The Professor is Out: When did you know you[r professors] were queer?
by Emily Blair
Most of us were once students in a classroom. We sat with our notebooks and pencil, facing our teacher as they attempted, desperately, to do their jobs. Perhaps this familiarity, skewed through the lens of childhood, colors what we all think about “teachers” and, later, “professors.” I remember being obsessed with my elementary school teachers: were they married? Did they have children? Where did they live? What were their pets’ names? What did they eat for lunch? Did they like me? Did they love me? Did they hate me?
While I was undoubtedly an anxious, brown-nosing child, that obsession carried into further anxiety when I became the person at the front of the class. Do my students hate me? Am I a horrible instructor? Have I failed them in every conceivable way? Do they think I look ridiculous in my black skinny jeans, men’s flannel, and Doc Marten boots? Am I more ridiculous in my khakis and a button down? If I take off my shrug because the temperature inside tops eighty degrees, will they judge my plain t-shirt, tucked into my jeans, carefully smoothed underneath by a camisole, because what would happen if they knew I wore a bra by the straps outline? What would happen if I wore sandals? What would happen if I was, for even a moment, a human being with them?
Empirically, really great things would happen if I were a human being. When instructors show that they are human, students feel more connected to them, and thus, the class. Because I care about my students’ success, on the first day of class, I pretend like I am pulling the veil back. In Week 2, I continue. I tell them that I have two pets, and their names. I tell them that I used to smoke cigarettes and now I don’t, usually when discussing advertising and science over the last hundred years. I tell them that my dad is a factory worker, that I’m Appalachian, that I always wanted to teach English, and that I love black coffee.
But I have never told a class, explicitly, that I’m queer. And I don’t plan to any time soon.
Some of my students pick up on my queerness immediately. I have space on my intake form for a legal name, a name they want me to call them in class, and an optional space for pronouns they want me to use in class. I have my own pronouns in my email signature. I mention that I co-sponsor a queer club on campus. I wear flannels and Doc Martens to teach, after all. For something so central to my identity, though, I’m shy about announcing my queerness verbally, in part because I want to create space where my students must question their assumptions about me and, hopefully, everyone else around them.
If I come out to a class in so many words, I worry that they will think that is normal and expected – that queer people must announce themselves on impact, as if we are otherwise hiding our sexualities. I instead mention my partner and use their pronouns and name in my class, eventually; some students are surprised, and others are not, and nobody says anything in the moment, and we all move on. But I enact this pedagogy in a conservative area (I am just woke enough to not come out! Convenient!) and as a femme, cis woman, I hide in plain sight in front of them, and everyone, adding to my safety in a cis-normative and queerphobic world.
When I discuss my choice with other queer colleagues at larger universities, I can see the pity and fear for me in their nods. Of course, I would not come out to my community college classes in a semi-rural area. Of course, I should not say anything. Am I empowered, or am I cowardly? Am I privileged, or am I disadvantaged? Am I disenfranchising my queer students by not boldly disclosing my identity in front of them, or am I creating an easy environment in which we can mention our partners, our identities, and our pronouns as easily as saying we have a pet, or like to drink coffee, or any other things that make up how we see ourselves as entire people outside of this shared space?
If you have an answer to any of these questions, please let me know. I’ll be at the front of the class talking about audience and tone and syntax, and struggling with mapping my first-year writing course lessons onto my own life.