Stand Up, Speak Out

My teaching tiger escaped from her cage with a roaring rage. We were reading the article, “Gay and So Alone” about a student being harassed, when one ninth grade boy said to the other, “faggot.” I lost it. I yelled, “I don’t ever want to hear that in my presence again. It disgusts me. You missed the entire point.” There was silence. It is my ninth grade honors class. They are all good kids. But even here, they don’t understand the damage that word does.

I get tired of explaining myself. It is my job after all, but some things are just emotionally exhausting and there are pieces of myself that I don’t share with all my students. Too many classes over the years, too many students per day, and too many misfires when I was being vulnerable and then thought better of it. It’s easier when teaching high school to come up with one-liners. “My sister is a lesbian. My best friend is gay. 10% of the population is homosexual, which means about three to four people in this room.” Somehow though, the one-liners never seem to cover it all.

A previous year, one of my students said regarding the principal, “That faggot. I’d kick his axx.” I wrote it up and gave it to the principal. This is a school where a student walked down the hall wearing eye shadow and another student pelted a bottle at him. As a teacher relayed the story to me, her solution was for the student to go to a more “accepting school” near Melrose. We also had a ninth grader that came to school wearing a dress. At a meeting, the coordinator of our ninth grade academy said, “We explained to him, if you come to school wearing a dress, you’ve got to be ready to deal with the other student’s reactions.” Here is where I spoke up, “a student should be able to come to school wearing whatever they choose and not have bottles pelted at them, or in the case of Lawrence King, be shot.” I didn’t say anything about the lack of consequence when my student threatened the principal. I did, however, tell the counselor that I needed the student removed from my class next semester because there were some things that I just was not willing to tolerate.

The complexity of these issues cannot be stated in a word when I want to stop a word from being used in my classroom. Please, my gay best friend from high school died three years ago. I think about the years he survived as an adolescent with society’s homophobia surrounding him. He, himself, made homophobic comments when we were young. It took years for me to understand the denial and inward self hatred that propagates such remarks. How can I explain to them how much I miss him, how witty he was, how he told me he would marry me if he were straight—that I would be the one.

When I was at my orientation for college at the University of Michigan, we were shown a video on diversity. My sister was in the video. She was quoting how two women were walking through the diag holding hands when a man said to them, “Come over here and we’ll show you how it’s done.” Afterward, we had a discussion group. I started talking, but burst into tears saying, “That was my sister in the video. How can people be so mean?”

Edgar called Nicolas “queer” in class the day after Nicolas used “gay.” I really didn’t have the energy to deal with the ignorance that day. I was already working on this essay and had mentioned this writing assignment that they would all have to do because of this very instance. But that day, Ruben, one of the boys I yelled at in regards to the “faggot” incident said, “You aren’t supposed to use that word.” He was a little beacon of light for me in that moment. He also told a girl who called me “Ms” that “she is Ms. Enszer—she is a proper noun, not a common noun.” Ruben makes me feel not only that I teach things, but more importantly that he learns them.

When I was in third grade, Boy George was like the voice of God singing to me, “Give me time to realize my crime.” People would say, “He’s gay.” I would quip back, “Bisexual.” He is actually gay, but to be accepted by the mainstream media, he said he was bisexual. That was before my sister came out to me, before I majored in theatre, before my best friend died. There was just something inherent in me to stand up to the negative connotation of that word at age eight.

So every day, I do my thing. I don’t know if any of my students realized I wore pink on February 19 in honor of Lawrence King and in the effort to stop bullying. But I do know that I moved from a small town in Michigan to Los Angeles for a reason. There, people wear big, bulky, winter coats. Here, a boy wore a dress to school. So even though I will apologize for yelling, I am not sorry for my emotional reaction. It comes from a very personal place. So if sharing this incites a student to see the film Milk, or research on the internet the Stonewall Riots, or simply say to another student, “You aren’t supposed to use that word” then some healing has taken place in my life and hopefully in the lives of others.