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I started my career at an urban school serving a high-poverty population in Nebraska in 2001 and found that the school’s GSA membership was just a handful of students.ĭuring my first year as a volunteer sponsor of the group, another teacher was invited by the official sponsor to one of our meetings and showed a video of people claiming to be “former gays.” He then pulled out a Bible and had a discussion with the students about how who they were was a sin. Our storiesįor me, being a faculty sponsor for the school’s gay-straight alliance student group was both heartwarming and heartbreaking. We have both faced invalidating, even scary, obstacles in our journeys as out queer educators, and we have seen our queer and trans students suffer as well. In the wake of the passage of Florida’s so-called “ don’t say gay” law, more than a dozen other states – including Missouri, Iowa, Tennessee and Ohio – have proposed similar legislation aimed at limiting how teachers discuss topics of gender identity or sexual orientation.īased on my own experience, that of my collaborator Steven Gill, and our initial research, teachers in the Midwest are having experiences similar to those elsewhere around the country. The national debate about LGBTQ issues in schools has come to the Midwest.