![I. Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime
Last week, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law S.B. 48 — the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act — which essentially amends the state’s Education Code to make note of the contributions of LGBT people throughout history, and alternately, prohibits discriminatory instruction or materials from being adopted by the California Board of Education.
The culture war response to this Act was both predictable and laughable — one right-wing essay claimed that Harvey Milk was personally “opposed to recognition that [gay] sexual activity spreads AIDS” despite the fact that he was murdered three years before the first reported case — but it also presented the opportunity for a new understanding to transpire: Education, or the dissemination of empiric knowledge, is the biggest threat to the conservative Christian ideology. They know, perhaps better than anyone, that the less we know about something, the more likely we are to be afraid of it; the phobia in “homophobia” is what keeps their business alive. By pulling the curtain on the invisibility of LGBT people throughout history, however, value is added to our lives and our placement in society. Injustice and discrimination are exposed. The idea that we are some kind of depraved, demoralized group is negated and — with only politically neutral facts to guide us — the notion of a brave, innovative, creative, and socially precious community emerges. The fear will dissipate.
Ever since Sarah Palin began the “anti-elitism” narrative that has persisted since her Vice President candidacy, we’ve been seeing what can only be described as an intentional push-back on education, codified into a euphemism of “people who think they’re smarter.” Despite a feeble protest that these two things are not related, the rhetoric itself suggests otherwise: The message being transmitted here is that all epistemologies work, that all sources of information are credible, and that, maybe, there is a tappable, perhaps otherworldly source of knowledge even greater than the intellectual and scientific canon one might investigate in higher education. But none of these assertions are true.
Those of you who follow the more personal threads that I share here know that I just finished my undergraduate work in English and Adolescent Education, and that as a required part of the program, I spent almost two years observing, tutoring, and occasionally engaging in supervised teaching at a Brooklyn high school. I walked away from the experience with two valuable empirical facts of my own: Firstly, even in New York City, homophobia thrives in our schools. There was rarely a day when I didn’t hear the word “faggot” being thrown around in a hallway or classroom, and there was rarely an instance when a student would be admonished for using it. But secondly, and more relevantly, whenever students were presented with politically neutral facts aboutLGBT people in history, they almost always arrived at both the same conclusion — that everything I know about gay people has nothing to do with real gay people — and the same question: What if I’m wrong?
II. Of Maus and Men
At the height of the gay marriage debate in New York, Senator Reverend Rubén Díaz called it “preposterous for Mayor Bloomberg to degrade and minimize the plight of African Americans in this civil rights struggle by equating it with the effort to … legalize gay marriage.” He continued: “As all survivors of the ‘Holocaust’ [sic] will likely agree, comparing the unique evil of that genocide to other tragedies in the world devalues its lesson to the world.”
But what was that lesson?
Last year, one of the classes I’d been working with had just finished reading Maus — Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel memoir about his family’s experience in the Holocaust — and I was given roughly forty minutes to help synthesize what they’d learned from reading the book. The first half of our time together was spent deconstructing some of the more technical aspects of the novel. We talked about form and delivery, metaphors and story arcs, the differences between personal histories and political histories. Afterwards, I proposed a more thought-provoking question.
“Knowing what you know now,” I asked, “do you think something like this could ever happen again?”
I’d barely finished the question before an outgoing Hispanic girl who seemed to take a shine towards me — we’ll call her Graciéla — tilted her head back, snapped her fingers, and confidently exclaimed, “Hells no!”
The group exploded in glee at her exaggerated gesture. I asked her how she could be so convinced.
“Because they was stupid back then,” she replied, quite matter-of-factly, “and we ain’t stupid!”
Most of the class seemed to agree with Graciéla. We’ve made such strides since then, they argued. Everyone knows it’s wrong to be prejudiced now, they said. “We even get Jewish holidays off from school!” one student noted, seemingly proud of his observation — as if school holidays were a reliable barometer for the absence of discrimination in America.
“What you need to realize here is that it’s not like Hitler just came out of nowhere and said, ‘Kill the Jews!’ and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right!’” I said, getting a laugh out of the class. “He convinced an otherwise decent group of citizens that Jewish people were a threat to the German people by using subtle persuasive tactics.”
Graciéla disagreed.
“That shit would not work with me,” she said.
“It already has and you don’t even know it,” I quickly shot back. There was something on my mind, and I had to follow through. “Do you remember what happened before the bell rang?”
Gracíela knew, but she kept her mouth shut.
I continued: “A young man stuck his head inside of the door, probably looking for someone, and you looked over at him, looked him right in the eyes, and — do you remember what you said?”
Gracíela knew, but she kept her mouth shut.
“You looked at that young man and you said, ‘Fag!’” The other students seemed surprised, shocked into silence by the fact that a classmate was being called out for using a gay epithet. I asked, “Why did you call him that?”
“Because!” she said, trying to find the words. “Because he don’t want to be called that.”
“And why doesn’t he want to be called that?” I persisted.
“Because!” she said, still unsure of the answer. “Because he’s a boy!”
“And why is that significant?” I continued, never breaking eye contact.
“Because no boy wants to be called that!” she said, clearly not knowing what else to say.
“No boy wants to be called that because being a ‘fag’ is such a terrible, horrible thing. Is that what you meant to say?” I asked.
Graciéla shrugged, her body language indicating a positive answer.
I asked the class if they’d ever heard of socially-accepted discrimination, and when they agreed that they didn’t know what that meant, I explained it in terms they might understand. “Had Graciéla called that young man a ‘spic,’” I noted, “is there any doubt that she’d be sitting in the Principal’s office right now?”
The class agreed that’s where she’d be.
“But because she used the term ‘fag,’ well, that could go either way,” I continued. “If someone makes a racist statement, we generally do not accept that person as part of our society’s mainstream. He is ostracized or punished. But if someone makes a statement against gay people, that’s still acceptable to some extent. This is what I mean by socially-acceptable discrimination, and this is what I mean when I say Hitler used subtle persuasive tactics to convince the Germans of a Jewish threat that did not exist: Hitler didn’t invent antisemitism. He took advantage of the fact that antisemitism was still socially acceptable in the early twentieth century, and he perpetuated that fear to come into power.”
I allowed the class to talk among themselves for a while, discussing this point. They seemed to understand the similarities in thought, but refused to make a connection. The Holocaust could never happen again, they insisted. Homophobia and antisemitism are different. Finally, a boy who had been mostly quiet during the semester spoke up.
“Gay people are just confused,” he offered. “I think you should just take all the gay people and put them on an island somewhere.”
I stopped the class and honed in on his point.
“OK, hang on. In a matter of five minutes, we went from ‘We ain’t stupid’ to ‘Gays should be rounded up and put on an island somewhere.’ So before we go further, I need for anyone to please explain to me the fundamental difference between separating an entire class of people and putting them on an island somewhere because they’re gay and rounding up an entire class of people and putting them in camps because they’re Jewish. Who’s up for it?”
The conversation went silent. As the students seemed to agree that there wasn’t any sort of meaningful difference between the two scenarios, something else occurred to me.
“Wait. You guys do know that Jews were not the only people Hitler targeted for genocide, right?”
As their eyes opened wide, it became obvious that they did not. They did not know about the Eastern European Gypsies, the disabled and handicapped, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Catholic priests. They had no idea that as many as 15,000 LGBT people were forced into concentration camps and/or killed. But after sharing these facts with the class, everything seemed to change. All of the sudden, they spoke about gay people with empathy. They acknowledged the humanity of those people who died for no other reason than for who they loved. Unlike so many ostensibly educated politicians or religious figures, these young students did not care to create a hierarchy for oppression; it wasn’t a contest between thousands of gays and millions of Jews, but an identical evil.
And then, “Wait a second!” Grazíela said. “Are you gay?”
Believe it or not, I’d never considered the possibility that I might be asked this question in a classroom. I’d never weighed the pros and cons of my sexuality as related to my position as an educator. But in this particular case, I wasn’t sure that coming out at this exact moment would be the best possible thing. Sometimes, when you’re a teacher, you have to put personal politics aside and reach for the ever-elusive “teaching moment” — if only to give students an opportunity to be objective critical thinkers about the facts.
Somehow, I was able to make this decision in a split second.
“I think it’s hilarious that you believe that someone couldn’t possibly say something positive about gay people unless he were gay himself,” I responded. “But let me ask you this: If the Christians had done a better job of sticking up for the Jews before Hitler came into power, do you think we’d be having this conversation in the first place?”
Gracíela nodded her head, with a compelling look of revelation on her face. I didn’t need to tell her what to think. It was obvious.
III. A Lesson to the World
It could be that Rubén Díaz, much like these kids, had never learned about gay oppression and genocide in Nazi Germany. It could be that he never learned about Alan Turing in school, or if he did, that he never knew Turing was a gay man whose contributions to ending the Holocaust by cracking German Enigma codes were so great that the British government felt the need to formally apologize for the way he was treated after the war — stripped of his security privileges and given an experimental chemical castration as “treatment” for his homosexuality. These are the kinds of omissions that the FAIR Education Act intends to correct, and despite what the other end of the culture war tells you, this correction has nothing to do with teaching sex in our schools.
When I think about the Holocaust and “its lesson to the world,” as Díaz puts it, I think about something that Coretta Scott King said in 1998:
“Homophobia is like racism and antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group.”
This, if anything, is the lesson. Somehow, I think even Díaz would agree that King was uniquely qualified to speak to the essence of a civil rights struggle.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lol4taVAbj1qz4yilo1_1280.jpg)
I. Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime
Last week, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law S.B. 48 — the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act — which essentially amends the state’s Education Code to make note of the contributions of LGBT people throughout history, and alternately, prohibits discriminatory instruction or materials from being adopted by the California Board of Education.
The culture war response to this Act was both predictable and laughable — one right-wing essay claimed that Harvey Milk was personally “opposed to recognition that [gay] sexual activity spreads AIDS” despite the fact that he was murdered three years before the first reported case — but it also presented the opportunity for a new understanding to transpire: Education, or the dissemination of empiric knowledge, is the biggest threat to the conservative Christian ideology. They know, perhaps better than anyone, that the less we know about something, the more likely we are to be afraid of it; the phobia in “homophobia” is what keeps their business alive. By pulling the curtain on the invisibility of LGBT people throughout history, however, value is added to our lives and our placement in society. Injustice and discrimination are exposed. The idea that we are some kind of depraved, demoralized group is negated and — with only politically neutral facts to guide us — the notion of a brave, innovative, creative, and socially precious community emerges. The fear will dissipate.
Ever since Sarah Palin began the “anti-elitism” narrative that has persisted since her Vice President candidacy, we’ve been seeing what can only be described as an intentional push-back on education, codified into a euphemism of “people who think they’re smarter.” Despite a feeble protest that these two things are not related, the rhetoric itself suggests otherwise: The message being transmitted here is that all epistemologies work, that all sources of information are credible, and that, maybe, there is a tappable, perhaps otherworldly source of knowledge even greater than the intellectual and scientific canon one might investigate in higher education. But none of these assertions are true.
Those of you who follow the more personal threads that I share here know that I just finished my undergraduate work in English and Adolescent Education, and that as a required part of the program, I spent almost two years observing, tutoring, and occasionally engaging in supervised teaching at a Brooklyn high school. I walked away from the experience with two valuable empirical facts of my own: Firstly, even in New York City, homophobia thrives in our schools. There was rarely a day when I didn’t hear the word “faggot” being thrown around in a hallway or classroom, and there was rarely an instance when a student would be admonished for using it. But secondly, and more relevantly, whenever students were presented with politically neutral facts aboutLGBT people in history, they almost always arrived at both the same conclusion — that everything I know about gay people has nothing to do with real gay people — and the same question: What if I’m wrong?
II. Of Maus and Men
At the height of the gay marriage debate in New York, Senator Reverend Rubén Díaz called it “preposterous for Mayor Bloomberg to degrade and minimize the plight of African Americans in this civil rights struggle by equating it with the effort to … legalize gay marriage.” He continued: “As all survivors of the ‘Holocaust’ [sic] will likely agree, comparing the unique evil of that genocide to other tragedies in the world devalues its lesson to the world.”
But what was that lesson?
Last year, one of the classes I’d been working with had just finished reading Maus — Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel memoir about his family’s experience in the Holocaust — and I was given roughly forty minutes to help synthesize what they’d learned from reading the book. The first half of our time together was spent deconstructing some of the more technical aspects of the novel. We talked about form and delivery, metaphors and story arcs, the differences between personal histories and political histories. Afterwards, I proposed a more thought-provoking question.
“Knowing what you know now,” I asked, “do you think something like this could ever happen again?”
I’d barely finished the question before an outgoing Hispanic girl who seemed to take a shine towards me — we’ll call her Graciéla — tilted her head back, snapped her fingers, and confidently exclaimed, “Hells no!”
The group exploded in glee at her exaggerated gesture. I asked her how she could be so convinced.
“Because they was stupid back then,” she replied, quite matter-of-factly, “and we ain’t stupid!”
Most of the class seemed to agree with Graciéla. We’ve made such strides since then, they argued. Everyone knows it’s wrong to be prejudiced now, they said. “We even get Jewish holidays off from school!” one student noted, seemingly proud of his observation — as if school holidays were a reliable barometer for the absence of discrimination in America.
“What you need to realize here is that it’s not like Hitler just came out of nowhere and said, ‘Kill the Jews!’ and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right!’” I said, getting a laugh out of the class. “He convinced an otherwise decent group of citizens that Jewish people were a threat to the German people by using subtle persuasive tactics.”
Graciéla disagreed.
“That shit would not work with me,” she said.
“It already has and you don’t even know it,” I quickly shot back. There was something on my mind, and I had to follow through. “Do you remember what happened before the bell rang?”
Gracíela knew, but she kept her mouth shut.
I continued: “A young man stuck his head inside of the door, probably looking for someone, and you looked over at him, looked him right in the eyes, and — do you remember what you said?”
Gracíela knew, but she kept her mouth shut.
“You looked at that young man and you said, ‘Fag!’” The other students seemed surprised, shocked into silence by the fact that a classmate was being called out for using a gay epithet. I asked, “Why did you call him that?”
“Because!” she said, trying to find the words. “Because he don’t want to be called that.”
“And why doesn’t he want to be called that?” I persisted.
“Because!” she said, still unsure of the answer. “Because he’s a boy!”
“And why is that significant?” I continued, never breaking eye contact.
“Because no boy wants to be called that!” she said, clearly not knowing what else to say.
“No boy wants to be called that because being a ‘fag’ is such a terrible, horrible thing. Is that what you meant to say?” I asked.
Graciéla shrugged, her body language indicating a positive answer.
I asked the class if they’d ever heard of socially-accepted discrimination, and when they agreed that they didn’t know what that meant, I explained it in terms they might understand. “Had Graciéla called that young man a ‘spic,’” I noted, “is there any doubt that she’d be sitting in the Principal’s office right now?”
The class agreed that’s where she’d be.
“But because she used the term ‘fag,’ well, that could go either way,” I continued. “If someone makes a racist statement, we generally do not accept that person as part of our society’s mainstream. He is ostracized or punished. But if someone makes a statement against gay people, that’s still acceptable to some extent. This is what I mean by socially-acceptable discrimination, and this is what I mean when I say Hitler used subtle persuasive tactics to convince the Germans of a Jewish threat that did not exist: Hitler didn’t invent antisemitism. He took advantage of the fact that antisemitism was still socially acceptable in the early twentieth century, and he perpetuated that fear to come into power.”
I allowed the class to talk among themselves for a while, discussing this point. They seemed to understand the similarities in thought, but refused to make a connection. The Holocaust could never happen again, they insisted. Homophobia and antisemitism are different. Finally, a boy who had been mostly quiet during the semester spoke up.
“Gay people are just confused,” he offered. “I think you should just take all the gay people and put them on an island somewhere.”
I stopped the class and honed in on his point.
“OK, hang on. In a matter of five minutes, we went from ‘We ain’t stupid’ to ‘Gays should be rounded up and put on an island somewhere.’ So before we go further, I need for anyone to please explain to me the fundamental difference between separating an entire class of people and putting them on an island somewhere because they’re gay and rounding up an entire class of people and putting them in camps because they’re Jewish. Who’s up for it?”
The conversation went silent. As the students seemed to agree that there wasn’t any sort of meaningful difference between the two scenarios, something else occurred to me.
“Wait. You guys do know that Jews were not the only people Hitler targeted for genocide, right?”
As their eyes opened wide, it became obvious that they did not. They did not know about the Eastern European Gypsies, the disabled and handicapped, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Catholic priests. They had no idea that as many as 15,000 LGBT people were forced into concentration camps and/or killed. But after sharing these facts with the class, everything seemed to change. All of the sudden, they spoke about gay people with empathy. They acknowledged the humanity of those people who died for no other reason than for who they loved. Unlike so many ostensibly educated politicians or religious figures, these young students did not care to create a hierarchy for oppression; it wasn’t a contest between thousands of gays and millions of Jews, but an identical evil.
And then, “Wait a second!” Grazíela said. “Are you gay?”
Believe it or not, I’d never considered the possibility that I might be asked this question in a classroom. I’d never weighed the pros and cons of my sexuality as related to my position as an educator. But in this particular case, I wasn’t sure that coming out at this exact moment would be the best possible thing. Sometimes, when you’re a teacher, you have to put personal politics aside and reach for the ever-elusive “teaching moment” — if only to give students an opportunity to be objective critical thinkers about the facts.
Somehow, I was able to make this decision in a split second.
“I think it’s hilarious that you believe that someone couldn’t possibly say something positive about gay people unless he were gay himself,” I responded. “But let me ask you this: If the Christians had done a better job of sticking up for the Jews before Hitler came into power, do you think we’d be having this conversation in the first place?”
Gracíela nodded her head, with a compelling look of revelation on her face. I didn’t need to tell her what to think. It was obvious.
III. A Lesson to the World
It could be that Rubén Díaz, much like these kids, had never learned about gay oppression and genocide in Nazi Germany. It could be that he never learned about Alan Turing in school, or if he did, that he never knew Turing was a gay man whose contributions to ending the Holocaust by cracking German Enigma codes were so great that the British government felt the need to formally apologize for the way he was treated after the war — stripped of his security privileges and given an experimental chemical castration as “treatment” for his homosexuality. These are the kinds of omissions that the FAIR Education Act intends to correct, and despite what the other end of the culture war tells you, this correction has nothing to do with teaching sex in our schools.
When I think about the Holocaust and “its lesson to the world,” as Díaz puts it, I think about something that Coretta Scott King said in 1998:
“Homophobia is like racism and antisemitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group.”
This, if anything, is the lesson. Somehow, I think even Díaz would agree that King was uniquely qualified to speak to the essence of a civil rights struggle.
