Annual Outing

(Part Unicorn…Lebanese)

I first came out to a girl I was madly in love with, over the phone, at the age of 15. It was a heart wrenching process in which I desperately wanted her to know how I felt, but like a regular Paige McCullers I didn't want to say it out loud for fear it would become 'real'. This turned out to be not so bad when she kissed me the next time we saw each other and we spent most of  the summer break fooling around.

Over the next couple of years I stumbled over my words with a few other people and then at 17 a misplaced love letter, to a new girlfriend, circulated quickly throughout the school and suddenly I was 'out'. Said letter included a number of song lyrics which, I felt, better described my feelings for her than regular words could. Turns out, this was pretty hilarious (think doubled over, thigh slapping laughter) to almost everyone who wasn't her or me.

Since then I have had to come out to family members, new friends, peers, colleagues and students. What I really wish is that I'd kept a tally of the amount of times I've had to declare, like Ellen on the front of TIME, "Yep, I'm gay".

There comes a point in every school year when I realise that most of my students seem to have no idea that I’m gay. Now I thought I was now 100% out, but apparently this is just not a thing that can exist. Over the course of my 9 year career I have even had two major outings in the form of me making excited announcements that my girlfriend was pregnant and expecting our first, then second, child.

Why this information doesn’t filter through to the rest of the school community or down through the other grades, I’ll never know. In a way I suppose I should be grateful that I am obviously not being talked about in a negative way within the community, but not being talked about at all? Come on!

Now besides openly stating to previous year groups, for announcements sake or when asked, that I am (in fact) gay, reprimanding students for their misuse of the word ‘gay’ and championing the rights of gay students (and fictional gay characters), there are many other factors which should indicate to my students that their teacher is, in fact, a lesbian.

Let’s start with my hair cut. Now I know for many it’s an unwelcome stereotype (short hair and comfortable shoes…), but in my case it fits. I haven’t got a short haircut because I’m a lesbian, I have a short haircut because when I had long hair I was told I looked a bit like a particular image of an Australian serial killer (for real, an actual one who also happens to be a man).

Now the second piece of evidence which should lead even the most clueless tween to understand that I prefer women, is the fact that I fangirl over Santana Lopez/Naya Rivera like a teenage boy (…or, as truth may have it, like a 30 year old lesbian). Rarely does a day go by without Glee being mentioned in my classroom (I generally clench my jaw, trying with all available will power not to bring it up, but what am I to do if the children wish to discuss it?) and, inevitably, the words ‘Santana’ or ‘Naya’ leave my mouth, quickly followed by 'brilliant' or 'fabulous'. But, alas, the silver band on my ring finger and the knowledge that I have two children all lead to the inevitable conclusion that Miss Q is straight.

Coming out can be an exhausting business on any day. It is especially exhausting having to come back out after all the trouble I went to last year. Not only did I announce that my girlfriend was due to birth our second child, but I also designed an entire competition around what we should/could/might name the baby. I took our new daughter into the school on several occasions and the students all acknowledged that she was my daughter, despite the fact that I had not been pregnant at any time in the 40 weeks prior to her arrival.

So how is it that I find myself today being asked by a student if I am married and when I respond with ‘no’ (and do not then plunge into a marriage equality debate with a 12 year old), she goes on to say ‘don’t worry, I’ll help you find a boyfriend’.

Oh dear sweetie. Miss Q doesn’t want a boyfriend, thank you very much. If you find Miss Q a boyfriend she’s
a) not going to have a clue what to do with him and
b) going to have to explain him to her girlfriend…

Perhaps I should just have a series of Glee-esque t-shirts made up in different colours and styles to wear to work, all of which simply state LEBANESE.

Teachers Are People First

Article: Teacher suicide after media hounding

Reading this posting from GayWrites, I was enraged to hear about the tragic result of the media involving itself in the private life of a British school teacher.

The comment which angered me most was when the school teacher was criticized for exposing students to "...complex gender problems at such a vulnerable young age..." (as paraphrased by the Daily Mail).

While I have no first hand information about the teacher referred to in the article, and no way to accurately speak to her teaching methods or abilities, I am going to work on the assumption that this was a person who did their job and did it reasonably well. Regardless, the bottom line is transgender people are people first. Teachers are also people first.

Western society needs to take a good hard look at what it values. An educator’s sexuality/gender identity doesn't determine their value to a class, school or school community. That said, an educator's sexuality/gender identity does have an impact on the person they are in the classroom, but it's because they have the potential to role model a particular brand of strength and courage.

Many people go through life without having to question who they are or where they fit in the world. Imagine being taught by someone who didn’t have this experience. Imagine being taught by someone who had to take some time to really work out who they are and consider how they could best live with themselves, within they life they had been given.
Imagine them then coming to work everyday and trying to inject a little of that self motivation and understanding of self worth into the lives of the kids in that classroom. Being taught art by an artist has a little more value than being taught art by someone who enjoys looking at paintings. Being taught about resilience and acceptance by someone who has had to constantly weigh these up also has more value than being taught the same by someone who has never had to question what they are fed by society.
Many queer teachers would, likely, be more aware of the impact of bullying/discrimination than a number of their straight counterparts. For this reason there is also a high chance that they would have the understanding and the desire to take action to help put a stop to it.
What happens, though, when it is the teacher who is the victim of such treatment? We need to measure the value of a teacher by the impact they have on children in their care. Teaching is about opening a person's eyes to the world, to possibility and to themselves. Who better to do this than someone who has seen the world through a different lens, has dreamed and who knows who they truly are.

Breathing Through Paige McCullers

Coming out at any age is a life changing moment. There is no right way to do it and there isn’t always a right time. While many people are able to experience love, comfort and acceptance from those around them, just as many are faced with ridicule and are left feeling more hurt and confusion than they had before.

Coming out as a gay teen is often complicated by the fact that teenagers, by their very nature are awkward beings who already lack a certain degree of self-confidence and exist within a judgemental bubble fuelled by their peers and the media. For so many gay teens, the initial stages of ‘coming to terms’ with their sexuality, even before coming-out, are filled with tales of self-doubt and blind fear.

On the whole, straight kids grow up having their feelings and thoughts validated in every book they read, every television show or movie they watch and in every group conversation they are a part of. There are hundreds of TV shows which depict examples of, for example, straight girls navigating their path to adulthood while factoring in the feelings, desires and emotions that come with falling for a boy for the first time.

What we watch and read helps us to determine how we should act, and interact, socially. Being raised Catholic and attending Catholic school for thirteen years, I spent at least eight of those years unable to even put a word to what I was feeling. Gay wasn’t something that was talked about. Gay wasn’t something which existed in my world and without any characters, on TV or in books, which I could identify with, I was left to identify as they only word which truly described how I felt: different.

Upon entering high school, the word different consumed me. I felt different. I wrote about being different. I probably acted differently because I felt completely lost about how to act, given what I was feeling. Different was as close as I was able to get to naming those all-consuming, overwhelming feelings. The only character I can remember identifying with, at any time during those confusing years, was a single mother in an ungoogleable (that’s a word now) movie, which I am sure I was the only person in the entire world to rent almost weekly.

There was nothing special about the movie, or the character I began to identify with. Looking back, the only stand out feature of the entire movie was that it was probably one of the first I’d watched in which a female in a lead role was acting of her own volition and not longing for, or needing, a man.
It is only now, at the age of 30, that I can honestly say I have found a character who speaks to the person I was and represents what I was going through all those years ago. This has occurred eighteen years after obsessive weekly movie rentals, fifteen years after falling in love with a girl for the first time and thirteen years after fully coming out during my thirteenth, and final, year in Catholic school. Paige McCullers typifies my entire teenage experience and I can honestly say that if the shy, frightened, self-hating fifteen year old me had been able to watch Paige McCullers’ journey, I wouldn’t have felt so alone.