LGBT Teachers Need Allies

Last month in Columbus, Ohio, a female teacher was fired from her position at a private school because her spouse is a woman. 

The teacher was outed by her mother’s obituary that appeared in the local paper. One “outraged” parent wrote a letter to the principal demanding the teacher’s removal. Bishop Watterson, a private Catholic school in Columbus, fired the teacher on the grounds that she morally violated the “tenets of the church.” 

Petitions, a lawsuit, and a media frenzy now surround this teacher’s plight, but her story raises important questions for us as educators, administrators, boards of education and citizens. 

For social justice educators toiling diligently in the classroom—questioning and confronting anti-gay slurs; designing lessons for students to hear the multiple voices of history, literature and science; providing safe spaces for our questioning young people—only comprises half of our battle for social justice for LGBT people. 

As a young lesbian teacher, I’ve faced the other half of these silent battles. When looking for a job, I applied specifically to schools that, in their anti-discrimination policies, listed sexual orientation along with gender and race. Unfortunately, where I live, those schools are few. 

The first job I accepted, I did after days of agonizing. A semi-rural, Appalachian middle school heavily recruited me for a language arts position, but my sexual orientation was not covered in their anti-discrimination clause. Further, I knew with the conservative politics of the region and that I would not be able to talk about my family with my students. I would have to use vague pronouns in reference to my “significant other” in the staff lunchroom. I would have to be extremely careful about which staff members I grew close to and make sure I made no mistakes. 

I knew that because of my sexual orientation, with one wrong move, one complaint from one parent and my contract could be simply “not renewed.” Or I could be “reassigned” or “fired” for a red herring. 

Yet, the worst part of being a lesbian teacher is not being able to show students that—to borrow a phrase—it gets better. When a student asks for advice or is hurting, I have to respond opaquely. When a student asks me if we can start a gay-straight alliance in our school, in order to deflect suspicions, I feel the need to point her in the direction of another teacher to ask to lead it. When the only openly gay student in the entire grade bluntly asks me, with an open heart and a will to identify, if I too am “one of us,” in order to save my job, I lie with omission and beg off.

If we ever want justice for our LGBT students, we must fight for equality for our LGBT teachers.  As a lesbian teacher, activism is even the smallest action of asking human resources if domestic partner benefits are available (they’re not in my district). 

We LGBT teachers need allies in our unions and on our boards to help us become visible and protected. Equality in resources and in anti-discrimination could eventually mean equality in acceptance among parents and students. If our schools cannot accept our LGBT teachers, they will never be able to completely accept our LGBT students, who sometimes desperately need the close proximity of “one of us.”

Ricket is a high school English teacher in Ohio.