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Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Labels-Can't Live With Them-Can't Live Without Them






Look at a calendar and you can see that it tells you if it’s today or yesterday and what day it will be tomorrow. Things get a little murky for me sometimes in my interior calendar. I know it’s 2019, but like my grandmother who lived in the cultural traditions of three centuries, I sometimes slide unwillingly between the deep past, recent past and the present.  Take being gay. There are days, I recall, when I may have wished you could have taken away my gayness. But, that’s the thing. Isn’t it? What part of me would that be? My heart, body, mind?

Recently I participated on a panel about being gay. The purpose was to help inform staff, volunteers and parents of students in San Antonio about how to improve schools' services to students who are other-than-straight. 


Of course, I mean students we are gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans and questioning of their young sexual orientations and natures. I'm reluctant to use labels these days when the Latinx-Chicano debate divides us precisely when we need unity more than ever. 

I think all the labels may help the statisticians, but they may be part of the problem. I'm not certain they help or hurt in changing the minds of staff, teachers and administrators who encounter students-other-than-straight in hallways, classrooms and conferences with parents. Come to think about it "other than straight" is just as clunky.
 

Well, It Really is 2019! 

I was there to facilitate for the participants, all who dealt directly with students in schools. I had sponsored our college's student activities club for LGBTQ students for the last ten years of my teaching career. I know they are exactly like other students yet also have their own specific challenges and concerns. 

I opened my brief talk with Mary Oliver‘s wild geese translated in Spanish. I felt it was important to introduce the topic of students and their natural sexual orientation with the work of a celebrated poet who happened to have been a lover of nature as well as a lesbian. 


I saw a remarkable interest and acceptance from the participants of the conference on learning ways to assist students traveling this path of being-who-they-are and loving-who-they-love in the face of many obstacles. 

I learned from the PFLAG representative who I worked with in preparing for the panel, an amazing and generous woman named Lauryn Farris, of an exercise that we could use to let the participants experience (for at least a few moments) one aspect of what it means for many to be gay, even in 2019. 

The Impact of Silence's Four Questions: "Who are the 3 most important people in your life? What are the 3 places that have special significance in your life? What are 3 things you most like to talk about?

We passed out a piece of paper with three questions written on it and asked the participants to find someone that they did not know and to introduce themselves. In the first part of the exercise they were to write their responses to the questions quietly on their own. The second part was to attempt a conversation with this new person about something important about themselves, but to exclude from the conversation anything that they had written in response to the 3 questions. 

As the tables full of school employees completed the written exercise and began the verbal part of the exercise, the atmosphere in the hall really got interesting. Tables buzzed with stop and start conversations. After a few minutes, I asked the participants how it felt to not be able to share something important about themselves? That's exactly what it was like to be a young person whose orientation was other-than-straight meeting somebody new and not being able to speak openly with them about parts of their lives that were private or could be held against them.

A Table To My Left Gasped In Astonishment. 

I looked out onto the crowd and I understood that the goal of the exercise had been met. I asked some of the participants who wanted to share to do so. At the far end of the room a woman stood up and told a story about her daughter who is a teenager and is gay. She said," I have known my daughter is gay since she was seven, but it’s a different story for my husband. When my daughter recently asked me if she could bring her girlfriend home for dinner, I wondered how my traditional Mexican American husband was going to respond. I worried about it all week. When that young lady came to the door my husband stood up from his chair, extended his hand and introduced himself and it was a good evening for everyone." It really is 2019!
 

Or Is It? 
At the end of our presentation a woman approached me and asked me in Spanish if I could explain to her the difference between gay and transgender. The interior calendar in my mind slipped and slided and made me feel dizzy. I nevertheless explained the differences with cheery detail, and she listened carefully. As she left, I recognized that if the basics are still missing for some school staff, then there is still much work ahead to guarantee all students in schools feel secure that they are accepted in their totality, whatever their natural sexual orientation and identity.