Creating Possibility Through Visibility in a School Setting
During Pride month, Alton Road Digital is collecting essays written by LGBTQ individuals about their experience in the workplace. Check out all of our Queer Impact essays here and learn more about sharing your story with us here.
By Santi, High School Teacher
For me, the workplace is a high school and I think that by saying that I probably conjure up traumatic memories for a lot of queer people. This was the place where we were othered and in large ways a place that set us on a path towards owning our sexual and gender identities. While the challenges remain, it is my love of teaching that has strengthened me and truly given me perspective into what it means for a teacher to be out and proud in a school setting. The generation I have had the privilege of working with is further down the road of social progress - a stark contrast to my time in high school.
Luckily, my current administration is very inclusive. The faculty is still somewhat divided between civil tolerance and actual empathy. Microaggressions abound. It has taken me the better part of ten years to earn their respect and not be consistently reduced to the token gay teacher. Naturally, my male colleagues have the most issue with it: they call me “buddy” and treat me in ways that dismiss my professionalism.
Instead of letting that determine my mindset, I use it to spark conversations with my students. What strikes me the most about being out in this space is that adults really have a need to sort each other out and make assumptions that satisfy their own desire to cope with their surroundings. My experience has been overall good, given that I have stayed away from working at religious schools, I have felt the agency to carve my own way.
As a teacher, one of the most rewarding moments comes years after students graduate and then reach out saying they have come out; it’s then that they begin to reflect on what it meant to have out teachers that were confident in their identity.
Visibility truly creates possibility.
With regard to how being out has helped or hurt my career, it’s complicated. I think that in many ways it has helped my professional growth because it has given me a sense of purpose. I teach International Politics and weave the struggle of LGBT people across the globe into all my lessons as a way of not only disrupting the conventional wisdom with regards to politics. This has given my courses depth and buy-in from the students. So, pedagogically it has helped my growth.
With regard to professional advancement, the situation becomes a bit murkier. It has been difficult to determine whether I am being asked to be on the Diversity Council simply because I am queer or because I have something to contribute to our school’s initiatives towards inclusiveness. Minorities are tokenized more often than not and this is then used to keep us quiet or “in line.” I find that it has served as a mechanism to ensure that we gloss over the microaggressions I mentioned earlier.
With that said, I don’t feel that there has been any real hindrance, in fact, I have been able to grow professionally while at my current school and I feel that this is due in large part to the way I am able to relate to the student body. They are facing a lot of identity issues in this political climate and queer people have a lot of experience in that department.
One thing that I think demonstrates an opportunity for growth is for cis straight people to consider is how they interact with their queer colleagues. My biggest advice would be to say less and listen more.
Having a gay brother or uncle or aunt does not mean you know everything about me and can treat me like you do them. We are not all the same. Don’t randomly come up to a queer colleague and announce that you recently went to a “drag brunch.”
To all the cis straight women: no, we do not want to go shopping with you, we do not want to see what you're wearing to your best friend’s wedding, and please don’t call us “honey.”
When I was younger, these were instances that I would just laugh off but as I got older and more secure in my career it began to feel like infantilism. My sexuality does not create an immediate relationship with you simply because you have made assumptions about people like me. It actually demonstrates that you have very few gay friends and if you do have any it means you haven’t truly gotten to know them.
To all the cis straight males: making light of my sexuality to make yourself feel more comfortable around me is not the most mature way of handling these situations.
Ultimately, the best thing you can do is just get to know us on our grounds, in a genuine way, the way you would anybody else.
