Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
I was accidentally outed at work. Why was I ‘in’, you might ask? Well, I wasn’t completely. I’m a teacher in a northern suburbs state school and to staff, I’ve always been loudly and proudly myself – my girlfriend attends work functions, I mention her in conversation. Why wouldn’t I, right? Everyone talks about their families. I’m not going to self-censor. How completely contrary to all my politics and beliefs around being unapologetically who you are and damn the consequences. And yet, up until four years ago, I wouldn’t dream of putting a photograph of my girlfriend on my desk. What if a student saw it and asked who it was? I would happily answer ‘No’ to the question ‘Do you have a boyfriend, Miss?’ but never follow it with: ‘But I do have a very lovely girlfriend. Thanks for asking’. Oh, I know what you’re thinking: Why do students have to know if you have a partner or not? Isn’t it better to keep your personal life to yourself? This was my rationale for years. I reasoned it wasn’t their business anyway and was irrelevant to my teaching. I often replayed the words of an old Diploma of Education lecturer who had said, ‘I’ve never known a single gay colleague to have come out successfully to a student body; it always ended badly for them.’ So when I was accidentally outed to a large group of students by two of my colleagues, I panicked.
I don’t blame these two teachers. It happened innocently enough. I had been communicating via email with the author of one of our Year 11 texts; an awesome collection of short stories. In one story, a young man’s sexuality is questioned by a friend and he laughs her off. The students always choose to believe that the character wasn’t gay, but I was convinced he was – which the author confirmed for me. I think I wrote to him something like, ‘As a big lezzo myself, I generally pick up on the homo subtext.’ Anyway, our emails back and forth contained some other insights regarding this story and others relevant to the teaching of the book, so I cut and pasted this email stream onto an A4 page with a heading that read, ‘Please do not show this to your students, but this may be helpful in teaching the text blah blah.’ Now, you may have heard that teachers are overworked. It’s true. If another teacher gives you a resource and you trust that teacher, you may not have time to read the resource before a class starts (shock, horror) and you may just photocopy it in the ten minutes you have before class because of all the other stuff you had to do over lunch and then hand it out to your class to read. And that’s exactly what happened. My two colleagues accidentally outed me to about 40 students. Aghast at their actions, they came to find me after their classes, to apologise. They were spoken to by the assistant principal about their unprofessionalism. For those of you who work at schools, you know that this pretty much means everyone in the school now knew – and if not at that time, then at least by the end of the week.
So, holy shit, they know. They know I’m a big ol’ lesbian. And I had to teach a bunch of the same Year 11 kids the next morning in Literature. I was beside myself. I skulked off from work that day feeling very exposed. What would they think of me now? I was suddenly confronted with the idea that I wasn’t actually as comfortable with my sexuality as I thought. All the worst homophobic prejudices I publicly denounced (amongst my entirely supportive friendship group and family) were the ones I was convinced my students would have of me. She’s a freak, it’s unnatural, it’s perverse – even, it’s sinful! I imagined parents calling the school to have their children removed from my classes; I imagined corridor and class bullying. I became that frightened teenager again and was so angry and ashamed at myself for losing the courage of my convictions. ‘Don’t show this to your students,’ I had written – ‘because I’m ashamed of who I am,’ I may as well have added and now they all knew it. It was with pure terror that I faced my Literature class that next morning. ‘I know that something was given to you in class yesterday that I said I’m a lesbian (nearly choking on the word) and I don’t want you to think that I’m worried that you know that, because it doesn’t really worry me. It’s just that, you know, you just want to keep some things to yourself.’ Urgh, it sounded so lame and it was. And the kids, they couldn’t have cared less. They barely raised an eyebrow. One of them, sensing my distress, said something soothing, bless her, like, ‘Don’t worry about it Miss.’ And the class continued as normal. And so did the next one and four years later not a single parent has called to remove their child from my class.
It’s not like one day the students didn’t know and the next they did. Some students still don’t know and it’s not like I’m running around the school, jumping out of closets at them. But when I hear homophobic language used, I say, ‘That’s really offensive language and offends me personally because I’m gay”. Works a treat. Never seen kids have a re-think so quickly! And, even if it’s not because they’re really sorry for having said it, but because they’re simply stunned that a teacher is willing to say they’re gay in front of them, that’s fine too. At least they’re thinking. I talk about my girlfriend in class sometimes, I might say something really controversial like, ‘Oh, my girlfriend loves that stupid show, too’. It’s really no big deal. Sometimes the boys squirm, sometimes they even tell me it’s bad because God/Allah says so. I just reply that we’re all entitled to our own beliefs but my belief is that I deserve to be happy. On these occasions I notice the looks of triumph on some students’ faces and this makes me immeasurably happy. I am generally a lot happier in fact, since I was accidentally outed at work. I don’t recommend it for everyone but for me, it’s worked out fine.
Students don’t seem to ask me as much anymore if I have a boyfriend, but I do have a photo of my girlfriend stuck to my desk. And if they want to know, I say, ‘She’s lovely. Thanks for asking.’
POSTSCRIPT
For the last couple of years, following a professional development class at Safe Schools Coalition Victoria, I have facilitated a queer/straight alliance group at my school. We meet every now again and talk and do things like baking and selling rainbow iced cupcakes to promote IDAHOT (International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia). The first year we celebrated IDOHOT we gave out some badges with an anti-homophobia message and got heckled a bit, but mostly the kids grabbed them and wore them on their uniform long after the official day. Safe Schools Coalition came to our school and did some professional development with the staff, which was very well received. We also made a huge effort to address the all-pervasive homophobic language used at school. We also work with the Equal Opportunities and Human Rights Commission on ‘Fair Go, Sport!’, a student led project that aims to increase awareness of sexual and gender diversity in schools and to promote safe and inclusive environments, particularly in the sporting arena. Sometimes I despair when I overhear some homophobic language used, or worse, witness some bullying, but I honestly believe that what we’re doing is slowly changing this culture. We can’t expect to change everyone’s mind on this issue, but I like to think that we can create an environment in which queer kids can at least feel like their school has their back. Please check out the links below.
Safe Schools Coalition Victoria link:
http://safeschoolscoalitionvictoria.org.au/
Fair Go, Sport! project link:
http://www.humanrightscommission.vic.gov.au/index.php/reservoir-high-school