Southern. Gay. Teacher.

Southern. Gay. Teacher. PDF Author: Randy Fair
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
ISBN: 9781646693511
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The South as a region has proven to be resistant to the idea of LGBTQ teachers. Some Southerners, including prominent politicians, have gone as far as asserting that it should be against the law for LGBTQ people to teach. This memoir chronicles the changes that Randy Fair witnessed in his over forty years of experience, both as a teacher and student, in the school systems of the South. Fair explores his experiences of overcoming his homophobic, conservative, and chaotic upbringing through the help of his teachers. He also tracks his own evolution as a gay teacher. From threats by administrators, distrust from homophobic students, and challenges by students, both gay and straight, who desperately needed more openness surrounding the issues of concern for LGBTQ people, Fair examines the difficulties he faced as a gay teacher in the South. Fair's teaching experiences also bring up issues of concern for both current and prospective teachers. Which parts of a teacher's life are public and which are private? What right does a teacher have to engage in politics and activism? How much of a teacher's beliefs are consciously or subconsciously embedded in the curriculum and the classroom experience? Through the examination of Fair's thirty years as a teacher, readers can examine more deeply the many roles and identities that a teacher must constantly confront.

Southern. Gay. Teacher.

Southern. Gay. Teacher. PDF Author: Randy Fair
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
ISBN: 9781646693511
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book

Book Description
The South as a region has proven to be resistant to the idea of LGBTQ teachers. Some Southerners, including prominent politicians, have gone as far as asserting that it should be against the law for LGBTQ people to teach. This memoir chronicles the changes that Randy Fair witnessed in his over forty years of experience, both as a teacher and student, in the school systems of the South. Fair explores his experiences of overcoming his homophobic, conservative, and chaotic upbringing through the help of his teachers. He also tracks his own evolution as a gay teacher. From threats by administrators, distrust from homophobic students, and challenges by students, both gay and straight, who desperately needed more openness surrounding the issues of concern for LGBTQ people, Fair examines the difficulties he faced as a gay teacher in the South. Fair's teaching experiences also bring up issues of concern for both current and prospective teachers. Which parts of a teacher's life are public and which are private? What right does a teacher have to engage in politics and activism? How much of a teacher's beliefs are consciously or subconsciously embedded in the curriculum and the classroom experience? Through the examination of Fair's thirty years as a teacher, readers can examine more deeply the many roles and identities that a teacher must constantly confront.

School's Out

School's Out PDF Author: Catherine Connell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520278224
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
"How do gay and lesbian teachers grapple with their professional and sexual identities at work, given that these identities are constructed as mutually exclusive, even indeed as mutually opposed? Using rich interview and ethnographic materials from Texas and California, School's Out explores how teachers struggle to create a classroom persona that balances who they are and what's expected of them in a climate of pervasive homophobia. Catherine Connell takes readers into the private and professional lives of gay and lesbian educators, along the way developing the innovative concept of racialized homophobia, which thwarts challenges to sexual injustices in schools. She also uses her own experiences as one point of intersection with the ideas in this volume. Connell's exploration of the tension between the rhetoric of gay pride and the professional ethic of discretion insightfully connects and considers other complicating factors, from local law and politics to race and gender privilege. With a sense of ethnographic verve and an engaging authorial presence, School's Out is essential reading for specialists and students of queer studies, gender studies, and educational politics."--Provided by publisher.

One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium

One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium PDF Author: Kevin Jennings
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807055875
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Twenty completely new stories of negotiating the triumphs and challenges of being an LGBT educator in the twenty-first century For more than twenty years, the One Teacher in Ten series has served as an invaluable source of strength and inspiration for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender educators. This all-new edition brings together stories from across America—and around the world—resulting in a rich tapestry of varied experiences. From a teacher who feels he must remain closeted in the comparative safety of New York City public schools to teachers who are out in places as far afield as South Africa and China, the teachers and school administrators in One Teacher in Ten in the New Millennium prove that LGBT educators are as diverse and complex as humanity itself. Voices largely absent from the first two editions—including transgender people, people of color, teachers working in rural districts, and educators from outside the United States—feature prominently in this new collection, providing a fuller and deeper understanding of the triumphs and challenges of being an LGBT teacher today.

And They Were Wonderful Teachers

And They Were Wonderful Teachers PDF Author: Karen L. Graves
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252047052
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida's Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers is a history of state oppression of gay and lesbian citizens during the Cold War and the dynamic set of responses it ignited. Focusing on Florida's purge of gay and lesbian teachers from 1956 to 1965, this study explores how the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, commonly known as the Johns Committee, investigated and discharged dozens of teachers on the basis of sexuality. Karen L. Graves details how teachers were targeted, interrogated, and stripped of their professional credentials, and she examines the extent to which these teachers resisted the invasion of their personal lives. She contrasts the experience of three groups--civil rights activists, gay and lesbian teachers, and University of South Florida personnel--called before the committee and looks at the range of response and resistance to the investigations. Based on archival research conducted on a recently opened series of Investigation Committee records in the State Archives of Florida, this work highlights the importance of sexuality in American and education history and argues that Florida's attempt to govern sexuality in schools implies that educators are distinctly positioned to transform dominant ideology in American society.

Queer South Rising

Queer South Rising PDF Author: Reta Ugena Whitlock
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 162396170X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
Queer South Rising: Voices of a Contested Place is a collection of essays about the South by people who identify as both Southern and queer. The collection’s name hints at the provocative nature of its contents: placing Queer and South side-by-side challenges readers to think about each word differently. The idea that a queer South might rise undermines the Battle Cry of “The South’s Gonna rise Again!” embedded in the collective memory of a conservative South. This rising does not refer to a kind of Enlightenment transcendence where the region achieves some sort of distinctive prominence. It suggests instead ruptures, like furrows in a plowed field where seeds are sown. The rising Whitlock envisions is akin to breaking and turning over meanings of Southern place. The title further serves to remind readers of the complexities of the place as it calls into question notions of a universal, homogenous LGBT, queer, identity. Queer South Rising is the first truly interdisciplinary collection of essays on the South and queerness that deliberately aims for multiple approaches to the topics. This collection is intended for a wide audience of “regular” folks. Essays explore multiple intersections of Southern place—religion, politics, sexuality, race, education—that transcend regional boundaries. This book counters conventional scholarly texts; it invites all readers interested in the South and queer themes to engage with the narratives it holds—and perhaps question their assumptions. Whitlock has sought, in collecting these essays, to seek out a diverse group of authors—across disciplines, professions, and interests—to shatter perceptions about a nostalgic, romanticized Southern culture in general.

Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement

Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement PDF Author: Sheila R. Morris
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611178142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
A collection of essays by South Carolina activists on the development of the LGBTQ movement In Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home, Sheila R. Morris has collected essays by South Carolinians who explore their gay identities and activism from the emergence of the HIV-AIDS pandemic to the realization of marriage equality in the state thirty years later. Each of the volume's nineteen essays addresses an aspect of gay life, from hesitant coming-out acts in earlier decades to the creation of grassroots organizations. All the contributors have taken public roles in the gay rights movement. The diverse voices include a banker, a drag queen from a family of prominent Spartanburg Democrats, a marching minister who grew up along the Edisto River, a former Catholic priest and his tugboat dispatcher husband from Long Island, the owner of a feminist bookstore, a Hispanic American who interned for Republican strategist Lee Atwater, a philanthropist politician from Faith, North Carolina, and a straight attorney recognized as the "Mother of Pride" who became active in 1980, when she learned her son was gay. Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement challenges the conventional understanding of the LGBTQ movement in the United States in both place and time. Typically associated with pride marches and anti-AIDS activism on both the east and west coasts and rooted in the counterculture of the 1960s and "Stonewall Rebellion" in New York City, Southern variants of the queer liberation movement have found little room in public or scholarly memory. Confronting an aggressively hostile environment in the South, queer political organization was a late-comer to the region. But it was the very unfriendliness of Southern political soil that allowed a unique and, at times, progressive LGBTQ political community to form in South Carolina. The compelling Southern voices collected here for the first time add a missing piece to the complex puzzle of postwar queer activism in the United States. Harlan Greene, author of the novels Why We Never Danced the Charleston, What the Dead Remember, and The German Officer's Boy, provides a foreword. Contributors: Jim Blanton Candace Chellew-Hodge Matt Chisling Michael Haigler Harriet Hancock Deborah Hawkins Dick Hubbard Linda Ketner Ed Madden and Bert Easter Alvin McEwen Sheila Morris Pat Patterson Jim and Warren Redman-Gress Nekki Shutt Tony Snell-Rodriquez Carole Stoneking Thomas A. Summers Matt Tischler Teresa Williams

Unmasking Identities

Unmasking Identities PDF Author: Janna M. Jackson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739118443
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Based on a qualitative research study of gay and lesbian teachers, Unmasking Identities explores how these educators negotiated their gay and teacher identities in a climate where the two have historically been pitted against each other. This process of integrating their sexual identities with their roles as teachers was impelled and impeded by several factors, including community atmosphere, school culture, and family status. Janna M. Jackson demonstrates that these gay and lesbian teachers made direct and indirect connections between their experiences related to being gay or lesbian and their classroom practices of creating safety, promoting social justice, and building on students' understandings. This unique book explores what happens when identities are oppressed and suppressed and the consequences when they finally break free. Unmasking Identities provides theoretical understandings and practical advice for teachers, administrators, and policymakers who are concerned about gay and lesbian issues. This engaging text will appeal to those interested in gender studies and issues in education. Book jacket.

Prelude to Bruise

Prelude to Bruise PDF Author: Saeed Jones
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566893844
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
Praise for Saeed Jones: "Jones is the kind of writer who's more than wanted: he's desperately needed."—FlavorWire "I get shout-happy when I read these poems; they are the gospel; they are the good news of the sustaining power of imagination, tenderness, and outright joy."—D. A. Powell "Prelude to Bruise works its tempestuous mojo just under the skin, wreaking a sweet havoc and rearranging the pulse. These poems don't dole out mercy. Mr. Jones undoubtedly dipped his pen in fierce before crafting these stanzas that rock like backslap. Straighten your skirt, children. The doors of the church are open."—Patricia Smith "It's a big book, a major book. A game-changer. Dazzling, brutal, real. Not just brilliant, caustic, and impassioned but a work that brings history—in which the personal and political are inter-constitutive—to the immediate moment. Jones takes a reader deep into lived experience, into a charged world divided among unstable yet entrenched lines: racial, gendered, political, sexual, familial. Here we absorb each quiet resistance, each whoop of joy, a knowledge of violence and of desire, an unbearable ache/loss/yearning. This is not just a "new voice" but a new song, a new way of singing, a new music made of deep grief's wildfire, of burning intelligence and of all-feeling heart, scorched and seared. In a poem, Jones says, "Boy's body is a song only he can hear." But now that we have this book, we can all hear it. And it's unforgettable."—Brenda Shaughnessy "Inside each hunger, each desire, speaks the voice of a boy that admits "I've always wanted to be dangerous." This is not a threat but a promise to break away from the affliction of silence, to make audible the stories that trouble the dimensions of masculinity and discomfort the polite conversations about race. With impressive grace, Saeed Jones situates the queer black body at the center, where his visibility and vulnerability nurture emotional strength and the irrepressible energy to claim those spaces that were once denied or withheld from him. Prelude to a Bruise is a daring debut."—Rigoberto González From "Sleeping Arrangement": Take your hand out from under my pillow. And take your sheets with you. Drag them under. Make pretend ghosts. I can't have you rattling the bed springs so keep still, keep quiet. Mistake yourself for shadows. Learn the lullabies of lint. Saeed Jones works as the editor of BuzzfeedLGBT.

Getting Ready for Benjamin

Getting Ready for Benjamin PDF Author: Rita M. Kissen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742581624
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book argues that issues of sexual diversity are inextricably interwoven into the basic concerns of pre-service teacher education. How do we make our students aware of assumptions regarding masculinity, femininity, and sexuality that arise from what is presented, represented, or omitted from curricula and classroom practice? What do we say about homophobia and heterosexism as we anticipate the administrative hierarchies, school cultures, parent and community politics they will encounter as teachers? What special challenges might face a teacher (straight or gay) who discusses sexual orientation in a high school classroom, or responds to a homophobic remark in the hallway or the cafeteria? How should we prepare a teacher for a parent conference with two moms or two dads? The essays in this volume range from an analysis of gay stereotypes in teacher education textbooks, to a discussion of queer multiculturalism, to personal accounts by lesbian and gay teacher educators and heterosexual allies who are challenging homophobia and heterosexism in their own classrooms and programs. All agree that education for sexual diversity is as important as education about all other forms of difference, and that future teachers need to know how to create safe spaces for lesbian and gay students, along with the children of gay families who are increasingly a part of the classroom landscape.

The Teacher's Closet

The Teacher's Closet PDF Author: Heather A. Cooper
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781433161124
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Teacher's Closet: Lesbian and Gay Educators in Georgia's Public Middle Schools reveals the intricate and multifaceted process of identity management that lesbian and gay middle school teachers regularly engage in.