Becoming The Gay Teacher I Wish I'd Had

In my early twenties, I graduated from college with a degree in creative writing. I’d spent the years prior dodging questions about the usefulness of my major by shrugging and waving the boring subject away, figuring that was a problem for future me. After all, I was young, raised by scrappy people who survived with half-finished diplomas and shadier immigration papers. I suppose I expected one day I’d meet an old rich dude who’d be happy to cover the rent as long as I kept his sexual secrets, or that I’d slip at the grocery store. Once I graduated, I tried to maintain the same optimism, but now that I couldn’t get away with calling myself a student anymore, it hit me that the future I’d been postponing was here. I had no sugar daddy, lived at home in Orlando with my mom, and worked at the Flip Flop Shop at The Florida Mall. If I didn’t quit messing around and go get a “real adult job,” I worried this would be my life forever.

The trouble was I didn’t know what I was qualified to do. I’d decided to study writing partly as an act of resistance: Most artists I saw were straight, white trust-fund babies, and every time I considered changing my major to something more practical, I thought, “You can’t let them win! You get to make art, too!” But my so-called resistance didn’t change the world as much as I would have liked. While the publishing industry was still mostly straight, white trust-fund babies, I was stuck scouring the internet reading job descriptions that seemed to be written in a language that my broke ass should have been learning instead of how to use semicolons, the entries full of stuff like “knowledge of SEO optimization and experience with Python a must.”

Plus, I had all these requirements: I absolutely couldn’t work anywhere where there’d be a majority of straight men (they don’t want me either), I refused to ask anyone permission to use the bathroom (I’d get fired if they said no), and I strongly preferred to not have to wear a uniform (unless it was hot, like the tight jeans the Dominican dudes at the Sprint kiosk wore). Sometime during my job hunt, I lamented to a close friend about the difficulty I was having finding work. He’d recently started substitute teaching and told me how much he loved it and that his agency was hiring. Listening to him, my mind shuffled through the subs I’d known throughout grade school; what I remembered most was that they got to sit behind the teacher’s desk and read, and sometimes they handed out worksheets no one actually did. It barely seemed like a job, but they somehow got the credit for being adults. Perfect, I thought.

All the agency asked for was a pee sample to test for drugs, my friend said, so I waited four to six weeks and applied. Not long after sending my résumé, I got an email invitation to a group hiring event, where everyone who brought ID and didn’t look like a murderer got a job.

My first day, I woke up before the sun and called the agency so they would tell me where to go and what subject I’d be teaching. It was biology at a high school a ten-minute drive away. I dug through my closet until I found a pair of loafers and a cardigan, drove to campus, and followed the directions the secretary gave me to a dark, empty classroom. As I searched the walls for a light switch, I had the feeling I was breaking into someone’s house, except with their permission. Once the harsh fluorescent bulbs flickered on, I made myself at home by wiping the white board and scribbling “Mr. Gomez” on it with a blue marker, then took a few steps back to make sure my handwriting got across the persona I was going for: easygoing yet professional. Part of me thought I was a fraud for having a second job selling Birkenstocks at the mall, and I didn’t want to look like I was trying too hard. I might have felt better quitting the Flip Flop Shop, but subbing barely paid seventy dollars a day. I made more talking to strangers about feet.

The people who had made the biggest difference to me growing up were the queer adults I’d seen in passing.

Because of the pathetic pay, I decided not to waste my energy trying to make a “difference” subbing. I’d work as hard as my salary called for. My responsibility was to keep teenagers from fighting each other long enough for their real teacher to recover from the flu; that was it.

“If you’re going to text,” I told my students once they arrived and settled in their desks. “Don’t let me see. And if another teacher comes in, take off your headphones, OK?”

Unfortunately, this quickly earned me the reputation of “cool sub” on the campuses where I subbed. This didn’t mean I had teens dying to know my favorite band, but that they thought I’d let them get away with anything. If I took my eyes away from them for a fraction of a second, they reverted to their most primal animal instincts: making out, sitting on each other’s laps, looking up porn on their computers. Though all I wanted to do was snoop through the teacher’s desk and read, I had to start sitting on a stool in front of the room keeping careful vigilance.

From that vantage point, I could spot the gay boys easy. They were either surrounded by girls, laughing and sharing bags of hot Cheetos, or focused intensely on their assignments. I’d been in their position less than a decade before—a queer kid in high school—and as I sat there on watch, all of a sudden they stopped being random children and turned into my own. Like many new moms, I felt a rush of love, followed by panic. No one was going to come for my babies.

When I was my students’ age in the early 2000s, being gay wasn’t the absolute death sentence the movies I grew up with had promised, but it wasn’t OK either. I mean, we had Mean Girls and Christina Aguilera screaming at us that we were beautiful, but we were also getting gay bashed on Queer as Folk and mocked on basically every other show. Queerness had become slightly more acceptable than in the past, yet there was still a lingering stink of homophobia in the air. It seemed like my generation of straight kids wasn’t sure whether to love or hate us.

Once, a group of boys followed me around my high school campus. We were between class periods and running late; there was no one around but us. Up to that point I thought my queerness was flying under the radar, that no one minded because I was quiet and spent most of my time in the library. It wasn’t until I heard them calling me a “faggot” that I understood how wrong I’d been. If I wasn’t so terrified, I might have laughed at the predictability of the scene: Of course, just when positive images of queer people were finally beginning to show up on-screen, I was being pulled back into some depressing after-school special. Whatever the lesson was supposed to be, I didn’t care. I took a deep breath and turned around to get my beating over with, telling myself that by not running I would at least get to keep my dignity. Then the most baffling thing happened: The boys just stood there, blinking at me. We stared at each other for a moment, and eventually they walked away. I walked away too, confused about how to feel. Relieved? Grateful? Did they also realize how embarrassing this was, for everyone?

Back then I pretended the incident with the boys didn’t bother me—I had to, otherwise I would have never returned to school. “It’s not that serious,” I thought. “They were just playing around.” Years later, from a safe distance, I can admit how the homophobia I experienced as a teenager affected me. My body may have not been injured, but I carried a lot of shame inside, and I was constantly afraid that I’d run into another gang of boys who wouldn’t be so kind. That’s how my shame made me interpret their taunting: as kindness, because they didn’t hurt me when they could have. Because they could have gone along with the tired script they’d inherited.

The more troubling truth, however, is that much of my self-hate didn’t come from my classmates, but my teachers: people who had come of age when violence against queers was more common. There was the history teacher who had me debate with the rest of the class about whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt children, the math teacher who laughed when she overheard a classmate ask me how my boyfriend and I dealt with “the shit” from anal sex. I don’t remember the student who asked the question, but I remember Ms. Cooper leaning in, the way she’d cradled her chin in her smiling face, like she expected me to answer.

Now that I was in my twenties, I wondered what it was like to be gay for this new generation of high schoolers. From my perch at the head of the class, I asked myself, were my babies getting bullied? Were they comfortable holding hands with their boyfriends? And if one of their classmates said something cruel, would their teachers have helped or joined in? Even more progress had been made since I’d graduated. There was Orange Is the New Black and Miley Cyrus, and some people were pretty mad about the Olympics being held in Russia, where a recent anti-LGBT law had passed. Still, it couldn’t have been totally fine for my students to be gay, right?

From my perch at the head of the class, I asked myself, were my babies getting bullied?

The gay boys could spot me, too. I had all the obvious tells: long hair, a lisp, and I rolled my eyes during the Pledge of Allegiance. As they walked into class and realized their teacher was gone and I would be in charge, I swore I could see their shoulders relax. Those times, I wanted to run up to them, give them a hug, and say, “I don’t know what your life is like, but once you graduate, I promise you won’t have to see any of these people again! You have so much to look forward to! Look at my life!” But we were prohibited from touching our students, and, anyway, I’d be lying. I mean, I had two jobs and lived with my mother. I was not fit to be an inspiration.

Instead I let my personal life remain a mystery. I hoped my gay students projected happiness onto me the way I’d projected my trauma onto them. I hoped that, as they watched me from the corners of their eyes (exactly how I used to watch queer adults as a teenager, trying to figure out what my future had in store), they imagined I had everything they could possibly want: a giant apartment, friends to brunch with, the boyfriend and job of their dreams.

They didn’t need to know what was actually waiting for them after graduation, that one of the reasons I didn’t have a more “adult job” was because I couldn’t think of many places to work where my being gay wouldn’t be A Thing. It was possible, and probable, that after high school they’d encounter the same workforce that I was navigating, one where they would have to wipe off their nail polish before handing in résumés, deepen their voices during interviews, either play up their queerness and be the token or water it down so they wouldn’t be “too gay.” That is, if they didn’t already work beside me at the mall . . .

I don’t know if they bought my act, but I do know that throughout my entire stint as a sub, I never heard a student picking on another for being gay. I hardly think that was because homophobia didn’t exist anymore, but because the straight kids must have picked up on my queerness too and knew that I wouldn’t have allowed it in my room. This might have made me feel good about the work I was doing, yet I knew that the second their permanent teachers returned, things would go back to however they were.

As a sub, I saw most students just once. That wasn’t enough time to do anything substantial. I couldn’t teach them to unlearn any shame they may have had. I couldn’t protect them forever. Even if I wanted to make a “difference,” it would have to be in fifty minutes or less.

Then again, it occurred to me that the people who had made the biggest difference to me growing up were the queer adults I’d seen in passing at the grocery store or restaurants. Queers who seemed to be living full, satisfying lives despite how small and bland mine felt.

So I kept up my performance of happiness, smiling and writing my name in cheerful letters on the board and leaning into the persona of “cool sub.” In math, I encouraged naps. In science, we learned how to use the classroom TV. The one time I taught gym, I remember seeing a gay kid dragging his feet to the flag football field where their permanent teacher had instructed me to send the class. That day, I gave students the option to walk the track. What I could offer wasn’t life changing—it was just a break, a little time to gather the strength to keep going.

And when the school day ended, I went to my car, changed into sandals, and drove to my other job at the Flip Flop Shop, where the air always smelled of coconuts. On my breaks, I took naps in the back room, listening to the Jimmy Buffett music piping in through the overhead speakers. For a few minutes, it was almost like I was on a yacht with the old rich dude of my dreams.

• 0