Authenticity in Education: Grant Moss on Being a Gay Educator in a Conservative Landscape

Teaching While Queer, Season 2, Episode 18

Ever found yourself at the crossroads of identity and profession, especially within the halls of academia? Grant Moss, an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University, joins us for a candid discussion about his lived experience as a gay educator in a traditionally conservative sphere. His journey from a childhood shrouded in societal homophobia to finding his truth in grad school, and how it's shaped his approach to teaching, offers listeners a glimpse into the resilience and adaptability required when one's authenticity is at stake.

As we trade stories, Grant and I shed light on the delicate art of cultivating safe spaces for LGBTQ+ students amidst the pressures of conservative and religious communities. Our exchange unearths the importance of visibility and subtle allies—whether it's a rainbow pin or a safe zone sign—that speak volumes to students grappling with their identities. Grant’s personal revelations, coupled with our shared strategies, underscore the impact educators can have on minimizing the emotional scars of queer individuals, simply by being present and supportive.

Closing on a note of introspection, we address the broader implications of queer identity within academia. From dissecting Shakespeare's sonnets through a queer lens to navigating the role of queer parenthood in an evolving society, Grant eloquently encapsulates the strides made and the strides still required for genuine inclusivity. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone invested in the enrichment of academic spaces, affirming the human right to live and learn authentically. Join us for a heartfelt exploration of what it means to be queer in the world of education and beyond.

Transcript

Bryan (he/they): 0:27

Teaching While Queer is a podcast for 2SLGBTQIA+ educational professionals to share their experiences in academia. Hi, I'm your host, Bryan Stanton, a theater pedagogy and educator in New York City, and my goal is to share stories from around the world from 2SLGBTQIA+ educators. I hope you enjoy Teaching While Queer. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Teaching While Queer. I'm your host, Bryan Stanton. Before we get started, I just want to say I have a tiny cold and so I am a little bit scratchy today, and the next few episodes will probably be scratchy, so I apologize in advance, but you know, autumn happens. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Grant Moss. Hi, Grant, how are you doing?

Grant (he/him): 1:20

Very good, thank you.

Bryan (he/they): 1:22

Awesome. I'm really glad to hear it and I'm so happy that you're here today. Why don't you tell everybody who you are?

Grant (he/him): 1:29

Okay, my name is Grant Moss, as you said. My pronouns are he, him, and I identify as a gay man and I am an associate professor of English at Utah Valley University, which is in Orem, utah, about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City, and I've been teaching here for 17 years, I think. Yeah, I started doing the math in my head, but, yes, 17 years. now arrived in 2006, and, yeah, I've had some interesting experiences during that time, but originally from the Midwest, the St Louis area, then lived in North Carolina while I was getting my doctorate at the University of North Carolina, then taught at Virginia Tech for several years before moving here. So that's pretty much. That's the resume oriented history, anyhow.

Bryan (he/they): 2:43

Love it. What I particularly love, which we will dive into later, is that you are in what most would consider a very progress or excuse me, that was exactly opposite of what I wanted to say a very conservative state. Correct and so we will touch on that a little bit when we get into your experience. But let's take a trip back in time. And what was it like for you growing up as a queer student?

Grant (he/him): 3:11

Well, I'm I think I'm just sort of guessing here, but I think I'm a little bit older, maybe quite a bit older than most of your guests. So it was I don't know that I had really a fully fledged or I know I didn't have a fully fledged queer identity as a kid or as a student. It took a long time. The first sort of queer landmark in my life was when, although I didn't know it at the time, the DSM finally changed so that homosexuality was no longer a disorder, and I was nine when that happened. So it was pretty grimly homophobic for my K through 12 years and to a lesser extent, my college years too. I mean the just sort of dimly aware of, you know, feeling different as a, as a kid in school, but the the overwhelming at least where I was, the overwhelming atmosphere was was homophobic. The students were highly homophobic, as you know high school boys tend to be anyway, but the, the teachers were also actively and openly homophobic, at least most of them. I'm sure some of them knew I was gay, even though I didn't know it at the time. But or I kind of knew it but was fighting it. But yeah, I didn't. By modern standards I came out relatively late. I believe I was just turning 25. So it was weird and often just kind of scary and unpleasant that you couldn't, or I couldn't, really find any sort of positive depictions of queerness anywhere. I wasn't, I wasn't aware of any kind of queer literature at that point. You know, when I was in, say, high school, I didn't, you know, you knew back in those days if, if a queer character appeared on a TV show, you knew they were going to be. You know, if it was fiction, you knew they were going to be the killer or insane or the criminal or something bad, something negative. Occasionally you'd see queer people interviewed on you know news shows, but there wasn't, it was almost clinical. It was. You know, tell me about you and your strange life choices or, as opposed to anything remotely affirming. And so it wasn't until I was in my mid 20s, as I said, that I was able to come out. I had a pretty cohesive friend network at the time and again, as far as not terribly progressive places. I waited until I was living in North Carolina to come out. But I was a grad student and I was living in Chapel Hill, which is the sort of liberal enclave of North Carolina at the time and I was, or still consider myself, extremely fortunate in that my friends were pretty much uniformly positive. My parents and family reacted well. The greatest reaction I got when I came out to somebody was from my sister, who had a two word response which was, and I quote, no shit. And we kind of moved on from there. But it was kind of difficult. It was kind of a difficult needle to thread I'm not sure if that's the best metaphor, but that most I was a teaching assistant when I was in grad school and most professors, most faculty, were not out to their students. At that time there was one out professor that I was aware of and hello, cecil Wooten, if you're out there. He was the faculty advisor for the university's gay and lesbian student organization. A really wonderful person and but aside from Cecil, I don't recall anybody, at least in my department, any faculty being out. They it wasn't a hostile atmosphere, they were for that time. This would have been in the early 1990s. The faculty, at least the ones who were supervising me, were pretty good about, or relatively good for the era, about diversity concerns. I mean that they were reminding us that as as TAs, that you know a certain percent, statistically, a certain percentage at that time we thought it was 10, figures vary, but 10%, whatever of your students are going to be queer. So you need, if someone says something homophobic, you need to stop that. You need to, you know, make it clear that that's, that's not acceptable and that was, you know, that wasn't necessarily a dominant view at the time, certainly not in North Carolina, but yeah, it was a, yeah, it was, you know. So as a, as a student who didn't come out until he was working on his PhD, I kind of was flying beneath the radar or, forgive me for the pun, beneath the gaydar For quite a few years. There again, I'm sure a lot of faculty that I, I'm sure a lot of my teachers and professors, you know, figured it out arguably before I did. But when I was younger it was, it was genuinely. I think it would have. Where I was in St Louis, in the St Louis area, I think it would have been genuinely dangerous. I mean, I think there was sufficient hostility just in general. I'm also a person of color who was going to predominantly white schools at the time. That didn't help. Luckily, I eventually figured out what bears are, but that took a while and you know, I just was an outsider in so many different ways that I think it took me a long time to figure out who I was and what kind of person I wanted to be as an adult. And I think particularly it was hard to construct again because of that absence of sort of public role models, aside from, you know, some activists. During the height of the AIDS epidemic you didn't really see many public personas and so you didn't have or I didn't have, I should say shouldn't project, I didn't really have that many people I could look at and say, well, that's how I want my life to go or this is how I would like to be in the world.

Bryan (he/they): 11:33

So there were some things that you said that I found really fascinating. First of all, because of my graduate research, I have researched the DSM and all the transfer of information on that, and for those of you who are at home and you don't know what that is, it's basically a manual for diagnoses specifically used by the American Psychological Association or Psychology Association I can't remember what the right phrasing is for their acronym but for a long time just being homosexual was considered an illness, and then in the 70s that was changed and being having gender diversity became like the problem. And now gender dysphoria is still kind of listed as a as a diagnosable disorder, but it's not listed in a negative way. It's more so there to help the, you know, insurance side of things that you have when you are doing gender transition. It can help, it can also hurt, so it's it's really like a double-edged sword, but this manual basically exists to help with diagnosis and so I found that fascinating, that, like you, have like an understanding of where that fits into your timeline. For me, when I was gosh, 17, 16, the Supreme Court overturned Texas case for sodomy laws and so I have a distinct memory of knowing like, oh, these things became legal right here when I was a child and and so I think that those kind of like almost political landmarks are so interesting that they they find a place of importance in our timelines. The other thing that I thought was interesting is that you mentioned not having really a reference and that like a queer person on a show would obviously be the killer or something like that, and for a lot of people I had been watching, or I have watched, this documentary called Disclosure. It's on Netflix and it's got Laverne Cox in it and she's talking about how many people their introduction to a trans person is silence of the lands, where this, this person, is literally disassembling people to make their own skin, and so for a lot of people that's what they thought a transgender person was. This complete psycho, was what people just kind of thought, and so for a long time the queer community you're right has been like demonized for being the criminals or the bad people, the outliers, and so those kind of things kind of stuck with me from what you were saying.

Grant (he/him): 14:32

How do?

Bryan (he/they): 14:32

you think, how do you think that your experience as a young queer person kind of influenced you as a teacher?

Grant (he/him): 14:40

Excuse me that's a good question and I think that there was going back to those media portrayals that you talk about. I mean, silence of the Lambs is kind of the ultimate version of that trope but it goes back years and years and years and that was very common on not the cutting people up, but it was very common on detective shows in the 70s and 80s to have a transgender person who was scarily, frighteningly passing as a woman but they weren't. And I think that a lot of that gave people of my vantage a very strong sense that we needed to stay hidden, that what we were was some whether you were gay or trans or lesbian or what have you that we were supposed to be skulking around at night. We weren't sort of fit for, you know, regular, respectable people to be around children, god forbid. And I think it probably made me I hope at least the. You know, one of the few sort of silver linings that you can take from that kind of thing is I remember very vividly what it was like to be in the closet all those years and you try as much as possible as a teacher to be clear, and I've gotten I think louder about this as I've gotten older, that I'm safe, that if you need to talk to me, if you you know, if you need to come out to me, great, or just talk to me or whatever that I'm open to that. I try to make that clear at the start of every semester to my students. I try to give them visual contact or information, like I wear a bunch of rainbow colored accessories into the classroom. Typically I have a safe zone sign posted clearly on my office door to make it clear to everybody that if they are in some kind of crisis that has something to do with being queer in some way, that I want to be there to help, and I think that it has been a relatively uphill battle. I mean. The other way that I think I differ from a lot of your other guests is I don't work with minors. My students are adults for the most part I mean once in a while you get somebody who's under 18, but the vast majority of the people I work with are adults, whenever they are adults who grew up in a very conservative atmosphere and it's been very you know, it's been a slow growth process at my university to have a permanent sort of stable gay student organization and queer student center. Sorry, I'm old and I'm behind on the terminology. So if I say gay over and over, I mean to be inclusive, I mean anyone queer, lgbtqia plus. But you know it took a while and the you know I've always, for better or for worse, I pretty much always my whole professional career has been in red states. It's been in North Carolina, then I was in Virginia, now and here, and you know you have people who are struggling with their identities in, sometimes in ways that I can understand and sometimes ways that I can't. Fortunately, from my perspective, I did not have. I did not grow up in a deeply religious household, so I didn't have conservative religious baggage to deal with in any significant way. But a lot of the is something I have to do, a lot of listening to. I mean I, having lived in Utah for for over for nearly two decades now, I have a much better understanding of what it's like to be a queer person closeted within an LDS church or community, in the same way that in the past I gained an understanding of what it's like to be queer in a Southern Baptist community or a Catholic one. I grew up in a, although I'm not Catholic myself. A lot of people in in the area where I grew up, or what I think is most difficult and I apologize if I'm rambling a bit here, but I think one of the things that it's that I wish more people in these communities understood is is how much harm they're doing unintentionally that I think there are many people you know. No community obviously is completely homogenous or uniform and there are many you know people who you know who would be, who are in the LDS I don't want to classify that one, but we're in relatively conservative churches who would be more than happy to accept their queer children but they don't think their children could be queer and so they make homophobic jokes or comments or and so forth. And you know, just as you know, having a flashback to being in high school, that kind of shit hurts, as you, as any queer person, knows that. That it cements you're already feeling like an outsider and it just sort of cements that terrifying notion that I'm like. I can't reveal who I am to any of these people, so I try to be somebody that it's safe for students to, to talk to, to come out to. You know some. Some come out to me, some don't. Obviously, people, even in places like Utah, people are coming out at a much younger age than they did when I was young, and that is great. But you know, and then they come out in the classroom. I have, I have my own sort of strategies for coming out to classes and sometimes I don't always do it on the very first day, but I try to make it clear that I'm, that I'm open to, to whatever needs or concerns they have. And I mean we've, if you're queer in in Western civilization, unfortunately we've all been burned. We're, all you know, to a greater or lesser extent, the walking wounded. I don't at least that has been my experience. It may be that if you're a queer person who's raised by a queer couple in the Castro neighborhood, maybe it's different, but where I've been, and it's you know. I think we all pick up some scars along the way and you want to. I think my biggest goal or aim is to just try to minimize the scarring of the people that I encounter because they're they're dealing with their they're. We're all walking a very rough road.

Bryan (he/they): 23:28

Absolutely. I think that's so. I love that idea of like minimizing scars and kind of just being there as a support for your students, because I think that a lot of people don't realize the unintended harm. And I had a conversation with a guest earlier in the season where he was saying you know, there's parents who are like I wish I would have known that by not being affirming of my child that it would have been so bad for them. But the thing is like the data is out there and parents just need to understand that there is a likelihood that your child will end up queer and what can you do to kind of help support them? And I think that's kind of like a huge mental shift that we need with parenting is that the assumption of heterosexuality kind of needs to come to an end, because it's not a given and if it doesn't happen, it doesn't change who your child is Like. They're still the same person. But if they didn't tell you, that's likely because of your behavior, not theirs.

Grant (he/him): 24:41

And I think because, because it affects or has an impact on sexuality, I think there's also the assumption, at least from people I've encountered talking about this straight people should say that this isn't something you need to worry about until your kid hits puberty and it's like. No, it needs to happen from the get go and people need to be aware that you know. Just as, hopefully, you would never make a racist joke in front of a four year old, you don't make a homophobic joke in front of a four year old either. Yep, you don't. You know, it's all you know about modeling behavior. Again, I'm I excuse me, I teach adults, so I'm really out of my wheelhouse here, but just as a, you know again, scarred person, and again, my, my parents, who my love dearly, were very supportive when I came out to them. But you know, my dad was blindsided. He had no idea and I think part of the reason for that is that it just never crossed his mind, it just didn't occur to him Once informed he was 100% on board. But you know he was kind of stoned and that you know. Obviously this was a long time ago, but but I think that that the time for that kind of shock. It should be over. Sorry, go ahead.

Bryan (he/they): 26:22

I know it's perfect. I agree with you. What's wild to me is that this is a parenting issue. It doesn't. It's not necessarily a heterosexual parenting issue, because I've experienced a lesbian couple whose son had a hard time coming out as bisexual because his parents were so like girlfriend oriented and he was like you know, I'm bi actually, and I want to have a boyfriend for right now, and what I find interesting about it is that I think it is definitely an issue that needs to be kind of like taken at consideration. There's all these memes that fly over the internet right, like, if you're not going to support your queer children, don't have children, and I think that people need to actually like think about that. That you don't. You don't get to tell your child what they're going to become or who they're going to become. They're going to grow and figure it out on their own. The question is whether or not they include you in that, because of whether or not you include who they are in your life, and I think that it's as simple as not making those jokes around your kid. You know what I mean. They're going to feel more comfortable if they're not hearing, you know, queer associated jokes or the you faggot or whatever word you're saying, because it means that that terminology is not okay in your house. And if that terminology is not okay in your house, then that means that perhaps the other ones could be the right words to use.

Grant (he/him): 28:07

Yeah, well, and yeah, absolutely, I mean I it is. I should not be speaking on this because I don't teach young people and I'm not a parent, but but yeah, I mean it's not that hard, it's just a matter of rethinking, and I get that. You know anybody my understanding. If you have a child, it just is normal and human to imagine them growing up to be like you. But that's not how this works ever. Really. I mean that they, we all, become some kind of unique amalgam of our parents, our environment, our education, our whatever. And you know, the kid is never going to be a clone of you. And and you really need to get out of that mindset if possible, as much as possible.

Bryan (he/they): 29:18

Yeah, absolutely, and so you've mentioned that you teach in the collegiate environment, but you've taught in mostly conservative states, so have you ever had situations where you've had to kind of confront queer phobia?

Grant (he/him): 29:32

Yeah, I mean it's because of advancing age, the memory is a little fuzzy on some of these things, but in more, in most cases it's, it's not as much. I haven't encountered overt hostility as much as I've encountered omissions. Like you know, my, my area of expertise is the 16th and 17th century. I teach a lot of Shakespeare. Someone at you know at the institution is holding a panel discussion on Shakespeare, but I'm not invited for some odd reason, despite the fact that I'm teaching. You know an advanced level course on the subject at the time. You do the math. You know, you sort of realize that or that people are can often be her students sometimes can be very aggressive about making sure that I understand that their, their beliefs are this and they do not support. You know deviance or whatever charming word they choose to use. And you know again, it's like I'm not an idiot when you're writing a freshman compass say that that is, that has that tone. I get it, but could you please move on. I'm not here to discuss that and I think to go off on a bit of a tangent here. But I think another thing that was hard for me to sort of figure out a balance on for a long time when I started teaching was how much of my personal life do I want my students to see that? That is also because I tend to you know, when like I don't usually know students have my email address, my office number, I don't give them my cell phone number, typically, unless it's some kind of urgent or you know, a specific situation, because once I'm, once I've left campus, I kind of want that to stop. I need to be in my own space, in my own head, and so the question sort of became when I started teaching. It's like, well, there's a kind of I think there can be a kind of closet variation on the closet. In a way it's like, well, I'm gay, but my students just don't need to know that I'm just here for this purpose. I'm here to teach literature or writing or what have you. And I think ultimately that's not how I operate anymore, because I think it's important for us to be visible. I mean, it comes back to what I was talking about with my childhood. There weren't any. There were no openly queer people for me to look to, and I'm not. I don't want to present myself as a role model per se, but because I really am not one, but I do want students to be able to know look, you can you know I mean to, to plagiarize from Dan Savage it gets better. Like you can come through this and you can get through high school. I mean, by the time they reach me they're already through high school. But it's like you can, you know, express your identity and have a fully functioning, functional life, professional life. You don't have to be in hiding, you don't have to be afraid all the time, and that's you know. So I, you know again, I used to sort of, I think, remain somewhat closeted to my students, but with the sort of rationalization of oh well, you know, that's personal, they don't need to know that. Actually, they do need to know that. Or the queer kids need to know that. And I would add another thing that I've noticed over the years, particularly as someone who's taught in conservative places, is that when queer stuff comes up in class, boy do I get a lot of questions. They, I mean there is a huge void of knowledge in these kids' lives and they are dying to find out more. And you know, it's kind of a tricky thing to manage now, because if, once that door is opened, I pretty much know that. You know that's where the rest of the class period is going, because that's all most of them are gonna wanna talk about. Not necessarily, and it doesn't necessarily come from kids who identify as queer. It just is like this is something nobody in their relatively conservative world talks about, and when they find a person in authority who will talk about it, I need a positive variation on the Pandora's box metaphor, because that's horrible, but that's the thing it's like boom, a door is open and they cannot wait to go through it.

Bryan (he/they): 35:37

In my experience, yeah, I appreciate that so much because I think that you're right in that creating this taboo just makes people crave that knowledge. That's why I get so frustrated with the book banning that's happening and all this stuff like, okay, well, book banning, people are still gonna get the books and they're still gonna read them if they wanna read them, because they crave that information. And the thing is, the books aren't for everybody. Not every book is for everybody. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of books that I haven't read and I don't want to read, and so I get so frustrated about that kind of thing. And you also mentioned this idea of almost like. It's like a separate, it's almost like a sheer closet. I don't know, but this idea of like my students don't need to know that it's personal, which is a huge topic right now, because I can see, I mean, in the comments on the social media for this podcast, we get a lot of like you shouldn't be talking about queerness in the classroom when I was like well, clearly you didn't go to the podcast. This is a place for teachers, but you know, since we're here, let's talk about that. I knew that my teachers were married. Some of my teachers got pregnant, which means I knew that that person had sex and I knew that they had children and none of those things have to come from like. None of those things are things that heterosexual teachers have to worry about, and I think that when people say you shouldn't be talking about sexuality in the class, I want to counter with you know that heterosexuality is sexuality, right? Because I think I absentmindedly in my second year of teaching kind of did that. I went back, not back into the closet so much as like I didn't actively say anything my students already knew through or with me from the year before and I absentmindedly kind of took my family out of my getting to know me slides and whatnot and I erased a little bit of myself because of a comment that my principal had made. And it drives me crazy that that one comment like stood in the back of my mind because it happened in like October and here I was almost a year later, starting the school year, going like, oh yeah, I should erase that part of my thing and that's again a little bit of that unintentional damage that I think that straight people don't realize that they do. But let's talk about this a little bit, because you had mentioned that you have like your own strategies for coming out in the classroom and one of the questions I always ask is like what advice do you give to an educator, someone who's going into a school setting for the first time and they're not sure if they should be there? Authentic self.

Grant (he/him): 38:40

Well, a couple of things Find well. First of all, if you don't feel safe, don't do it. I think is what I would tell anybody. Certainly I've said that to students, but to new teachers too. I mean. The economy is rough, and some of us are. We've all had jobs that were less than ideal, if you're in a place that you think is a hostile environment. Don't feel that you have to necessarily make a stand. If you want to. I'm all for people shaking stuff up, but we got to pay rent and eat too. So I would say don't do it unless you feel safe. But if you feel safe, then find a way that works for you. I have colleagues who come in on the first day and just make this big declaration of who they are, what their political affiliations are, with the idea that, okay, there is no such thing as total objectivity. You should know what my biases are at the get-go, and that is great. That does not work for me at all, so I kind of sidle into it what I will do. Most of my literature classes involve teaching Shakespeare's sonnets early in the game. And when you get to sonnet 20, where he's calling the young man the master mistress of his passion, I talk my way of doing this. As I say, this reads again it's 400 years ago things were different, standards were different, ideas were different. They didn't even have the word homosexual yet. But this poem reads gay as hell to me. Full disclosure I'm gay, so I might be biased on that, but this is what it looks like to me and that's, and so if any of my students are listening sorry it wasn't as spontaneous as I hope I made it sound, but that's my way of sort of putting that on the table that it's a relatively natural, if you will, way of bringing it into the conversation. But it's also something that is typically, if I've got students who've had me in multiple classes, they already, like you were saying, they already know, and you know, grapevines move fast in the age of social media. I would be shocked if most of my students didn't already know when they arrive on the first day. I mean, I'm pretty sure that kind of information travels fast, but I think so for me. That's the way that works for me. That's the way that sort of introducing it at a point in the conversation when I'm talking about queer issues anyway, as a way of putting my perspective on the table, making it clear where I'm coming from, is what I like to do. But again, you know, and it there's no one correct way of coming out, obviously, and not every way, it might take a couple of tries before you get to one that you feel completely comfortable with, but I think. But I think eventually it's good to get there, because keeping it bottled up just grates on you. I mean, I also they're, they're, um, funny, I had almost forgotten this. I used to also make a coming out sort of comment or joke connected with Shakespeare's Sonnets years ago, but students are too young to get the reference now, because I used to, because there was a there's another character in that poetry sequence is called the Dark Lady, and I would mention that that was also a song by Cher and they but again, students now are too young to remember that. You're probably too young to remember that. But anyway, there's no right or wrong way to go about it and finding a place that's comfortable for you is good. But also, if you can, if you feel safe, if you feel comfortable, do it, because even if there's some initial discomfort and nervousness, like coming out, in general it will make your life easier. I mean, I don't know about other folks, but I came out as much from when I originally came out to friends and family. I came out as much out of fatigue as anything just trying to like I couldn't remember what story I told this person and that person and what did. Whatever the amount of lying you have to do just gets exhausting. And once it's done I mean obviously it's never completely done as you know, you're always coming out at various times and occasions throughout your life, but each subsequent one gets easier, not to me at least. I can't speak for everybody, mainly because after a while again, my personality is not hyper-defiant really. But there's also a point where, okay, if you can't handle this, you don't get me. You can just fuck off because I don't. If this ups because telling students early in the semester is also my way of signaling if this freaks you out, drop now, because this is just how it's going to be, this is how I am and I don't think anybody has dropped, at least not in a very long time. I have had occasionally going back to what you were saying about sort of homophobic reactions I have had students leave the room a time or two when I've been talking about actually in the communities I've taught in a lot of times students will kind of the more conservative students will freak out and leave over anything remotely sexual not even queer necessarily, but straight stuff and it's like look, this isn't, this isn't my wheelhouse either, but we've got to. This is what the poet is writing. But yeah, I think overall it is just again, if you're not at the moment in the place where I work, I'm not too concerned about job security, barring some radical shakeup somewhere. I'm not generally concerned about being fired for being queer or anything of that kind anymore, but if you're in that kind of place it just makes your life easier. You just there's so much less stomach acid being used on a daily basis, for me at least, after being out.

Bryan (he/they): 47:06

Oh for sure, it's like a weight lifted. And so, coming from a higher education perspective, what do you think that academia on a whole can do to be more inclusive for LGBTQ plus people?

Grant (he/him): 47:20

I think academia is really good at paying lip service to diversity in general, but not so great on the follow through that if you genuinely want to be inclusive, then make an effort to hire more queer faculty or faculty of color or whatever. You know the drill, but that are we going? Do we want to say that we welcome queer students? Yes, absolutely. Can we have a queer student lounge? Oh well, wait a minute. We do have one now, but we were. It took a long time, that it needs. You can't just say it's a long time. You can't just say it's okay to have queer people around. You need to say it's okay to have queer people being visible, being vocal, being open about their lives and their work. And you know to make it clear to faculty that, or to both faculty and students, that if you want to pursue queer studies as a research area, that's fine. We're not, you don't have to worry about being penalized or punished for that that we're going to judge that fairly and the same way we would judge any other kind of research agenda. I mean, that is where, again, I think and I'm not necessarily just speaking of where I work now, but I think in general you know all of the schools I've been affiliated with, either as a student or as a faculty member, have been, have talked a very good game, but a lot of times are less inclined to. You know, walk the walk and that's harder, but that is where the work needs to be done, I think.

Bryan (he/they): 49:44

Yeah, absolutely. So. At this point in the interview I'm going to turn the mic over to you so that you get to ask me a question.

Grant (he/him): 49:53

I am just having listened to a number of episodes, I'm a little curious about how being a parent has affected your sort of conception of queerness or queer identity, because that was something that even at the time when I came out gay and lesbian couples being parents was extremely rare, or people occasionally you had people who had been married, had children and then came out, but queer couples wanting kids. It was something that we didn't really talk about when I was in my 20s and I'd be curious to know what, if you feel, what, if any impact you feel that that's had on you. Because I think again, for me when I was in my 20s, queer and parent were kind of mutually exclusive and obviously that's not the case anymore.

Bryan (he/they): 51:07

I don't know if that makes sense, yeah, and you're talking about something that I kind of referenced in the past, where I am kind of living this life in my present that didn't exist in my past which is what you're saying because you couldn't be a parent in queer or it was really uncommon, and when it did happen, it was people who had heterosexual relationships who ended up in queer relationships for the most part. And so I'm living a life right now in my present that I one didn't dream of, because I didn't really dream of my future, because there was no future to be had. I am a child of the 80s, but my teens and whatnot were in the 90s, and so I'm coming out of all of the anti-queer media that circled around AIDS, and so even when I came out to my parents in like early 2000s, that was the first thing out of their mouth was you know what if you get AIDS and die? And so there was no future because we were all gonna get AIDS and die, Like that was the mentality. And so I think it's interesting, because I feel like it's something almost like how sexuality is a taboo for conservative communities, like parenting is almost like taboo for queer community, and it's something that I think that there is a new kind of like branch of queer theory that centers on queer family, and I want there to be more of that, because I still think that even now, there are not as many queer people who are thinking about having kids, because it's still considered like not an option and for some people like I, whether you're straight or queer like if you don't want to have kids, don't have kids. Like no one should force that upon you. But for the people who are like I would love to have kids, but I'm queer Like there are so many of us that are doing that and living a queer life while also being a parent, and the things that I've noticed is that it almost like it's an unfortunate silver lining and that it makes you more palatable in queer or in heterosexual communities. Like oh, they're gay but they have kids and they're married, so they're like normal quote unquote. You know what I mean. And my husband and I used to joke that we were like that palatable gay couple before I started identifying as queer as opposed to gay, but like we were that palatable gay couple because we were married with kids, so we were less threatening, and so I think that there's a lot of things and I'm interested in seeing how like research develops from this because I'm a researcher by nature how queer life can have its own spectrum that is similar to heterosexual life, and I think there's a term now called homonormativity, which is like creating a like a stasis of what it means to be like an average gay person, and so queer family is just now like becoming a part of that, as an option, because homonormativity might look like spending a lot of time single and having a lot of sex. It could look like, you know, having a partner for a long, long time but never having kids, but they have two dogs, and it could look like having a family now. And so I think, as the idea that homosexuality and gender identity, like all these things that are queer, are actually not queer, they're just a part of human existence, and people start to recognize that it's not an anomaly so much as it's something that is just now being talked about, we'll see queer family become more visible and, like. Part of my research is just that in theater is researching plays that have to deal with queer family and the phenomenon that is musical theater is the place where you can talk about anything, because queer family shows up more in musical theater than it does in written plays, and I find that so fascinating that, like you know, singing and dancing on stage, you can almost talk about anything, and it's okay.

Grant (he/him): 56:07

Interesting.

Bryan (he/they): 56:08

I don't know if that answered your question. It is definitely a weird kind of to be living something that wasn't a reality.

Grant (he/him): 56:18

Yeah, no, that didn't, thank you. I mean, one of the things that I sort of took away from that is earlier you mentioned, you know, straight people not wanting to acknowledge that heterosexuality is also sexual in nature. And it strikes me that part of that non-threatening gay couple or gay person idea is that, ironically, given where they come from, the addition of children seems to sort of take sexuality out of the question. That it's like, oh well, they have kids, so obviously they're not. They're not at mid-Atlantic. Well, maybe they are who knows, maybe you are, yes, but the assumption with the presumption from the straight people is always oh well, this is something I recognize. This is normative. You know, a dog collar, no, but this looks close enough to the family unit. I recognize that. I'm willing to let my guard down and it's not making me think about sexuality. And I mean, obviously you shouldn't think about sexuality every time you meet a gay person or anybody, necessarily, but that is what I think most straight people, especially the conservative ones, have been trained to do, because of your sexual outbox, as well as how much conservative people think about gay sex.

Bryan (he/they): 57:59

It's like more than gay people think about gay sex. Oh God, yeah, it's wild.

Grant (he/him): 58:03

I don't understand. They're also obsessed with bestiality, which is a subject I have never discussed with anyone queer, but they love to bring it up for some weird reason.

Bryan (he/they): 58:16

I guess they need to work through their things, right? Anyways, I've had such a great time talking with you today, grant, and I just want to thank you for being on the episode.

Grant (he/him): 58:30

Oh, thank you so much. It's been fun, really enjoyed it.

Bryan (he/they): 58:33

Awesome and thank you all for tuning in at home or wherever you are listening to the podcast. Have a great day. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Teaching While Queer. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did make sure to subscribe, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, leave a review, and that would help out tremendously. You can also support the podcast by going to wwwteachingwhilequeercom and hit support the show. Thanks so much and have a great day.