Greg Knotts
The collection of essays in “Coming Out of the Classroom Closet” helps academics, practitioners, parents, and students discover the status of many topics surrounding gay and lesbian issues in the schools. Harbeck compiles a look at intervention, advocacy, and curricular modifications that addresses the rise in social support and legislative protections concerning gay and lesbian issues in the schools. “Coming Out of the Classroom Closet” discusses the invisibility experienced by many gay and lesbian teachers and students in schools. The compilation investigates issues of gay and lesbian educators in the schools. It includes an inquiry into the history of legal rights and the current status of those rights. School-based intervention and the needs of gay youth are also investigated. There are also inquiries into teacher and school counselor training and what should or might be included into the curriculum. Harbeck compiles a wide variety of voices that help uncover the status of gay and lesbian issues in the schools. Read through the lens of a decade of change and growth, Harbeck's insightful compilation helps serve as a baseline and comparative fodder for more current investigatory work.
Harbeck's introduction maintains that this collection may be the first such compilation of research on homosexuality and education and educational history. In the decade since its publication, it is hard to imagine that just over ten years ago, no one else had been able to coalesce this kind of research in to one publication. This bodes well for the modern researcher of homosexuality and the schools. The collection is a great sounding board for a world in the not too distant past as it compares to the current status of legal protections and social change impacting gay and lesbian issues in education. Read through pre-Lawrence v. Texas eyes, this book was probably transformative for its time. The collection today, however, reads a little disjointed and arbitrary. Inclusions about school counselors, curriculum, identity, coming out, and HIV education make the reader feel that Harbeck was simply culling anything in order to flesh out the book. Realizing that research into these issues was much less frequent and probably much less supported is important to remember when reading some of the contributions. What is also important to note is how the status of many of these topics has changed, but how so much has remained the same.
For instance, Uribe and Harbeck discuss the origins of PROJECT 10 in Los Angeles — a school-based reform effort to include gay and lesbian issues in curriculum as well as to ensure a support mechanism for gay and lesbian kids in Los Angeles Unified School District. Since the publication of Classroom Closet, eight states have enacted legislation that names sexual orientation as a protected category in the Education Code. This far surpasses the school-based reform effort of PROJECT 10 and like interventions. However, only eight states have such legislation today, so while there has been growth, it has not been widespread or universal.
James Sears contributes an inquiry of educators and their feelings and perceptions regarding homosexuality and homosexuals. The article has a twofold purpose: to investigate adolescents' perceptions about teachers and counselors, and also an inquiry into teachers and counselors themselves. It focuses on the fact that personal beliefs affect the attitudes of teachers and counselors, and even in the face of policy that may protect children or necessitate inclusion of gay and lesbian issues, the individual perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs of teachers and counselors often influences their ability or willingness to implement such a policy. Sears finds that perceptions of teachers about gay and lesbian issues in schools is much more negative among elementary teachers than among secondary teachers. This informs the foundation for the homophobia so often fostered in the schools. Educators, Sears finds, may have negative attitudes about homosexuality, but often do not let that play an active role in prejudice in the day-to-day activities of the school. Teachers are able to interact in a non-judgmental, professional way in school. However, they will rarely take a proactive approach to the harassment, prejudice, and homophobic behaviors found at their schools. Teachers will go to training on how to address these issues, but then will not actually implement the necessary change mandated or suggested by that training. Sears calls this 'benign neglect,' and reasons that this neglect is responsible for the continued silencing of gay and lesbian student (and teacher) voices.
Harbeck herself contributes an inquiry into the history of case law on gay and lesbian teacher dismissal and credential revocation. Harbeck traces court cases and legislative acts from the 1700s to issues like the Briggs Initiative in California and the influence of Anita Bryant in Florida in the late 1970s. Court cases considered pioneering for gay and lesbian issues in the schools are also discussed. Often times, Harbeck summarizes that there is a disconnect between what is enacted in law or determined by the courts and what is implemented in practice.
Interestingly, Harbeck offers some thoughts on the 'future' of legal connections to gay and lesbian issues and the schools. These future prospects are sometimes today's reality. Harbeck focuses a great deal of attention on the role AIDS will play in legislation and education. Informed by the late 1980s and early 1990s, it is easy to understand why this assertion would be made. However, she also suggests that strides be made in education, not legislation alone. Studies show, she says, that a heterosexual who knows a homosexual is much more likely to have less stereotypic and more accepting responses to homosexual issues. With advances in the media, a wider social acceptance and more and more homosexuals living 'out' lives, it is hard to know which of these events, over time, informed the other. It is obvious today that with television programs like “Will and Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” an exposure to 'things homosexual' has grown — but has that exposure grown because attitudes are growing more accepting, or are attitudes growing more accepting because of the exposure? In either case, Harbeck is correct — attitudes are changing. What is also of note, is that advances in legal protections have also grown. There are still great strides to be made to ensure an equitable treatment of all children — but if Harbeck's assertions are correct — both education and legislation will continue to make strides in the future.
Pat Griffin contributes an interesting study that focuses on teachers' self-perceptions and being informed by those perceptions in order to take a collective action. Griffin interviewed gay and lesbian teachers who took their own transcribed interviews and created a profile of themselves. The teachers then used those profiles to discover shared experiences and commonalities among them. These shared emotional and professional experiences then served as a basis from which they could then be used to create a process of empowerment for collective action. This participatory study helped teachers to claim voices that had long been silenced and to invest in consequences that might otherwise have had no way of being created or fostered. It is a transformative study that merits investigation by researchers interested in creating social change and empowerment for individuals who typically have no voice.
Whatley contributes an investigation into gay and lesbian images fostered in higher education texts. This is followed by D'Augelli's inquiry into a university course focused on the history of a gay and lesbian identity and the development of that identity in gay and lesbian individuals. D'Augelli discusses how this development is informed by, and is often in direct contradiction to, a stigmatizing culture that does not embrace this development. Both Whatley and D'Augelli focus on these issues at the college level — it will only be later that these same issues are addressed in secondary schools, and sometimes at the middle school level. Researchers then were unwilling to address these issues on the elementary level, and very few, even today, have filled that void.
Cody Murphy investigates the education of mental health professionals and determines that they are poorly prepared to confront issues of sexuality in the schools. Cranston's inquiry into HIV education determines that schools, multi-service agencies, and self-help groups are the best venues for HIV education. Schools, Cranston says, can rely on programs like PROJECT 10 and the Hetrick Martin Institute in New York to help implement a viable and productive education surrounding HIV and AIDS. For my money, although these programs are effective and certainly already exist, they have proven to not be a fullproof means of education. Today there is a rise in HIV infection rates among youth, so there must be more concerted efforts to address these needs in the schools. With a federal policy that endorses abstinence-only-until-marriage as the only means for sex education, we are certainly not addressing the imminent needs of our youth. Seen through the lens of a decade ago, or today, it is apparent that our children need more comprehensive sex education.
The compilation in Classroom Closet is an informative look at gay and lesbian issues in the schools. Billed as the first compilation of its time, it is easy to see that these issues are being addressed in deeper, more enriched, global ways today. Using The Classroom Closet as a lens through which to view the growth in addressing gay and lesbian issues in the school is a good use of this book. Much of the research presented here is either fairly commonly accepted now, or outdated already. It is a good place from which to discuss the comparative amount of growth in a short period of time, but also to witness how other areas involving gay and lesbian issues in schools have not changed at all.
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