Being Queer Educators: Part 2 with Sara and Renae!
- Blog Community Member
- Aug 12, 2020
- 7 min read
[Continued from Part 1 where Sara and Renae discuss media that has been helping them get through quarantine, queer spaces in NYC, and organizing.]
Zoe: That kind of leads into--we were wondering what your experience has been like being queer educators.
Sara: Renae, how do you feel being a queer educator, how bout you start with that.
Renae: I never thought about it much, I also feel like I’ve been queer in other very cis [and straight] spaces. Queer social worker, spaces that were all hardcore straight people, toeing that heteronormative line. Probably my most difficult relationships were probably with men, straight and gay. Just because they’re men, and they were doing that thing where they felt like they could say what they wanted to say and I was probably too good at saying, “nope, that’s inappropriate, you crossed the line.” And the response was always, “That’s because of the way you are--” no, that’s because that’s the way the world is. So I think about that more than anything else. I don’t think it’s really come up as an issue for me, knock wood, since being back in some sort of academic space.
I think being out is valuable because adolescents struggle with all kinds of things. [Queerness] being a big one. I’ve always understood the need for queer role models just because of the suicide rate among queer teens. And I have worked with a lot of disenfranchised teens, so it’s just a big part of how I move through the world in general. I have worked for homeless kids and homeless queer kids and all kinds of folks. I think it’s just integral to whatever work I do. I don’t separate or parse out parts of myself in doing what I do.
Sara: I feel like especially with you, Nae, it is hard to name because there are so many parts of you that you leave out open for students to find and people to find. So students gravitate towards you for all sorts of reasons, and it's so hard to parse out if a student is now super close to you because the queerness makes them comfortable, or if it’s whatever space you set up for them or whatever you do with pride. It’s hard to be able to name it.
Renae: I feel like all these spaces or these intersections that I live at are all difficult places to navigate in the world and to figure out how you fit in the world. Because I'm a little older I've seen a lot more things and I always say, I’ve been saying since March pandemic, just add it to the list, you know, I lived through the AIDS crisis, pandemic we got you. I think it’s important for me to put out there that people do live in all these spaces and it’s important that people can live happily in all these spaces and that space has to be respected. Because I am above all of the things petty I look at all the small micro stuff that goes on. I think one of the biggest blow outs that [my boss] and I ever had was when she was like “well aren’t you in charge of mailing things” and I was like “no, no i’m not in charge of mailing things” and she just wasn’t getting it. Or the time she and John just held up the [BLM day of action]. And they really couldn't get how this is not a good look. Optics here are bad! You have two white people holding up an entire school for you to micromanage who crosses Ts and who doesn't, I mean come on. And for me it is really important to point out how those things are all connected to how we are socialized and programmed. I’ve always felt like if I have to understand things that are so far removed from me culturally, then people need to understand things about me culturally as well.
Sara:
I’m trying to think how it also comes to the floor. Like when you are a queer educator maybe your pedagogy is queer, the ways you interact with people are not centering heteronormative narratives. I flag myself, I call the wall that I have a flag for students. I have stuff up there that makes it clear where I stand. I think it was hard my first year at the school because I didn’t know how to even articulate those things or make people know these things about you. You can be queer, you can be a lot of these things, but unless you start flagging yourself you don’t really wear them the same way that you wear certain identities like race. I always feel like being a queer educator is almost a silent thing that I’m always doing, but being a Brown educator or a Muslim educator is actually at the forefront, is what ends up happening. But that’s also fun because I feel like, especially at a school like [ours], there are so many South Asian kids or immigrant kids where school ends up being the place where they can be the person that they can’t be at home. And for me that embodies so much queerness already, whether it has to do with your sexuality or gender or not. Walking the lines of being multiple people and wearing multiple forms of yourself is queer to me. That’s just to say that all of South Asia is pretty queer with the ways in which we work in fantasies and denial. That’s been really fun to watch as an educator.
I empathize with students a lot because up until two weeks ago I was walking the world still afraid of my parents knowing who I was. I just feel like there’s so much space in youth and being young and knowing exactly what people want of you but also having that struggle of knowing they want this, but I’m still not doing it. That’s queerness for me in a really tangible moment that’s just like being young, so I love working with young people. I don’t know what I do for them, but I love being around them.
Zoe: I feel like I saw kind of what you did for them at the summer program. The few times I sat in on your class, obviously there were some students who were more receptive than others, but I feel the work that you do as an educator is super incredible and the way that you prioritize students is kind of amazing, and I just wanted to assert that. I see it happening and I think it’s incredible. So we have another question that we have kind of covered a little bit, but it’s how has your queerness changed over the years?
Renae: I can put my sound back on because my son is asking questions about dinner. It’s just lunch time but he’s asking about dinner. Anywho, queerness gets bigger and smaller in my life. I can remember coming out and it being a really really big deal and it kind of ebbs and flows depending on your relationship with people around you. Coming from a fundamentalist Pentecostal family it was a major ordeal but the funniest thing about it is I never actually had to come out to them. The only person who I attempted to come out to was my older sister and she was just like, I’m your oldest sister I know everything you do, whatever. I was telling Sara this a couple of weeks ago, my ex-wife and I met in college and when we moved back from college to the city we stayed with my grandmother for less than two weeks while we looked for an apartment and we didn’t do anything unusual while staying, just this is Jennifer she’s staying here. I don't know how or why but my grandmother called my mom a couple of weeks later and called me mom saying “your daughter is a f****t and I’m not responsible” and she was like “she’s a girl, how is she going to be a f****t if she’s a girl“ “well she is a b********r then“ and my mother was like, that’s really funny and she hung up the phone. I guess it was big for me then and then it died really quickly and I guess now it’s not the most interesting thing about me, I don’t think. Great British Bake Off, the two original hosts, Sue and something, one of them is queer and she said in the interview that her being queer is probably number 46 on the list of interesting things about her, and that’s kind of how I feel about it. I think queerness ebbs and flows, there are times when it’s bigger and the space is bigger, and I think it changes with everything, becoming a parent and being queer is different. Fortunately, I have queer friend parents that I had before they had kids and that’s another part of my queer community, we have our zooms where we talk lovingly about our children. And being in a queer space is kind of like being in a Black space or being in a female space, it’s just another space for me.
Sara: I think also, people make it big. Like our families make it a big deal and that’s when identities become big deals, when people poke at them and make you talk about them and make you confess them, and coming out has to be this big thing, like a confession. It’s not a huge deal when it’s just happening and when you’re in community and what you see is just that these are just people you love and hang around with, and for them it’s so far off because they are so removed from this community and from me, even. I think my identity as a queer person becomes central to who I am only when it becomes something I have to fight about it with somebody. Other than that I’m just chillin’ with my girlfriend being a normal person just like cookin’ and eating and sleeping.
Renae: I guess the other thing I forgot about that, is two things, one is that I have an older brother who is gay which is a far greater offense, because he is male. The other thing is that growing up in a pentecostal christian family Church was a big part of my childhood, and there’s always a ton of gay people in church. It’s always the unspoken thing. Queerness became a big thing as a child because it’s like so and so likes so and so but I'm scaring her away because I know he is one of those boys. It’s always kind of fascinating to me because you know this, you preach against it, but then you still have them here. Make it make sense! Just thinking back about it, those were the times when it got big in childhood. Queerness is a favorite topic of fire and brimstone preachers.
Note: Interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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