I thought about ending my life, or at least moving far away—where people didn’t know me or my past, where I wouldn’t run into Leslie—or any former colleagues from that school. I probably would have done so, but the head of the upper school asked me to fill their English teaching position, offering me the job outright before considering outsiders. My students’ parents praised me to the upper-school principal; they were so pleased with what I had done for their children they urged him to hire me.
I was doing some good. I was valued.
And yet, while teaching more sophisticated works, skills, and concepts energized and challenged me, I left an important part of myself outside the campus gates each morning before greeting these teens. Brenda Bock had encouraged me to take the position, but I kept hearing her words when she hired me: “This is a conservative school, and you should not share the details of your personal life.”
During my decade as Ms. White, English teacher and varsity soccer coach, I took my ex-husband to a Christmas party; I dated men, trying to escape the anxiety of living as a closeted gay woman.
Then I met Carlton at a bar. Since he lived in Charlotte, I only saw him on weekends, and not every weekend. I did not miss him during the week, and I never enjoyed the occasional sex I felt obligated to have with him. What I did enjoy was casually mentioning to colleagues—and even a class of students—that I was going to a concert with my boyfriend. When he showed up at a basketball game, I dramatically jogged to him and hugged him beneath our scoreboard for all to see. As the two of us walked up the bleachers, female students gave me their thumbs up and approving smiles.
That relationship lasted until I kissed a woman with whom I was organizing a 10K Saint Patrick’s Day race. And just like that, Carlton was gone, and I was, once again, in a relationship with a woman. Roxanne brought me back from the dead. She was beautiful, intelligent, fascinating, active, kind, and highly skilled in English grammar—which I had learned as we edited our Saint Patrick’s Day race brochure.
Nevertheless, I once again refrained from discussing my personal life and avoided public places. In fact, I went out of my way to mention my ex-husband whenever I could, but I never mentioned Roxanne. When Roxanne came to a school play with me, the next day a student asked, “Who was that woman with you?” I shriveled, then said, “She’s a friend. Someone who is going through a hard time and needs my help.”
I heard from a history teacher that one of my soccer players asked him, “Is Coach White gay?” He assured me that he said “No way!” He meant well, but his fierce denial cast my truth in the wrong.
Another English teacher told me, “A student said, ‘Oh my God, I saw Ms. White with her partner at Mamacita’s. I was so uncomfortable! They were ordering burritos.’ I told her she was wrong—you’re not gay.” I thanked her for not validating the rumor.
I believed my secrecy would protect me; in fact, those years of living and teaching falsely were self-destructive.
In the spring of 2010, Alex, a student I had taught in ninth-grade English and creative writing, tried to kill himself. I know this because this brave young man, three years after he graduated, spoke to our entire faculty about what it was like to be gay as a student in our conservative school. No one was out, he told us. No students. No faculty members.
As he spoke, I remembered a time I handed the students in his class a short story I’d copied from an anthology. The last page was split with the first page of the next story: E. Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” Alex asked, “The movie Brokeback Mountain is based on a short story?”
I cringed because I had not blacked out that title with a marker before making copies. “Yeah, you’d be surprised at how many short stories have been made into movies,” I said, diverting his inquiry to safer ground. I didn’t even think about assigning that beautifully written short story. Nor did I tell him how much I appreciated both the story and the movie. Just like the characters in the story, I carefully hid my sexual orientation.
Alex discussed how this curtain of silence made his feelings shameful. When asked what could have helped him, he said, “I knew there were gay faculty members, but they never talked openly about their partners. A picture of a gay teacher’s partner on a desk would have made a world of difference to me.”
Tears reached my collar, and I fought to stifle an animalistic cry of agony. We gave Alex a standing ovation. I stood in line, waiting to thank him. He smiled at me knowingly. As we hugged, I spoke into his ear, “I am so sorry I hid my identity.” He nodded silently, and I walked outside to the brown remains of the school garden and cried for how I had failed Alex and because I was not as brave as this twenty year old.
Did I then put a picture of my partner on my desk? No. Did I ever refer to her in front of students or parents? No. But Alex’s honest talk pushed me to be open with my colleagues, even if I continued to avoid the topic of my relationship with my students. I did, however, stop mentioning my ex-husband as a way of tricking them into thinking I was straight, and I did confront students when they made homophobic statements. Little steps.
But then came my leap. Only because I was blindsided.
On Martin Luther King Day, 2014, our administrators decided that instead of having a school holiday, we would meet that day—not for classes—but to celebrate Dr. King’s call for justice, peace, and love. We planned age-appropriate activities for students by division. In the upper school, teachers led morning activities before breaking in the afternoon for a speech by Rodney Glasgow (Head of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Middle School in D.C. and Chair of the National Association of Independent Schools’ annual Student Diversity Leadership confer-ence) who would then lead us through an exercise in appreciating diversity.
As this dynamic, openly gay black man spoke to us, he stepped out of his clogs and walked around our gym floor, showing off painted toenails that added even more color to the stories he told us of his high-school self, college growth, and clashes with racism and homophobia. The students were mesmerized by his rhetorical richness, his humor, and his honesty. He concluded by stressing how important it is that he, a Harvard graduate with an MFA from Columbia, be proud of all parts of his identity and not hide them—for his accomplishments encourage young people to live comfortably and successfully.
Rodney asked us all to come down to the gym floor and make a large circle alongside the walls. Unlike the morning activities we had planned, faculty members and administrators had no idea where he was leading us. He explained that we all carried multiple identities, and he encouraged us to claim those identities and to respect everyone else’s.
I worried. He was not preparing us to tell our favorite foods or to greet someone we didn’t know well.
As he wandered around the floor, speaking to us through a microphone about the need for a community to validate others’ identities, I felt vulnerable, trapped. I could not leave the circle without drawing unfavorable attention. I braced myself.
“If you identify as a student,” he asked, “step inside the circle. Everyone please look around and recognize the students in your community.”
“If you identify as a teacher,” he continued, “step inside the circle.” I stepped forward, anxious. “Everyone please look around and recognize the teachers in your community.”
He continued to calmly ask people of different identities to take steps into visibility. I stepped forward for having a learning difference and identifying as white. When the black students stepped forward, I considered how they must feel. That feeling stuck as the Asian students stepped forward. Only two of about two hundred people identified as Hispanic. And a lone student rolled his wheelchair forward for people with a physical disability.
“If you identify as a lesbian,” Rodney continued, “step inside the circle.”
I saw Alex, saw my family, saw my unpainted authenticity. I took three large steps for all the Alexes in the gym. And I trembled with fear and elation to claim me.
I am teaching at the same school
, but it is not the same school that hired me. I am not the only faculty member who is openly gay, there are students in same-sex relationships, and we have gender-neutral bathrooms despite North Carolina’s virulent HB2 law. I teach a social justice class, and Roxanne, who counsels addicts, was a guest speaker during our unit on mental health and addiction. I proudly introduced her by her profession and as my partner.
Recently, Roxanne and I were looking at jewelry in a downtown shop when a student from my social justice class walked up and said hello to Roxanne, and then to me. As this student told Roxanne how much her presentation meant to her, I rested my hand on Roxanne’s warm back.
About the Editors
CANDACE WALSH coedited Dear John: I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women (Seal Press, 2010), a Lambda Literary Finalist, with her wife, Laura M. André. She is the author of Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity (Seal Press 2012), a 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards winner. She also edited the Seal Press anthology Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On. Her writing has appeared in numerous national and local publications, including Newsday, Travel +Leisure, Sunset, Mademoiselle, New York magazine, and New Mexico Magazine. She has also worked on staff at Condé Nast International, Mothering Magazine, and New Mexico Magazine and is currently editor in chief of El Palacio magazine. Her essays have been published in various anthologies, on Slate, and in the Huffington Post. Her screenplay Birthquake, cowritten with Laura M. André, was a quarter-finalist in the 2013 Screen Craft Comedy Screenplay Competition.
She is currently enrolled in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers (Fiction) program and frequently teaches writing classes and works one-on-one with writers as a developmental editor. She lives in Santa Fe, NM, with Laura, their two children, and two dogs.
Find out more at candacewalsh.com.
BARBARA STRAUS LODGE is a writer whose personal essays have appeared in Parabola magazine; The Rumpus (Voices of Addiction); Chicken Soup for the Soul; The Good Men Project; Literary Mama; the New York Times “Motherlode” blog; the “LA Affairs” section of the Los Angeles Times, and a variety of anthologies. An essay entitled “Mirror Image” written under her pen name Leigh Stuart was published in the anthology Dear John I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women (Seal Press, 2010).
She teaches writing to incarcerated young girls through Write-Girl, a Los Angeles-based mentoring program, and is the founder of TruthTalks workshops, offering hope for parents of kids with substance use disorder. She is constantly in awe of her two young-adult children and her loving partner of eight years.
Learn more at barbarastrauslodge.com and truthtalks.us.
About the Contributors
KATE ARCHIBALD-CROSS has written for a variety of newspapers in and around her hometown and currently vows each week to make more time for writing. She is mother to two wonderful sons, partner to one woman of her dreams, and works at a variety of part-time jobs in order to make parenting and household wran-gling her first priorities—a financially ludicrous (but emotionally savvy) strategy.
K. ASTRE is a writer with a global appetite for art, music, and culture. She fuels her creativity with tea, yoga, good music, and meditation. She lives with her wife and three children in California.
G. LEV BAUMEL is a writer, traveler, and mother of one delightful daughter. After working with other people’s stories for close to two decades—in human rights, print, video, and online—she is now pursuing her own writing career. Baumel is a graduate student, currently getting her MFA with a focus on the power of cross-platform storytelling. She is working on her first book.
TRISH BENDIX is a writer and editor in Los Angeles, California. She is the former editor in chief of AfterEllen.com. Bendix’s work has been published in The Hollywood Reporter; Cosmopolitan; Slate; The Village Voice; Time Out Chicago; Out; Punk Planet; Bitch; The Frisky; AlterNet; and the Huffington Post. Her fiction has appeared in The Q Review and on CellStories, and she has essays in the 2010 Seal Press anthology, Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women (Seal Press, 2010); More Than Marriage (Ooligan Press); and Opposing Viewpoints: Celebrity Culture (Layman Poupard Publishing).
Bendix is the winner of the 2015 Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for the LGBT Journalist of the Year from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association. She is also a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and a member of the Television Critics Association as well as the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She’s spoken on panels at SXSW, Q-Me Con, BlogHer, and Creating Change, and to classes at University of Western Washington and Columbia College Chicago.
LOUISE A. BLUM is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist living in Corning, NY. She is the author of the memoir You’re Not from Around Here, Are You? A Lesbian in Small-Town America (UW Press), and Amnesty, a novel from Alyson Publications. She writes about the environment, family, activism, and justice and is currently working on a YA novel called FRACKED, about the effects of fracking on one small town in the mountains of rural Pennsylvania.
JEANNOT JONTE BOUCHER is a writer, speaker, and transgender community advocate in Dallas, Texas, as well as a publicschool teacher. Jeannot has contributed numerous articles to the Dallas Morning News, The Male Montessorian, and UKEdMagazine. Boucher is an advocate for transgender students’ rights in nondiscrimination policies for bathroom use, while speaking as an openly queer trans public-school teacher and parent. Jeannot and wife, Ashley Boucher, also transgender, speak regularly on university, medical, and LGBT organization panels advocating for trans queer community needs. The pair also perform live music in queerlesque spaces such as Cabaret Boucher. Boucher was named Chamber of Commerce Teacher of the Year in 2014, and has received two awards for innovative teaching.
SHARA CONCEPCIÓN is a Jewyorican writer based in Boston, MA. She received her AA in liberal arts from Borough of Manhattan Community College, her BA in psychology from Smith College, and her MA in gender and cultural studies from Simmons College. Her work has appeared in Cosmogirl, Pank Online, and the Eunoia Review, and she is a recipient of the City University of New York Undergraduate Poetry award. Though she currently resides in Boston, her heart and its shareholders remain in New York City.
PAT CROW, a fourth-generation Floridian, earned her master’s degree in counseling, specializing in marriage and family therapy, in 1989. After practicing and teaching somatic psychotherapy for twenty-five years, she retired and now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she began writing her memoir about coming out at sixty. She and her partner recently married and share their lives with two diva rescue dogs. She has a daughter living on the west coast, and a son living on the east coast.
RUTH DAVIES lives in Brisbane, Australia, with her partner and cat. Her essay “Marriage Mirage” appeared in Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women (Seal Press, 2010). She works as an editor of research reports.
VANESSA SHANTI FERNANDO is a writer and social worker living in Vancouver, BC. She still likes reality television. Her recent publications include “Chosen Family,” in Salut King Kong: New English Writing from Quebec (Vehicule Press, 2015); “Wanting,” in Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women (Seal Press, 2010); “The Body, Revolutionary,” in Subversions Journal of Gender & Sexuality (Concordia University, 2009) and “Vacancy,” in GirlSpoken: From Pen, Brush & Tongue (Second Story Press, 2007).
KRISTA FRETWELL earns cash to support her writing habit working as a family nurse practitioner in community health. She enjoys Nordic skiing, the dirty parts of gardening, and is an exceptional tree climber. She lives on a small farm in south-western Washington state with her partner, their five children, two goats, five ducks, four cats, and one big dopey black lab.
ELIZABETH J. GERARD refuses to be boxed in by labels or limitations regarding her life or her work. That refusal, coupled with a deep intellectual curiosity, has led her to attain multiple advanced degrees (C
olumbia College Chicago: MFA, fiction; Northwestern University: Graduate Certificate, creative nonfiction; University of Chicago: Graduate Certificate, creative writing) as well as diverse training and experience in acting, storytelling, performance poetry, filmmaking, and book and paper arts, among many other interests. She seeks to create art by delving into the darker aspects of life then writing those stories within, across, and in combination of every writing form and genre. She has been published in numerous anthologies, literary journals, and blogs. She has worked as an aquisitions, production, and web editor for Hair Trigger Student Fiction Anthology; Punctuate. A Nonfiction Magazine, and The Mini Poetry Chapbook. Elizabeth continues to work as an assistant editor for Hotel Amerika and holds the 2015 CSPA National Gold Award for Best Experimental Fiction—of which she is incredibly proud. She gratefully blames K.B., P.A.M., and A.P. for setting her on this path of being “a real writer.”
SHERRY GLASER, actress, playwright, author and commentator, wrote and starred in Family Secrets, the longest-running one-woman show in off-Broadway history. In it, Sherry played five members of a typical American family based on her father, mother, two sisters, and grandmother. The show garnered critical acclaim and awards, including the N.Y. Theatre World Award for Best Debut and L.A.’s Ovation Award, as well as rave reviews in the New York Times and Variety. Simon and Schuster published Family Secrets: The Book based on the play. Her essays have been published in a variety of anthologies. Sherry’s weekly radio editorials, ongoing engagement in the arenas of politics, humor and spirituality, can be downloaded from her website, sherryglaser.net.
LEAH LAX holds an MFA in creative writing. She’s written award-winning fiction and nonfiction, including her memoir excerpted here, Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home. She has also been a finalist for five literary prizes. Uncovered has been featured on NPR, the Advocate, and the Huffington Post and on numerous Best Of and Top Ten lists, and is soon to become an opera by Lori Laitman. When Leah’s not writing, you can find her out walking her Airedale or with her wife kayaking around the globe.
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