Loving Coalitions: Teaching and Forming Intergenerational LGBTQ+ Community in the Classroom

Abstract Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric positions queer and trans adults as predatory groomers who should be kept away from children’s bodies and minds. Attacks on LGBTQ+ educators, both historically and now, imagine queer and trans teachers as violent indoctrinators, not to be trusted with young people who are always assumed within these frameworks to be straight and cisgender. And yet, both teachers and students who defy norms of gender and sexuality have often had ways of finding each other and forming coalitions within the very spaces that have attempted to erase them. As an openly queer high school English teacher who has always lived in the US South, I am familiar with ideology that attempts to erase me and/or construe my relationships with students as inappropriate. I am also deeply concerned with cultivating spaces in which my students can be safe and affirmed. In this chapter, I explore how the concepts of vulnerability and endangerment inform my presence in the classroom, the curriculum I design, and the pedagogy I embody in which radical love informs my connection with students. I also explore how my students, in particular queer and trans students, as well as their strong allies, can learn about historical examples of intergenerational LGBTQ+ coalitions as we work to create one together in the present. One of the most pernicious myths about queer and trans people is that we are unlovable and alone—in this chapter, I explore how both curriculum and pedagogy can refute that.