plopped down in the front row, and I slept in class more often than not. I wasn't interested in anything my teacher had to say, and when she gave me feedback on my writing—especially the feedback that essays required transitions between paragraphs and I needed to start using them—I'd say, "I don't believe in transitions," and leave in a huff.

Back in my dorm, I'd say to my roommate, "Is this what happens when you don't get any dick? What a dyke. At the end of the year, I dropped out of college for the first of many occasions and started working at a cafe where everyone else—everyone but me—was gay. They'd hired me, I later found out, because they assumed I was one of them. I was not, of course; I was a proud heterosexual. But these lesbians were cool. They were young and hip and had shaved heads and sculpted eyebrows.

They weren't lonely. They didn't have cats.