Stories

These narratives provide insight into the incredible work and reflection being done by a handful of LGBTQ+ teachers across the United States. I invite you to read through them at your own pace, circle back to the ones that stay with you, and discuss them with others. A few questions to consider:


All names have been changed to protect the privacy of participants. All biographical information is accurate to the time of the interview. 


Levi (they/them), a middle school teacher in their 11th year teaching who has taught in the Southeast and Mid Atlantic


“When I first started teaching, I really felt like I needed to be that representation as I had just recently found myself since I didn't have that representation when I was younger. So I got really heavy into like starting the GSA and being really out and just being that representation for them that I didn't have. And then as I kind of went throughout my career and I grew, I kind of strayed away from identifying or being within a box because I just didn't feel like I needed something to identify with anymore. But then as I did that, the last couple years, I've realized that, even though I'm kind of past that point in my life, kids aren't and they still need that representation. So I feel a really strong connection and the passion to being that representation for kids in the LGBTQ community, because I didn't have that when I was younger.” 


Riley (they/them), an 8th grade reading teacher from the Midwest in their 2nd year teaching


“I think the best thing is…I get to see firsthand the students who are really genuinely thrilled by the fact that we, as teachers are [supporting them]. I have a student who is non-binary and they were talking about it and their parents emailed me and another teacher and were so proud and excited that their kid likes to come to school now because we respect their child. We respect who they are and it's not like they had to make this big old meeting about my kid does this, my kid does that. Their kid just came in, was like, "Hey, I use this name. This is the name I go by. This is what I am. This is who I am."


*content warning for mention of suicide:


“[The best thing is] seeing these kids so happy just because they're being noticed. And it's not before they come up to me and say, "I tried to kill myself last night." It's, "Ms. Smith, Ms. Smith, Ms. Smith. I asked a girl out and she said, yes." And I can go, "oh my God, I'm so excited for you! Where are you going?" And they can tell me their experiences. They get to be the same kids as Tommy and Susie in the hallway. And none of us blink an eye. And I think that's the big thing. And that's the biggest difference. Because I went to school at the school I teach in and I get to see the transformation from when I was in school... If a teacher had put up a Safe Space or asked pronouns or had a LGBTQ section in their library…they would've been yelled at so fast and basically told they can't do that so fast, their heads would spin.”


“It was really nice to actually get to talk about this. I was really excited about this. I told my coworkers. I was like, "I get to go talk about all of my things and being an openly LGBTQ teacher." Because I got your whole thing like right after my whole big pronoun debacle and I was like crying and upset because I was like, "did I do the wrong thing by letting kids tell me who they are?" And of course my mentor teacher was like, "no, you're just taking care of those kids who know who they are." So it was really nice to be able to see that not only is it just us who are actually in the field, but those people who are coming into it genuinely care.”


Anna (she/her), a sixth grade science teacher in her first year teaching


“I live in a very conservative area. There are a lot of political posters around my school that I might not align with. And the students come in wearing that kind of regalia as they will. And so I think just being honestly who I am from the beginning, my rule for everybody was you have to respect yourself, and you have to respect others in my classroom. We can't do anything else if those things aren't met. And so I think just respecting myself enough to be who I am has allowed the students to feel comfortable and also see me as someone that they could talk to.”


“I think they've [my students] now realized that not everybody looks and speaks like the people they went to school with. And so I think that they are very open to supporting people, but you have to call them out on being unsupportive or using biased language. But as soon as you do it, they're like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't know. I didn't know that saying that meant something. I'm so sorry," because maybe I'm the first gay person they've ever met, knowingly.” 


Frankie (they/them), an elementary schooler teacher in their 3rd year of teaching who has taught in the Midwest and Northwest


“I am helping as a whole create the people of our future. And so I think that's a really cool part of my role. I use things like books, or even just like representation in anything that I show them. Whether that be words, videos, books, pictures, all of that, they get to see those different people throughout their education. And I also try to make myself visible, I mean, as much as you can. Especially with the littler kids, they're not going to be picking up on much of that. But for example, I had a student, I think it was just last week, that we were counting ... they had counted the boys and the girls in the class, and she was like, "Oh, this many girls, if we're counting you." And I asked her, I was like, "Who said I was a girl?" And just being able to have ... we didn't go very far into the conversation, but just dropping that little seed of, "Oh, people don't have to be one of these two genders that you have been taught." So that's a really cool and powerful place that I get to be in.”


“At the end of last school year me and one of our education assistants had a conversation. "Hey, I want to go by a different name next year. What should I use?" And we sat down, we Googled some stuff together. We were just brainstorming different things that I could use and felt right. And just being able to have that conversation at work was so awesome. And I think just having people like that and moments like that have been a really important part on me being able to keep becoming myself and not be stopped in my tracks of, "Oh, no, what do I do? I can't do this by myself." And so I think that has been motivating and continuing my own journey.”


Molly (she/they), a sixth grade teacher in her 5th year teaching


"I think generally I had my little group of kids that would always log on to office hours at the end of last year and just to hang out and they were all queer of some variety. And yeah, I feel they gravitate towards me and I naturally connect with them as well, which is kind of nice that it comes naturally. And then with some of them, it's less. This one kid, in particular, I'm just thinking about, I have not connected with so easily. And so that's been something I've been trying to navigate and figure out how I can get him more support."


“The [other teachers] I've talked to are definitely all interested [in being inclusive]. Even one of my teachers at my grade level, he's an old white man, religious, not generally who you would think is the most accepting person and in the past, he has not been. But I think he is really because of the student I was talking about that I don't really connect with. It's very apparent that this kid is having challenges. So the teacher, he's started to read articles and really trying to educate himself. And now if he's talking about a kid and he uses the wrong pronouns, I correct them, now he's like, "Oh yeah," and changes what he was saying. So he's trying. And the other teachers, they're all like, "I don't really know much of anything, but I'm willing to do what I can to help."


Lucy (she/her), a middle school teacher from the Midwest

“When we do have new staff come in, they talk about it a lot at the beginning. "Hey, just so you know, you have to be supportive. You have to be onboard because so many of our kids identify this way, and we love that about them, and we don't want people who are going to invalidate that." At the beginning of the year, too, a lot of us, we're thinking of, "Okay, so we know a lot of kids are trying different pronouns, trying different names. How can we help support that day one?" We just got together and thought through the best ideas of how we could do the whole role thing but have kids not feel called out in a way that they were not comfortable or able to share. A lot of people did name charts like, "Hey, write down your name, whatever name you want to be called, with your last name. And then, if you want to put your pronouns ... you don't have to, but if you want to put those things." Some teachers thought, "Well, I'm just going to go through the roll and call them by their last name and if they want me to go by a nickname or something different, we can do that." I think just those little things were just great. Great little jumps, I think, of progress.” 


“This one boy was kinda almost aggressive about [an LGBTQ+ topic] like, "I don't get this and it doesn't make any sense to me." And so another student was sitting there, and I had worked with them a lot. Like, at the beginning of the year, they were very jump on anybody who disagreed with them or anyone who didn't understand….And so, we've been working a lot about how do we approach those conversations? How do we explain to someone who maybe just is confused or maybe doesn't get it, but is willing to listen? And so in that conversation, I could see them sort of pull themselves back a little bit and they started to really try to just hear, and they started by asking this boy questions like, "Well, what don't you understand? Or, what could I help explain because I have a lot of knowledge about that." And, just as they're doing their math problems, they had this little conversation and the kid who did identify as LGBTQ just explained the little things that they did know. And they said, "Well, everybody's different and the nice thing that you can do is just ask people, and if you don't know, that's okay, you don't necessarily have to know everything." It was just such a calm conversation between them that could have, maybe months previously, become an argument, like "Well, we don't get each other." But just seeing just how they just had this nice, neat conversation together after, of course, getting to know each other in time as classmates, and then just asking each other questions in a calm way. It was really, really cool.” 


“So, my curriculum… for social studies is ancient civilizations. So it's nice when we get into mythologies, when we're talking a lot about pre-Christian eras and we talk about how that influenced the ideas of what relationships are, what marriage is. It's not explicit in the curriculum, but I weave it in because kids want to know. And when we talk about mythology, there's a ton of stories of essentially gay gods and goddesses…I talk about it plainly. Kids are like, "Wait, weird." Well, no, it's not because the idea of man and women is cultural to this particular religion, which didn't exist yet, so not everybody thought that way. And, it lets us point out some different historical figures too…there's an Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut, she identified or wanted to be identified as a man so kids are like, "Well, that sounds trans to me," and I'm like, "Maybe." 


“There's a lot that I would love to do, and I think as time goes on, there's more of that support…our school at the beginning of the year, they were like, "Hey, post classroom wishlists if you had them," and I had a ton of books, historical books, non-fiction, fiction. A ton with LGBTQ character themes highlighted, and I had a lot of parents buy them, which was great. They filled my classroom with a lot of LGBTQ and diverse books, which says a lot about how things are progressing, and I think about the community support within our school and how it's changing.” 


“I think because of growing up in a very conservative community, just about every teacher I had followed the same exact pattern of getting married at 21 and having kids, and they all go to same church, or something similar. And so, for me, I'm like, "That's not how the real world works. That's not indicative of what everyone should do." And so, I try to even just get kids out of those checkbox mindsets. So, I think it guides how I ever just interact with students, like, "Hey, it's okay to be single. You don't need to be in a relationship in seventh grade. That's not something you need to get down on yourself for." Or, "Don't feel like you need to figure all of your self out." Kids like to talk about ... sometimes even they start the conversation of, "All right, everybody say how they identify." And, I'm like, "Whoa. Hey guys, not everybody knows yet or not everybody needs to share that yet." So, I think [my identity] guides a lot of my interactions with kids, and I know that it's important to talk about it, so I will continually push for that diverse content. I will continually push to include more LGBTQ rep in our curriculum. I will continue to push for more opportunity for kids to interact with each other in that safe space environment. I'm going to continue to secretively post as many rainbow colored art that I can in my room.” 


“I had a lot of kids, first week of school, one of their assignments was to write thank you cards to somebody. And, I had a stack of them, not a huge stack, but five, and they were all from kids who identified as LGBTQ. And they said, "Thank you so much for talking about that stuff with us. Thank you for always letting us share a part of our life. Thank you for validating us." And so, I remember I posted like a TikTok video about it like, "Oh, this is amazing. This just reaffirms why I do what I do," because maybe not all of them knew that I was also LGBTQ, but they felt that safeness or they felt that acceptance and that love for exactly who they were, and that's what they need and that's what they need to see.”


“No, I don't feel well prepared [to teach about LGBTQ+ topics] because I feel like I'm constantly also learning our history, but I am willing to do the work, I think. I'm definitely a reader, so I try to take in as many stories, whether they're fictional or nonfictional. I try to do what I can to be a continual learner so that I can provide better content or better just teaching or an interaction with kids. It's not always just learning about LGBTQ history. It's doing trainings on how to be a culturally responsive teacher or how to incorporate more restorative practices, which is an indigenous practice in the classroom. So it's taking all the histories, I think, that have been suppressed for so long and incorporating more and more of that into school environments because we talk about how schools are that prison pipeline. And we don't want that for any of our kids. We know that all of that data of reading scores and the way that that's been used is a negative tool. There's almost too much to ever really consider yourself well prepared, but I'm willing to constantly be someone who is a learner. That's why I keep telling myself to stay in education, even when it's really hard is because, well, what else am I going to do? I love to learn about this stuff, and I want to share my knowledge and I want to share that with colleagues too, not just kids. And, I want kids to learn how to be continual learners.” 


“This year, I am the Social Studies department head, which is cool and a lot of work…but I have a really cool team ... I came out to them the first day where they were like, "Do you have kids?" And I was like, "No, I'm gay." And, they rolled with it and it was awesome. They are really good questioners and they've jumped in on how can we support kiddos? And, pushing that boundary, I think, of what is traditional historical teaching? What is traditional teaching in general? And, what we want from kids is to be critical thinkers, thinkers for themselves, looking for more than just that one perspective that so many of us have been taught forever and pushing beyond that blindsided, one-sided tunnel vision that is easy to fall into because that's what still so many curriculums and districts expect. We have to adhere in some way to state standards. Those things definitely need updated, but we have people who are willing to push beyond, because we know what skills kids need in the real world and it's not necessarily what the ancient state standards are saying kids need. So, is it specifically LGBTQ? I can't say because I'm just not in their classes enough, but I do see people doing the work to go beyond those traditional outdated methods so that students get better exposure to better learning.”


“So I guess there was that solidarity from seeing teachers being like, "Hey, this is what we're doing," and then having to pull it back. That was really hard, I think. Around September, a lot of teachers were feeling really down and unsupported and we could really come together in that social media way to support each other like, "Hey, I'm going through something similar. We're going to get through this, which is nice. The friend that I used to work with a couple of years ago, who was my other coworker who was out ... Yeah, she was openly out. She was in a relationship and that was, for me, almost a role model situation where I was like I can start pushing to be more comfortable and to be more open with kids who do need that representation and they need that knowledge. And now, I come out to the new staff every year. She ended up moving to another school that was definitely a better situation for her, but even just that connection of wow, I have never worked with another person that was openly out and they taught me that I could do that, too.”


Lisa (she/her), a English teacher in her 19th year teaching who has taught in the Northeast, Midwest, and West


“I feel like the mostly informal support that I've offered students is a big part of my job and it's one of the things that keeps me engaged in this work and keeps me showing up to work. I always feel really privileged when students share things about their gender identities and their sexual orientation. Sometimes, I'm the first person that they're sharing some of that stuff with and they're really sorting it through. I don't have any real particular training that prepares me for that, except for being an adult in their life who cares about them and hopefully they feel like is not going to judge them for whatever it is that's coming up for them.” 


“On the first day of school, I write my students a letter, and I change it each year but I try to come out to them in that letter to try to not make it a big deal later, just have it from day one kind of understood. I think, in general, my gender presentation communicates a lot about my sexual orientation but, depending on who I'm teaching... Like English language learners, for example, don't always read gender presentation the same way, so then students know that I'm an out, queer person and that I seem relatively happy with my life-ish, I think. Then, kind of throughout the year, I feel like students, as they start going through something or figure out that they want to talk to somebody, would appear in my classroom”


“As an English teacher, I have the privilege of having students write about themselves or give them the option to write personal stuff. Sometimes they would write me things and I would write back and say, "If you want to talk about this ever, I'm here for you." Yeah. Sometimes, I'm remembering a student who came in, who was like... I wish I could remember this exactly but he was like, "I'm not sure what I am, but I know that I'm different from other people because I really don't want to have sex with anyone ever. I'm romantically interested in people but I don't... I'm just really not interested in that and I'm kind of worried there's something wrong with me." And I remember being like, "Have you heard of the word 'ace'?" And being able to sort of be like, "You don't have to fit into this characteristic, but there is this group of people who have this social identity, and maybe learning about them could help you decide if you sort of think about them or not." This was at the university, and we had an ace support group. It was called Ace of Spades, so I got to just send him off to that, which was really fun.” 


‘I try really hard to have the first thing that I say when they tell me they've learned something about themselves is to try to be really affirming and celebrate how cool it is that you know this about yourself, what a beautiful thing that is to try to be a voice like that but sometimes they're filled with so much pain about it. It feels a little weird to be like, "I celebrate this in you, this thing you're weeping over right now while we're talking." 


“I think that there really are enormous regional differences…I think a lot of your experience depends on where you are and the size of the place that you live in. My kids in the midwest, who felt so weird and so out of place, I just wanted them to go to college in a city. You're going to be fine. There are so many people like you. There are so many people who are going to appreciate you, so that stands out to me. I guess, I also would say that compared to eight years ago, if you wanted queer young adult books, you had Aristotle and Dante and you had... I don't know. I could name you the four books that were on shelves that featured queer characters, and now, there are a gajillion and they're queer in all these different ways.” 


“I think I've had enough students come back a few years later. Sometimes, students come out five years later to me. They want me to know. I had them in seventh grade and they're a junior in college. They write me some letter or something, like, "It was really great to... I was thinking about you as I came out. You were the first person I saw that lived this lifestyle." And so that's been really gratifying. It doesn't always happen, but I have a little file folder of those letters. I keep them.”


“I never got to take a gender studies class. I remember when a student told me what pansexual meant. That didn't always exist, and it was a student who was like, "You're missing an important term here." And I was like, "Please, let's learn about it." These things are changing all the time and young people are making up new ways of being also, and I'm kind of old now, but if I'm being a good teacher, then what I'm doing is not telling people how the world is but giving them a chance to explore it and figure it out and name it for themselves. Yeah. Now, for example, when I give students vocab about gender, I always leave blank lines because I know that there's going to be something that somebody wants included that I didn't think of, so I try to acknowledge that I'm still learning, too.” 


“I think we find each other like magnets…Connecting with other queer educators keeps me sane, in general…I think that my four best friends are queer teachers. Is that true? It's basically true. Yeah… We share ideas among each other. We share our little victory stories, like, "Oh my gosh, that student came back. Guess what they told me now." And that's helpful because it doesn't always feel, in the moment, that you're making that much of a difference…We remind each other of the big picture”