In 2001, I was saving by working at a McDonald’s in my rural Kentucky hometown. A customer came in. Say hi to.
He said, “I don’t want anything if you touch the food. I don’t want AIDS.” I was young and scared. I called the manager.
She did not mince words: “Sir, none of my employees will attend to you. Give up.” He did.
Later, I worked at Papa John’s. Same town. An older coworker told me, “I feel sad for your dad. It must be embarrassing to have a fag for a child.
He was immediately fired and prohibited from returning. I didn’t have to advocate: my manager, Mike, believed in my dignity.
Twenty years later I remember this support and I can’t imagine it as a teacher. Not in my wildest dreams can I imagine rural LGBTQ teachers receiving support, let alone dignity, because national rhetoric has politicized K-12.
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Last year, a woman in my town imposed egregious Marjorie Taylor Greene-style accusations against me, another colleague and our students for the simple fact that LGBTQ adults lead a school club that includes LGBTQ students. She posted photos of us online. She posted photos of my former students at her workplaces. She called our club a “grooming camp” and suggested that the older students were “grooming” the younger students. The posts were widely shared.
Her allegations are not only false, but were shared without her attending a single meeting or speaking to any club sponsor. The club advocates for community cleanup projects, anti-bullying, and mental health.
I worried about my students.
I wrote to my administration for help. Several parents did the same.
One parent simply begged, “Please do something.”
The superintendent’s response was as follows: “While I understand there is a lot of misinformation in these posts, the ability to directly address every social media post that disagrees with something associated with our schools and the district is not feasible.” .
No one spoke to the children.
No one reassured the children.
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There’s a lot to unpack in his response, namely whether homophobic lies against teachers and students constitute more urgency than a typical Facebook tirade against masks or test schedules. (They answer those, by the way.)
In other words, do teachers or students who identify as LGBTQ matter as human beings? Is your safety important?
While I can’t answer why my old school didn’t step in, I can make two widespread statements about the place of LGBTQ teachers:
- It is not politically expedient to defend LGBTQ teachers.
- It is often politically expedient to throw them to the wolves.
Conservative politics is on fire with anti-LGBTQ sentiment, with more 300 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in the US during the last legislature, the vast majority of which focused on schools. Key US Republicans make despicable charges against LGBTQ people and their allies for simply existing in schools.
Still, the HRC reports more advances in LGBTQ rights than ever before it was done in the workplace these past few years. Businesses protect, advocate and include LGBTQ employees.
But rural schools are working in the opposite direction.
School councils are democratically elected and enjoy broad autonomy. Boards elect superintendents, who elect other leaders.
Few safeguards ensure that best practices are followed; districts are generally, and rightly, supposed to make the best decisions for their communities.
This assumption explains why school boards are the new epicenter of the culture war: the people who feel increasingly powerless are the most powerful locally.
Schools obviously want to protect their image. Anyone can go to their local school’s Facebook page to watch them monitor the narrative around masking, the curriculum, and, in progressive places, their moves toward LGBTQ and BIPOC inclusion.
Rural places, however, are reluctant to announce anything on these latter issues because conservative America is increasingly hostile to black, brown, immigrant, gay, lesbian, and trans voices. Politicians embrace hate – US Senator-elect JD Vance he even praises hate as a conservative value.
What can rural school districts do when groups of voters hate LGBTQ teachers, view their existence as suspect, and riot against them?
If your goal is to keep their jobs, then supporting those teachers might work against the goal.
If your goal is the kind of justice you intend to teach students, then the answer precedes the question: we don’t give in to bullies, to lies, to hate.
Protecting LGBTQ teachers, and by extension, students, requires courage, strength, sacrifice, and most importantly, the proactive vocal support of LGBTQ educators and students.
I implore any LGBTQ educator, especially in rural places, to listen to administrators saying they are LGBTQ-friendly, not assume that kindness equals support, and if the school claims to support LGBTQ teachers, say, “Show me .”
If they can’t point to something, assume you won’t get support.
Willie Carver is the author of Gay Poems for Red States and a board member of the Kentucky Youth Law Project. He is the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year.