[teacher.story.jennings]


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I REMEMBER
by Kevin Jennings

I remember Mr. Hooker (his real name), my seventh grade gym
teacher at Southwest Junior High School in Clemmons, North
Carolina, in 1976. Quite simply, he scared the hell out of me.
Whereas his co-teacher, Mr. Mercer, was all smiles and
encouragement, Mr. Hooker seemed to have a smoldering rage
burning inside him, and I tried to steer as clear of him as
possible. He made gym class an ordeal.

This was a shame because, as the youngest of four athletic boys,
I loved sports, and was one of the better students in P.E. But
there were even greater problems with gym class than dealing with
Mr. Hooker. The locker room was a source of tremendous anxiety,
as I was terrified that my eyes would linger a little too long on
the male bodies around me, to which I was increasingly and
disturbingly drawn. I wasn't yet ready to admit what that meant
to myself, much less to anyone else.

Sometime in the winter we did a unit on wrestling. The
stimulation of this particular sport was just a little too much
for me, and I began to approach class with dread, as I feared for
my ability to keep my feelings successfully hidden from my
largely-fundamentalist classmates. One in particular, Gary, was
the most distracting of all. With feathered blond hair parted in
the middle (this was the eve of the disco era, after all) and a
budding musculature that seemed to predestine him for the pages
of International Male, Gary entranced me, even though I hated
him and, more importantly, myself, for doing so. I could barely
take my eyes off him.

I was fighting just this internal battle on the day we began our
wrestling unit, as Mr. Hooker droned on and on about the sport's
scoring system. Try as I might, I just couldn't seem to look
away from Gary, who was blissfully absorbed in Mr. Hooker's
lecture. Mr. Hooker, however, seemed more attuned to where my
eyes were focused. He stopped in mid-sentence, fixed his gaze on
me, and said very slowly and clearly, "Stop looking at his legs."

As my classmates slowly turned to look at me amidst the dead
silence of the wrestling room, I felt as if a stake had been
driven through my heart. A few moments of silence passed, and
Mr. Hooker then went back to his lecture.

I never went back to being the person I was before that moment.
Humiliated, I never played on an organized school team again from
that day forward. I never again felt like I belonged at school.
I never forgot Mr. Hooker.

I remember Mr. Korn (not his real name), my ninth grade
Geometry teacher at Mt. Tabor High School in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina. I hated Math, but I love Geometry. I loved Geometry
because I loved Mr. Korn. I loved Mr. Korn because he noticed
me. One time, I had been out of class with the flu for a week.
Fearing the effect on my grades, I had dragged myself back, even
though I still wasn't feeling well. No one else much noticed my
absence or my return, so I was feeling pretty sorry for myself by
the time I went to Geometry. When he called the roll, Mr. Korn
customarily stayed next to the overhead projector and rarely
looked up. On this day, however, when he got to my name and I
croaked "Here," Mr. Korn looked up with a smile. "Kevin Jennings
is back," he said, and then went back to calling the role. In
those few seconds, he let me know that I mattered to him. I
would have walked off a plank if he'd asked me to.

While the other kids acknowledged Mr. Korn as a gifted and
inspiring teacher, they also mocked him behind his back.
Slightly effeminate and conspicuously unmarried, Mr. Korn was a
"faggot." His being labeled that didn't bother me; it intrigued
me. At Mt. Tabor High School, the only person who seemed to get
called "faggot" as often as Mr. Korn was a sophomore named Kevin
Jennings. Unlike Mr. Korn, I was not given the courtesy of
having it done behind my back. Haunted by Mr. Hooker's "outing"
in seventh grade, I was taunted daily in the hallways, in the
locker room, in classes before the teacher called the roll, even
during class. Whenever I volunteered to answer a question or
write on the board, a slightly-audible murmur from my classmates
would arise. "Faggot," I would hear. I learned not to volunteer
or raise my hand.

In Mr. Korn's class, it was different. While most teachers
looked the other way in the face of this verbal onslaught, Mr.
Korn made his class an oasis of safety. No one dared harass me
that way, perhaps because they feared Mr. Korn himself would take
offense at the epithet. I was protected there, and Mr. Korn
encouraged my participation. I found myself excelling in math, a
feat never duplicated before or since in my academic career, as I
would eventually go on to flunk Pre-Calculus senior year and took
no more math in college. I excelled because I mattered, and was
valued, and was safe, all conditions created by Mr. Korn.

One day in the spring of freshman year, I simply couldn't take
it anymore. I fled my homeroom, where the lack of a
teacher-directed lesson left plenty of space for verbal
targeting, and fled to the library. I asked the librarian to go
and get Mr. Korn, to tell him that I desperately needed his help.
He came a few moments later, clearly concerned. I poured out the
story of my harassment, fighting hard not to cry so I wouldn't
look like a "faggot." Mr. Korn listened sympathetically,
comforted me, and promised to speak with some of my other
teachers about putting a stop to this. Grateful, I looked up at
him and asked, "Do you have any children, Mr. Korn?"

Startled, he replied, "No. What makes you ask that?"

"Because I think you'd make a great dad. I think you should
have children, Mr. Korn."

He laughed. "I don't think that will be happening, Kevin."
And, with a smile, he was on his way.

I know now that Mr. Korn must have been gay. And I know that
this was what I was asking when I queried after his children.
What I was truly asking for, however, was not information about
his sexual orientation. I was asking for information about me.
I was asking him to tell me I was going to be all right, that I
was going to grow up and be gay and be okay. I was asking him to
show me something I had never seen before in North Carolina: a
gay man who was happy with himself.

In 1976, in the land of Jesse Helms, I was simply asking too
much. Mr. Korn could never have told me what I needed to hear.
He told me what he could. And it got me through freshman year.

I remember John, one of my history students at my first teaching
job at the Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island, in
1985. On the surface, John had everything going for him. A
varsity soccer player, he was a gregarious, handsome boy with
many friends and a bevy of girls who followed his every move. He
hid his needy side well from his peers, but shared it with me.
John's parents were working-class people of Portugese descent,
who had little connection with their prep school-educated son.
His sisters had long ago moved out of the house, and John
desperately needed an adult presence in his life. He wanted and
needed a man who could serve as his role model. Early on in my
days at Moses Brown, he latched on to me as just such a role
model, and I was happy to take the time to help him. I felt like
I was doing for him what Mr. Korn had done for me all those years
ago.

All, however, was not well in my first teaching job. Fresh out
of college, where I had been an openly gay activist, I found life
at the Moses Brown School a bit of a shock to my system. My
Harvard credentials had gotten me the job, but on my first day, I
was quickly informed that the rules would be different for gay
teachers in Providence than they were for gay students in
Cambridge.

The headmaster took me aside after our first faculty meeting, a
look of concern on his face. He said "I'd like to talk with you
about that piece of metal in your left ear." I had gotten an
earring that summer but, not being sure how I wanted to deal with
being gay in the high school setting, it was my left ear that I
had pierced, remembering the dictum "Left is right and right is
wrong," to throw off any suspicions that this was a statement
about my sexual orientation. It soon became clear that I had
failed to throw this particular bloodhound off my scent. "If
you're going to wear that tomorrow on the first day of classes,"
he continued, "don't bother coming in." Stunned and cowed, I
took it out that night at home. I noted, a year later, that no
such fuss was made when a colleague well-known to be straight had
the same ear pierced.

The whole experience of working at Moses Brown was difficult.
Having grown used to freedom at Harvard, I couldn't adjust to the
closet in Providence, a small city where you frequently run into
students and parents in the course of daily life outside the
school. The attitudes that my first encounter with the
headmaster evinced hardly disappeared as time wore on. In one
faculty meeting, an advisor encouraged the faculty to stop
students from harassing a boy they had nicknamed "Veg," short for
vegetable, due to his phlegmatic demeanor. "Better a veg than a
fruit," the Head quipped in response.

The classroom, by contrast, was an oasis for me. Filled with
first-year enthusiasm, I eschewed our uninspiring texts and
instead sought new ways to engage my students. I found primary
documents, invented games designed to show how colonialism worked
in Africa ("Wheel of Misfortune," I think I called it), and
worked to get every student involved in discussion. I tried to
remember the lesson Mr. Korn had taught me: if a student knows he
or she matters to you, he or she will excel in your class.

These students were my lifeline. They loved my class, they
loved my subject, they loved me. Feeling unloved by my
colleagues (only two of whom, one a gay man mentioned on the
dedication page of this book, ever invited me to a social
occasion), their affirmation was crucial. Older teachers were
scandalized by my teaching methods and my emphasis on topics such
as African-American and women's history, and it was only the fact
that my students loved this material so much that enabled me to
fight off the pressure to conform to the school's norms. These
kids deserve better than the run-of-the-mill textbook garbage, I
told myself, and I hung in there.

John, in particular, was a source of pride for me.
Underachieving in the rest of his classes, he shone in mine.
Around the school he often took the time to run up to me to say
hello and to share the important events of his day. Having been
the youngest in my family, I got a kick out of playing older
brother to John. I knew that I made him feel like he mattered
and that, in turn, made me feel like my work mattered, even
though I was earning only twelve thousand dollars and the disdain
of my colleagues for doing it.

In the fall of my second year, I was assigned to coach the JV
soccer team--even though I had never played soccer in my life.
I was careful not to divulge this to the kids, never playing in
practice with them, and relying on my motivational techniques to
get me by. Surprisingly, this worked, and we ended up with a
winning record. Although dangerously close to being exposed as
an impostor, I accepted the congratulations of the athletic
director (who never seemed to realize that my name wasn't Keith)
and the varsity players like John, who came to our games when
they could and seemed to think I knew what I was doing.

At one game, John and some of his varsity buddies were perched
on the embankment behind the field, just within earshot as I
coached. John's friends must not have realized they were within
hearing distance, as they proceeded to initiate a debate over my
sexual identity. "He's a fag," one of them said with certainty.
John hotly defended me against this "charge," undoubtedly
motivated by his affection for me. The debate wore on as I stood
frozen, terrified to look around. Finally, John brought it to a
conclusion with what he thought was the definitive statement.
"He can't be gay," John said, "he's too cool to be gay. I know.
He's my advisor."

I knew for a moment how Mr. Korn must have felt in 1978, at Mt.
Tabor High School, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I
desperately wanted to be able to say that I was gay, and that you
could be "cool" and gay, that the person John admired and wanted
to grow up to be like was gay and that this didn't change
anything. But I couldn't. By the end of that year, I could no
longer tolerate the tension this created, so I left the Moses
Brown School.

After some perfunctory attempts to stay in touch, John and I
drifted out of contact. I heard a rumor years that he had
developed a serious substance abuse problem in college, and was
in fact a major supplier of drugs for his dorm. I felt guilty;
even though I knew I was not directly to blame, I found it hard
to forgive myself for leaving John. And I have found it
impossible to forgive the Moses Brown School for making my
leaving the only option I could pursue and retain my sense of
self.

I remember Brewster, a sophomore boy who I came to know in 1987,
my first year of teaching at Concord Academy, in Concord,
Massachusetts. Brewster was a charming but troubled kid. His
grades didn't match up with his potential, his attendance could
be irregular, and he often seemed a little out of it. He was
clearly using some substance regularly, and was not very happy
with himself. But I didn't have a clue as to why--at least not
at first.

I had come to Concord from Moses Brown in search of a place
where I could be more open about who I was. I wore a ring that
symbolized my commitment to my partner, and students like
Brewster started asking me what it meant. Confused, I went to
the Head to ask how I should respond. "Tell them it's a gift
from someone you love," he said. Incredulous, I replied "Do you
say your wedding ring is a 'gift from someone you love'?" I
answered Brewster's question about my ring honestly. To my
surprise, he and the other students who asked didn't turn away
from me, as my peers had turned away from Mr. Korn in 1978.
They didn't seem to care much at all about my being gay.

Toward the end of my first year, during the spring of 1988,
Brewster appeared in my office in the tow of one of my advisees,
a wonderful young woman to whom I had been "out" for a long time.
"Brewster has something he needs to talk with you about," she
intoned ominously. Brewster squirmed at the prospect of telling,
and we sat silently for a short while. On a hunch, I suddenly
asked "What's his name?" Brewster's eyes widened briefly, and
then out spilled a story about his involvement with an older man
he had met in Boston. I listened, sympathized, and offered
advice. He left my office with a smile on his face that I would
see every time I saw him on the campus for the next two years,
until he graduated.

I was thrilled to be able to do for Brewster what I had wanted
Mr. Korn to do for me ten years before. But the conversation
also left me troubled. I had been playing a variation on the
"don't ask, don't tell" game with my students. If they asked, I
told, but otherwise my sexual identity was not a fit topic for
discussion. I grew uncomfortable with the message this was
sending, with the air of secrecy and shame and scandal that my
quasi-silence implied. I decided I needed to come out in a more
forthright and honest fashion, and made plans to do so the fall
of 1988, my second year at Concord.

The venue I chose was chapel. Three times a week, the entire
school gathers in the school's nonsectarian chapel, to hear a
talk by a senior or a faculty member on a topic of their
choosing. It is the central ritual of school life, and a forum
wherein personal sharing is commonplace. I decided to come out
here, and signed up to give my chapel on October 11, 1988 -- the
first-ever "National Coming Out Day," and the anniversary of the
1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which had
been a turning point in my life. It seemed like the right way to
commemorate the event and, more importantly, the right way to let
students like Brewster know that they should feel no shame over
being gay.

I met with my Head early upon returning that fall to discuss my
plans with him. He reacted with alarm, fearing that such a
public statement would frighten off potential applicants and
alumni donations to the school. He asked me to postpone the talk
while we "worked things out," and I reluctantly agreed to do so
as a sign of respect for his good will. In the meantime, my
intentions had become a surreptitious subject generating fierce
discussion among the faculty and eventually the students.
Everyone seemed to know that I was planning to come out, and that
whether or not the school would support was hanging in the
balance. It had turned into a litmus test about how the
institution viewed gay people. The import of my postponement was
duly noted, and I worried about the message this was sending.

None of this was helped by the fact that I was twenty-four and
in the midst of a performance review that would determine whether
or not I would be offered a permanent position at the school. I
had no role models. I didn't know a single openly gay teacher at
that time, and had no sources of support from other gay people at
the school. In fact, an older, closeted teacher had come to meet
with me at the Head's request, and had reacted with horror at my
plans. My resolve began to falter. Over lunch one day with some
straight colleagues, I poured out my confusion, and confessed
that I was thinking of cancelling my chapel talk. One of them
looked at me and said slowly, "If you do, you will never be able
to look at yourself in the mirror again. No job is worth that."
I decided then that I had to go forward, no matter what the
consequences might be.

On November 10, 1988, I rose to the pulpit of the Concord
Academy chapel, my talk in my hands, sweat drenching my
button-down shirt and soaking through to my blue blazer. My best
friend had flown overnight from California to be there. A former
teacher at the school named Karl Laubenstein, a gay man who had
always wished to come out but had never been able to do so, came
almost directly from the hospital to support me, leaning on a
cane as his recent bout of AIDS-related pneumocystis made it hard
for him to walk very far. But, most importantly, Brewster had
found me in the dining hall right before chapel, had stuck by my
side as I walked across campus, and had then perched himself in
the front row. We hadn't discussed the whole controversy around
this chapel. We hadn't even talked about what I was planning to
say. But he knew, and I could tell from the look in his eyes how
much my decision to go forward meant to him. I knew I had done
the right thing.

Fifteen minutes later, I dismissed the students, having told
them about my struggle with being gay when I was their age, a
struggle that led to serious substance abuse problems and
attempted suicide before I finally learned to love myself as a
gay man. The reaction had seemed to be positive and, when I
signaled for them to leave, I felt things had gone reasonably
well. I didn't expect what happened next. Kids literally leapt
up from their pews and rushed the pulpit, surrounding me and
hugging me, many of them crying as they tried to thank me for
what I had done. I was overwhelmed, and spent a good chunk of my
first class embracing them. When I realized I was fifteen
minutes late for U.S. History, I ran across the campus to my
classroom and burst in, out of breath, to find the board covered
with graffiti. I temporarily blanked out, so sure was I that
they had written homophobic epithets across the slate. When my
vision returned, I read what they had actually written. "We love
you, Kevin, and we're so proud of you," it read. Each student
had signed the board. Embarrassed and speechless, I simply
erased the board, turned, and said, "Okay, let's talk about the
Erie Canal." They smiled and opened their books to the right
page.

Brewster's problems didn't go away overnight. He struggled with
substance abuse and probably got grades below what he should have
gotten throughout his time at Concord. But he knew that it was
okay to be gay and that he had a place to turn for support, and
this enabled him to make it through high school in one piece. In
1990 he graduated from Concord, and went off to college. Except
for a few phone calls, I heard little from him, and lost track of
him as the years went by.

I remember April 3, 1993, when I went to Club Cafe, a gay
restaurant in Boston, for the annual awards dinner of the
Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights. An organization I
had helped found, GLSTN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Teachers
Network), was being honored that night, and I had come to accept
the award on our behalf. I sat with some friends, my back to the
center of the room, and soon got engaged in conversation. From
behind me, I heard a familiar voice. "Care for a drink, sir?"

I turned and it was Brewster. Shocked, we were both speechless
for a moment, before we hugged each other and caught up. He was
now twenty-two, taking time off from college, and living with his
boyfriend. His smile showed that he had found his way to a happy
adulthood. In that moment, I remembered why I had gone into
teaching in the first place.

Spontaneously, I dedicated the award that night to Brewster, who
stood mortified in the back of the room while I talked about our
relationship. The key moment came when I recalled my own
experience with closeted gay teachers in high school (Mr. Korn
was hardly the only one), and how that had influenced me to come
out as a teacher myself. "I'll be damned," I said, "if I will
remain closeted and help teach another generation of young gay
and lesbian people to hate themselves." Despite all of the
struggles I had been through at my school, seeing Brewster that
night made it all worthwhile.

The last time I saw Brewster was at the 1993 Boston Gay Pride
March. He was standing on the side with his boyfriend as GLSTN
marched past. He called my name and I broke away briefly to hug
him and say hello. As I stood amidst the sunshine on the
beautiful June day, I looked at Brewster, and I thought: You
made it. I made it. We, as gay students and gay teachers, were
going to make it, no matter how many obstacles and barriers stood
in the way of our liberation.

I remember when I didn't think I could do any of this. And I am
happy that that feeling of hopelessness is now but a memory.


(Excerpted from ONE TEACHER IN TEN: GAY AND LESBIAN EDUCATORS TELL THEIR
STORIES by Kevin Jennings.)


CONTACT INFORMATION:

Kevin Jennings
GLSTN
122 West 26th Street, Suite 1100 
New York, NY 10001 USA 
Tel: (212) 727-0135 

..................................................................

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Tel: (212) 727-0135 
Email: glstn@glstn.org 
Web: http://www.glstn.org/respect/

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