CHAPTER 20: Kaleidoscopic Musings on A Queer Praxis

When I began teaching more than 10 years ago, I strongly believed that my sexual identity played little role in my professional life. As a male working in an elementary school, my gender was enough of a variant to make me stand out among the overwhelming female faculty (I was usually the only male staff member, perhaps alongside the custodian and principal, wedged in the middle of that hierarchical pyramid). I, the sole man working with young children, was most certainly “queer” in the midst of all those ladies. Nonetheless, I believed that my interactions with students, my being a member of the school district, and my role as a classroom teacher were devoid of any ontological influence as a result of being a gay man. The tacit extension of this belief indicated that queerness ended, and I ceased to be gay, upon entering the classroom. It was as if walking across the student-drawn chalk lines on the playground magically removed any vestiges of gayness, otherness, and queerness. À la Cinderella, with the drone of the morning school bell I transformed into an asexual, decontextualized being identified as “teacher.” Not until the 3:00 p.m. buzz at the end of the academic day (and crossing over those chalk lines again) would I metamorphose back into my habitual self, my “real” self, from Dockers to denim, from “Mr. Martin” to “Adrian,” from “teacher” to “queer.” Viewing queerness as a performance, my identity and epistemological understanding of my practice as a pedagogue were mutually exclusive. If this were true, who was the “unreal” man sitting before a group of first graders, sharing literature or deconstructing the language of mathematical word problems? Perhaps a deconstruction of self would be advisable.