Encouragement from some who lived to tell their tales (ed_grover's Gay Freedom W-O)
Written: Jun 26 '01 (Updated Jul 02 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: Varied authors bring insight and wit to reflections on their often difficult times in school.
Cons: As in most anthologies, there is a variety that might seem instead to be unevenness.
The Bottom Line: Many gay kids kill themselves instead of facing hostile educational environments. This book by people who've endured such abuse could provide a lifeline to people tormented because they are different.
eplovejoy's Full Review: Telling Tales Out of School Books
Sally Miller Gearhart is grateful in Telling Tales Out of School for her "occasional angels."
As she grew up in the 1940s and came to realize she loves women in the way women generally are expected to love men, Gearhart found encouragement from a few teachers along the way who fostered her belief that being different might be okay. "They had suspected that, in spite of my family, I felt out of place in my hometown, and they had reached out to help me at crucial times. They had been my 'occasional angels,' precious chaperons of my soul."
There were no such guardians for Julie, a friend of writer Merrill Mushroom. "Julie hung herself from a tree in her backyard with the sash of a terry cloth bathrobe. Afraid of what her future might hold, she died for being a queer in 1959, three months before her 18th birthday."
And Ken Rus Schmoll's friend Mike needed an occasional angel as well. Schmoll and Mike were students at the same university in the mid-1980s. Both were gay, but Schmoll's parents told him, "Your being gay does not preclude being the best son we could ask for." Whatever Mike was told, it was probably very different. One night in the university's showers, "Mike cut his wrists. The right way. Moving up the wrist. Not across it."
Adolescence is difficult for almost every kid. The pressures to conform are so great that people feel they must sacrifice their personalities or even parts of their bodies to fit in, to be funny enough or thin enough or cool enough to be popular. jkkelley cites the "Procrustean bed of teen peer pressure," ( http://www.epinions.com/content_22251540100 ) and anyone who dreaded going to school recognizes that he is not overstating things by evoking the mythological murderer who chopped his guests' legs off or stretched them on the rack to make them fit his only bed. The pressures to be like everyone else can be especially crushing for kids whose sexual orientations are different, or are at least perceived to be different. Combined with the impact of societal oppression of people who aren't heterosexual, the force of peer pressure can be fatal.
Gearhart, who is an author and feminist activist, and the 36 other women and men whose recollections of their trials and triumphs in school comprise Telling Tales Out of School: Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals Revisit Their School Days, faced the cruelty of their would-be peers and endured. Larry Duplechan, now a novelist, took sustenance for years from a moment of triumph on stage as Ebenezer Scrooge in his elementary school's production of A Christmas Carol. That allowed him to make it through high school, which he writes is "no place for a small, effeminate, black gay boy with a high IQ, a high-pitched voice, and a penchant for phrases like 'I daresay' and 'heavens, no.' This I know from experience."
Others found less satisfying ways to tough it out. Warren J. Blumenfeld, who went on in 1971 to found what is now the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Student Caucus of the United States Student Association and who was in the early 1960s a junior high school student, was so desperate not to be gay that his parents sent him to counseling and he considered subjecting himself to electroshock treatment. Instead, he shut himself down emotionally until he found acceptance among anti-war protesters and was able to begin coming out in graduate school.
Author Michele Spring-Moore was a "prepubescent punching bag" for kids who thought she was too tomboyish. But one instant in which she found the courage to fight back energized her enough that she was able to get through high school. In college she discovered that many of her past adversaries were frequenting the gay bars she was just discovering.
But what kids -- especially gay kids -- need most to survive high school is encouragement. Students who feel alone are likely to feel oppressed by the educational environments that ideally would free them to discover who they are and to become those people to their best ability. Students who feel like freaks often feel their one way out is to exert the only control they believe they have: to die by their own design. The kids who don't kill themselves are those who saw someone who told them either directly or through the subtle symbolism of example that things will get better.
Michael Mitchell, who is executive producer of the Gay/Lesbian American Music Awards, wrote "Toughskins," the only piece of fiction in Telling Tales Out of School. His story suggests he saw something in his older brother's heterosexual confidence that inspired in him some ability to accept his not being heterosexual. For David Garnes, who is an academic reference librarian but was a shy high school student in Massachusetts in the 1950s, it was a teacher who encouraged him to read about ancient Greece, where acceptance of same-sex relationships was more pervasive than in modern America. Susan Gorrell, a program manager for a mental health agency, found inspiration briefly from a third-grade teacher in whose class she longed to be.
Amid the variety of expression in Telling Tales Out of School -- some write personally while others are more analytical, some write with polished prose while others use words that are stark and simple -- the one constant among the 37 contributors is that they each sought some kind of encouragement. Everyone wanted someone to at least suggest that it is permissible to be different, and that adulthood would bring satisfactions that adolescence denied.
Feasts of such encouragement were available to very few contributors, while others settled for scraps. Most were left longing for it. And so they -- all of them -- have grown to provide to others the affirmation they missed. They've written about themselves in a book they hope will help others. Peter Dell, who remembers the sixth-grade with dread, became a sixth-grade teacher with hopes that his example would make it easier for his students than it had been for him. Randy Fair, who grew up hoping that one of his teachers might have been gay, is a high school teacher. And Kevin Jennings,* who edited Telling Tales Out of School, escaped a torturous high school in North Carolina to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees from two Ivy League universities and to found the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
John Di Carlo teaches at a private school in New York City. He writes that he was encouraged when Aaron Frick made national headlines in the early 1980s by taking a male date to his high school prom. "That one small act of 'social disobedience' by someone my own age caused me to doubt that all was lost. Hearing one small 'yes' in that riot of 'no's' gave me pause."
In a book that contains something of interest for anyone who has ever feel out of place at school, Di Carlo and 36 others have added their voices to a chorus singing "Yes" to kids who hear too often only "No."
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* Kevin Jennings and I went to the same high school for a year, although not the one in North Carolina which he writes about in Telling Tales Out of School. We shared an English class and were on the debate team. We've kept in touch since then, but it would take much more than this to make me say good things about the book Kevin has edited if they weren't true.
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This review is a contribution to a write-off that is running concurrently with the annual celebration of LGBT culture and resistance. The write-off was organized by ed_grover and Stephen_Murray.
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