Michael Musgrave-Perkins: Teaching Theatre, Navigating Queer Identity, and Fostering Inclusivity in Education
Bryan sits down with St. Louis Theatre Educator, Michael Musgrave-Perkins (he/him) to talk about being outed in high school, growing up in the South and Mid-West, and providing safe spaces for LGBTQIA+ students on a high school campus.
Join us for an insightful conversation with Michael Musgrave-Perkins, the dynamic chair of the theater department at Grand Center Arts Academy in St. Louis, Missouri. Michael's journey from touring actor to passionate educator is a captivating story, filled with valuable life lessons. His innovative teaching methods aim to provide students not just with theatrical skills, but with useful tools like public speaking and problem-solving abilities. Being a proud queer teacher, Michael also co-sponsors the school's Gender Sexualities Alliance, supporting students through the complexities of their own unique journeys.
Coming out is a deeply personal experience for each individual. Michael bares his soul, sharing his own journey of self-discovery, the ups and downs of coming out, and the impact of relationships with family during this time. He emphasizes the importance of therapy in understanding oneself and the need for patience and grace for teenagers grappling with their sexual identities. His insights provide a sobering look at the challenges faced by queer people, particularly during the difficult period of the early 2000s.
Teaching theater and maintaining a safe, inclusive space for all students to express themselves is central to Michael's educational philosophy. He reflects on the importance of setting boundaries as a queer teacher and his experiences co-sponsoring with a drag performer at his school. Michael explains how he ensures that students can explore their characters without exploiting personal traumas. His exciting endeavor of introducing a student drag show at the academy and his advice to queer teachers on tackling difficult topics in classrooms bring a fresh perspective to theater education. So, tune in to hear Michael's enlightening take on teaching, self-discovery, and making theater an empowering tool for all students.
To be a guest or to hear more episodes visit www.teachingwhilequeer.com.
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You can find host, Bryan Stanton, on Instagram.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Teaching While Queer Podcast! Please help support the podcast by leaving a review wherever you listen to the podcast.
You can find host, Bryan Stanton, on Instagram.
Follow us on Instagram at @TeachingWhileQueer
To be a guest or to hear more episodes visit www.teachingwhilequeer.com.
00:00 - Introduction
00:34 - Welcome Michael Musgrave-Perkins
10:17 - Coming Out: Judgement House
27:37 - Addressing Bullying and Setting Boundaries
46:34 - Influence of Media on LGBT Youth
Teaching While Queer is a podcast for LGBTQIA plus teachers, administrators and, well, anyone who works in academia to share their stories. Hi, my name is Brian Stanton, a queer theater educator in San Antonio, texas. Each week, I bring you stories from around the world centered on the experiences of LGBTQIA folks in academia. Thank you for joining me on this journey and enjoy Teaching While Queer. Welcome back to Teaching While Queer podcast. My name is Brian Stanton. I am your host. Today's episode. I have the joy of talking with Michael Musgrave Perkins. Michael, why don't you take a second to go ahead and introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:All right, hello. As Brian said, I'm Michael Musgrave Perkins. I am the theater department chair at Grand Center Arts Academy in St Louis, missouri. I have been teaching there. This will be my fifth year teaching at that particular school. I teach mostly 9th through 12th grade, but I do have a couple of our middle school grades. Our school is a 6 through 12 public charter school with four arts pathways visual arts, dance, music and, of course, theater. So I teach all of the tech classes. I am also the technical director and theater manager for the historic Sun Theater, which we rent out to other institutions, but we also host renting events. People come in. They'll put up a couple of weekend shows, so I have to be the person to do that. Then I will lean on my student crew to help me out. Sometimes I also teach a couple of acting classes, wherever it's needed, because I am one of three theater teachers at our school, which is such a gift to have. I know that not everybody gets that, so try to remain grateful for such things. I also co-sponsor our school's GSA. We have shifted away from calling it the gay straight alliance because I think that's kind of an outdated phrase. We now are the gender sexualities alliance, so that terminology is a lot more inclusive. I say co-sponsor because, as much as I love the students, I have to have at least one other faculty person helping me, because if we're meeting I'm usually kind of ducking in and out and doing other theater related things. So a lot of juggling there. My pronouns are he, him. I am a cisgender gay man, which I feel is just kind of a bit plain, I guess, or just like oh, that's not exciting. I can remember when that was like shocking and oh my gosh, I'm like no, I'm just cis. That's okay, though I'm happy to be the boring old gay guy Because that shows how far we've come right. That can show like oh yeah, this is just kind of more of accepted. But I really want to help students kind of branch out and see where on the gender spectrum or the sexuality spectrum they actually fall. So I'm happy to be a conduit for that. That gets too far off topic now, I think.
Speaker 1:Oh no, that's great. Did you grow up in the Midwest?
Speaker 2:I sort of. So. I was born in St Louis, I grew up in Houston and Memphis as well, and then I ended up finishing high school in St Louis. Lots of moving around by choice or otherwise Not always my choice but yeah, once I finished high school in St Louis, I went to undergrad at Lindenwood University, which is in St Charles, missouri, which is about 30 minutes away from downtown St Louis, and I have a BFA in directing theater. So when I got into teaching, it was sort of something that I didn't specifically pursue, but one where I discovered a passion for arts education, and that was born out of a senior internship that I had in undergrad where I was a paid touring actor at the St Louis Shakespeare Festival. What we did was we I was one of five actors that got in a van and we had all of our sets and costumes and stuff in a van and we drove around to area schools, we performed a show, we taught some workshops and I really, I really enjoyed that. I loved, you know, teaching those workshops and helping students realize how they can become better performers. And when you become a better I can talk about this later, but when you become a better theater artist, whether on stage or backstage. I think there's a lot of what I guess what's called portable skills, so you don't just have to be a professional theater artist, like like you know, like we are, but you get to just use those in whatever fields you end up going into how to speak in public, how to fix something that's broken because techies are always fixing stuff that's broken all the time. So, there's a lot, of, a lot of ways that you could do it. You could become better people. If you're if you're good at theater, I think you're a good human.
Speaker 1:I love that. So, with all the moving around, what was your experience like growing up as a young gay boy?
Speaker 2:I didn't know. I was a young gay boy for a while. I it was something that I was really self-conscious about, Gosh, because I first started to get like the, the inklings of that. I felt different in like middle school, like I'm thinking like sixth grade, so I'm still in Houston by that time didn't really feel confident enough to really act on it. I didn't know what to call it. But I knew that I'm like nah it started with nah. I don't like girls. But I responded to, you know, like like male friends or just males in general, like oh, that's interesting. But I still didn't be like I'm not talking to anybody about it because that would just make me feel that would make me weird, right. So that that was not a healthy way. Now, looking back on it, that was not a healthy way to do it. But I also didn't feel like I had people who would have that same experience, who could identify, like where I was coming from, so that kind of manifested into splitting off some of my identity, like I would have the outward behavior but then I would have this like other, you know way more private side of things. That also was not healthy, because when you're let's put it this way when you become a teenager so I'm talking like ninth or 10th grade. Now I've moved up to St Louis. I'm staying with my aunt and uncle. They were my guardians. We had a shared computer and I did not clear my internet history when I should have Scandal scandal.
Speaker 1:Yes, scandalous.
Speaker 2:That's about as delicately as I can put it on any pod. So the story of when I so I never came out. Whenever we get to like coming out days or coming out stories like I didn't come out, I didn't get the choice, I was outed, so I'm like all right, here we go. And there was a lot of just emotions flying around. You know, my mom, who was in the other room, has probably been the most supportive in my entire family about it. That's why I'm staying with her. And that's why I love Side Note For listeners Brian and I are both members of the Summer MA for Theater Educators at the University of Houston. So the reason that I love, right, right, but the reason I'm, you know, here and the reason why I thought, oh, this is like like planets aligning type of thing, is, oh, I get to, you know, earn my master's degree, but it's a place where I grew up. It's also really fun, you know, experiencing Houston, you know, as someone in their mid to late 30s, as opposed to my Houston experience when I was mostly in, like, you know, elementary and middle school. It's really different. So anyway, but yeah, when I was outed, the story behind it is wild. So let me set the stage for you. The high school friends that I had were all. They all went to the same Baptist church, which I did not go to. I was just around it. In general I was adjacent to it. So the Baptist church put on what's called a judgment house, have you?
Speaker 1:ever heard of this? No, but that is very ominous.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, oh, it doesn't stop there. I still have the script for this, by the way, somewhere at home. I sometime like later on I should send it to you, because it is fantastically crazy. Imagine a haunted house, but for Jesus. So what would happen is it's kind of like what sleep no more, I guess, would have become. So you would go in, they would take groups of people through the church and each room of the church was converted into like a small theater space. I was me, and the other my other friends were recruited because I'm like oh, we do theater at school, so you know we need actors, let's have them do it. So as each group goes through, you follow the story of a brother and sister, and they don't remember their names, so we'll just call them brother and sister. Brother is always goes to church and he's a really nice boy and does everything that his parents tell him to do. The sister is a bit of a rebel and she likes going out and partying and she smokes cigarettes and acts promiscuously and is, you know, I guess, just sinful with a capital.
Speaker 1:I am already passing judgment.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I'm already sitting here going like don't misogyny, Right Wow.
Speaker 2:Well, you go into the next room and then you find out that the sister had been drinking and she decides to drive with her brother in the car and they get into a horrible car accident and they both die.
Speaker 1:They die.
Speaker 2:Yes, and so the next room you go into, the sister is in hell of like of our thespian troop. Are our treasurer or secretary One of those? He was dating the president of our thespian troop. He was Satan. He played the fucking devil. So, I have a friend who's just like, oh yeah, he's over there playing the devil. And then my role was I played the brother when he went to heaven, and so they had converted the church sanctuary. They converted the church sanctuary into heaven and we have this like youth pastor Jesus. So he was the guy who had like the really, because this is 2001 or two, so he had like the really short hair that was comb forward and you had like these little baby bangs and they put them on a white rope Huh.
Speaker 1:Free beaver yeah. Justin Bieber yeah.
Speaker 2:And then he's trying to push down until yeah, he tried to look grown up and had like a goatee and stuff and so that he was Jesus. And so my line was like I just had to step forward and hug him and say I'm like, oh, this could be okay or something like that. So we would have to do that little bit every like 15 minutes or so, as they brought groups through and they had, like the dry ice machines and the early 2000s Christian rock kind of lightly playing in the background because there was a lot of theatricality to it. So I'm in the middle of doing that and then when we're in like the kitchen area that was like our green room or staging area, my uncle, who I was living with, bursts in and says you need to come with me now we're leaving. I'm like what? We're in the middle of it. Nope, leave now. So we're sitting in the car, very tense, right home and he goes you want to know what I found on the computer? Like, I know what you found on the computer. This is what it is, I know what you're talking about. And I was like immediately ashamed and just very apologetic and oh my God, this is like my, you know, stomach dropped, right, it was just awful. And so that quickly started making the rounds, not at my school, but they people started to be curious. I'm like why was he taken out of the just? So it's just the irony of I'm in a judgment house.
Speaker 1:Then this happened.
Speaker 2:You know, like Jesus knew, right, right that began just a very antagonistic relationship with any organized religion and that I think that's fair. I will say that the church I go to now very open, very accepting there, even with you know folks who are older, but they're just way more loving and I think that kind of gets to what religion should be about, if not telling people what to do. It just had to be a better person. I kind of wish that more, more churches would get on that. The Baptist certainly weren't. No, no no yeah.
Speaker 1:We were chatting right before, right before we started recording, and I said that how intriguing it was going to be to listen to your story, considering that I grew up in Southern California and you grew up in various places in the south of the Midwest, and right off the bat we have parallels. When I was 13, the internet betrayed me, but not in the same way. It was the days of dial up, and for you, younger people before the internet was fast, it was very slow and you would have to listen to this bong like sound for sometimes minutes that felt like hours, and you can only use the internet if nobody was using the phone. And so a friend of mine who was my boyfriend. At the time. He was 16, I was 13,. I was going to be 14 in a week when the situation happened. We were chatting on AOL instant messenger. He went downstairs to unplug the internet so his mom could use the phone, who went upstairs and spied our conversation and then outed both of us and went on a whole moral rampage for several days.
Speaker 2:How dare you?
Speaker 1:It's wild. It's wild that we can have these parallel experiences in around the same time frame in different parts of the country.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it's a very, very common experience. I think that, especially just queer people in the early 2000s that's what we had as a resource. I kind of wish I knew more supportive people that I could confide in and could help kind of guide me through all of that, who had been through similar experiences. You know pre-internet and you look at the broad historical events, you know we're coming off of the other side of the AIDS epidemic and so I think they're still in the early 2000s and even now they're still like that stigma around. You know queerness or the word queer in general, which I'm glad that has been reclaimed in large part. But yeah, there's just so many parallels and that's really what I want to be. For my students, and especially the students in my GSA, they'll be like I can't speak specifically to your experience, but I can at least be an example, I guess how do I use my own traumatic experiences to make sure that other students don't have to go through that? You know how can they come out or how can they discover things about themselves. You know qualities about themselves that people are going to accept rather than make them feel the shame that they are a certain way. And the first thing I do is I go make sure that you don't make you. Don't let anyone tell you that you're just, oh, you're choosing to be an enemy today. No, you don't choose, that is just, especially at that age.
Speaker 1:Because I work the way you describe it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's a discovery, it's not? Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to choose to be trans today.
Speaker 1:I'm like, no, that you're just this morning I woke up and I was trans.
Speaker 2:Right, because I had a student who her pronouns were he him for about a year but then, like through therapy and healthy that, not like conversion therapy, that, god ugh. Not through that, but through counseling discovered that her pronouns were she, her, and so that changed. But it wasn't a choice, you know, it wasn't like a con. Just okay, I'm gonna switch this off. It took a lot of like soul searching and growing up and you know, when we deal with high school students that is so in flux. I'm like you don't know your brain isn't finished yet, you're not done cooking, as my husband likes to say, because he I'll frequently. If I'm griping about a student, he's very good about reminding me I'm like they're not done cooking yet, so they're not set in this. The identity that they have now is not gonna be the identity that they have forever. I mean, I think the two of us seem like pretty prime examples of that. Like the person I was in high school is not the person that I am now at all.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's funny because when I well, my husband and I started looking into the adoption process, we were talking with some random woman at the airport or something like that, and she was like I just want to warn you that between the ages of 15 and 26 are the dumb years and your kids will just be like, will completely not listen to reason, and then they will come to their senses. And I was like thanks for the warning. So now, when teenage things happen, I'm like the dumb years All right, it's the dumb years. Gotta remember it's the dumb years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so you have to have a lot of grace, really really a lot of just leave ourselves open to experience or their experiences, and that way we don't get quite so frustrated when they do something that you have to ask them like, why did you do this? And their answer is often I don't know, I just did it. Yeah but yeah, that's that outing story, that quote unquote coming out story is I know not unique to me, but I like using it as an example of not everyone gets the privilege of coming out, and sometimes it's like that decision is made for us and now it's there and what do we do then? What do we do about it? And so I went back and forth several times where I kind of retreated back into my shell for a while and said, okay, they found out that time. How can I make sure that they don't find out? And so it was really just the waiting game of how can I get out on my own, how do I not live under this oppressive situation? Because I can't be myself. I know I'm not. I was in like high school and beginning and going kind of into my freshman year of undergrad, I was forced to go to, not the full conversion therapy type thing, not the we're gonna send you away, but I was basically my guardian or my aunt and uncle leveraged the car that I was driving at the time. They're like you're not gonna get to drive the car if you don't go to this Christian family counselor who sat there and told me with a straight face, straight that I did not have a strong male influence in my formative years and that's why I was acting the way I do and I fundamentally disagreed with that. But I'm like, oh, I'm being forced to be here, so I'm just gonna listen. And so I, because I'm in theater, I bullshitted him for an hour, a couple times, but yeah, then I totaled that car and I was like I'm gonna go to the hospital and I totaled that car on the way back from one of those appointments, not on purpose, not on purpose, it just kind of worked out that way, I mean I'm okay.
Speaker 1:Now Poetic justice though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm like well clearly Jesus doesn't want me going to this counselor, so I don't. So they didn't have the leverage over me while I was an undergrad and I was off in college and wasn't living with them so much anymore, and so that's kind of when I started to branch out a little bit and that's when I started dating. When I was in college I didn't dare date anyone while I was still in high school because, again, most of my friend group went to that Baptist church. I didn't really know any out queer people in high school and, like my friend group in high school, these were the kind of folks who as soon as we graduated, and even kind of before that, they were getting married, they were having kids. They were like whoa, not even ready for that, Not even like how. The serious high school sweetheart stuff going on, and I don't even know how they did it. Cause, yeah, I was, cause I was A. I was not emotionally ready, I never dated anyone. And just imagine, if people weren't as judgmental, if people weren't, as you know, on their freaking high horse, that I could have felt comfortable to be out and to kind of figure out who I was earlier, rather than spending the better part of a decade going just like poking my little head out. Nope, nope. Going back in. Cause, yeah, it really, I think, delayed so many things, but it also got me to the place where I was able to meet the person who would eventually become my husband, but that wasn't until I was like 29. And that's a really fun story too, I can tell you that. But yeah, I really coming back to like the subject of it, all of these experiences just inform my teaching style, because I tend to be very attuned to when a student is being a little discriminatory or, in some cases, just outright bullying, like I can. I am a staunch defender of queer students. When they get bullied, oh boy, I will not hesitate to not not rudely, but firmly tamp down on someone. Like okay, I'm gonna pause my lesson right now. We're gonna have a discussion about how trans and non-binary and how all of that is a spectrum and y'all need to get out of this gender binary situation. I will shout it from the friggin' mountaintops that it's not just man or woman, boy or girl, whatever it's. Y'all fall somewhere on a spectrum. Okay, so it's not. We keep wanting to try to classify people. So, yeah, it doesn't matter what grade they are either. I've had this conversation with like sixth and seventh graders and they're very articulate. Like we're just, we're gonna pause right now. This is kind of a moment and we're gonna have this discussion and I'm gonna tell you basically why you're wrong. But I'm gonna offer you some clarification. I'm not just gonna say, ah, shut up, don't talk about that anymore, get out or whatever. It's an education moment. So I'm always very sensitive to that and that's kind of led me to become a sort of resource for many of the cis-hetero people on staff, especially our counselors, because there's not a lot of queer teachers at our school. Even less so going forward because even less so going forward because so many teachers are just leaving and that's a larger issue. You and I could probably talk at length about the staffing shortages that are going on everywhere.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God, that might be a whole podcast series Right.
Speaker 2:Because I don't belong to a district. Our school is part of a network. I'm doing the rabbit ears for people that are listening, like the little quotes. Yeah, we're part of a network of charter schools and our human resources director was just quoted in an article that was talking about staffing shortages and he said well, I guess we're just going to have to get creative. I'm like you think it was a very diplomatic way of putting it, but it's a simple thing of they have the same, just a dwindling pool of people to hire from. We're going to go into the school year with some staffing shortages Fortunately not in my department. We, I'm I'm so excited, I'm really excited for this coming year, Myself included and the new person that we just hired. He comes from rural Missouri, like the Jefferson city area, which is the capital, but he's been able to really to thrive out there. I think he's looking forward to being a little more open when he's teaching at our school, which does tend on. I said that there's not a lot of queer teachers, but it's a very progressive. You know liberal, I know that word is such a dirty word now liberal, but yeah, they're not dirty, if you believe that. Yeah, let's put it this way, they're not as conservative as other schools, anyway, but I'm really excited for him because he's, because he's very energetic and I get the sense that we're going to collaborate very well together. And he's a drag performer, oh my.
Speaker 1:God, yeah, I got to, I got to go.
Speaker 2:Like seriously, as soon the I know it's going to happen the first day that the students will discover that he's a drag performer and they're going to lose their minds. They're going to be so excited and he's going to be the new favorite and everyone's going to love him and it's going to be great. Yes go talk, to go talk to Zach, hmm, but yeah, I got to see him Go ahead yeah. I mentioned because he mentioned in the interview. He's like, oh, I'm performing at such and such place because I asked him about it and I ended up going to see him at the show the next day after he had got the news that he was hired. So I'm like, hey, I'm here and you know he was really happy about that, so I wanted to make sure that that he is welcome also and hopefully he feels good about coming to our fair school. But yeah, he was. We saw like three or four applicants that day but he was the top choice unanimously amongst you know everyone who was, who was in the room, and I was really happy that I got to be in the room for that. Um, he, I haven't asked him yet because he hasn't officially started, but I want him to be the co-sponsor with me on the GSA and we're like we can handle this because I think we can use some of his, some of his seemingly boundless energy, because mine is not quite as boundless these days, especially during the pandemic. I mentioned this yesterday and another interview that I did about teaching, not for a podcast, this was for a gift card, I do it for Amazon, and so it was like it was like an MIT study where they were talking about the experiences teaching and it really just came I have to. I have to set firm boundaries for, like, when I'm going to work on school stuff and when I'm going to work on lesson plans or curriculum or whatever it's like. As soon as that a certain time hits, I have to put it down, or else it would drive. It will drive me crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's so many teachers you like dive in, and it's almost 24, seven and I'm just like I cannot. I set hard boundaries to even like. I'm going to rehearse until six and then I'm going to go home and eat dinner with my family. And some people are like what we used to have rehearsals until eight or nine o'clock at night.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I try to operate by equity rules. It's like, if I'm, if I'm in the building because I'm usually in our school building by 7am I don't want to rehearse past seven the night before, even if it's like a tech or address rehearsal, like listen y'all, I need that 12 hour buffer. I because, yeah, we have, we have families, we have lives where we want to be full, rich people. We don't want to, you know, burn out our students and then burn out ourselves, because that that just leads to all kinds of problems. Yeah, you want to try and maintain that, that healthy relationship I. That kind of makes me think of what I see others teachers doing is where they, they are invested in students lives, and I want I think I'm that way as well. However, I make a concerted effort not to blur that line between you know, I think if I get too involved, I verge on becoming like, okay, I'm not a therapist, I'm not. I'm also not their parent. You know, I have to be an educator first. Sometimes I do miss that. Maybe they don't come to me for everything, but I'm kind of okay with that. I'm okay if they, if I'm a resource or if I'm a valued person about a certain issue, but I don't need to be like the person that they go to for everything, because I then I think so that diminishes the teacher student relationship a little bit, and I've seen teachers who get way too involved and then when things happen it gets really emotional and it gets personal. I got some feedback.
Speaker 1:My first year teaching that was. It was from the seniors, which is always a tough group when you go into a new school, right, because they've had all this experience with a previous teacher. And I was like I just appreciate how drama free this year was, because the previous director was that person who was incredibly involved in people's lives in and out of the classroom. And I was like, yeah, like I care about you, but I don't need to know everything about your personal life. Like I will be here for you if you need something, but this isn't the place where we air out our drama. Our drama is for the state.
Speaker 2:And I try to express healthy theater habits to where you don't necessarily need to mine the depths of your trauma to make an effective performance. It's like if you're not ready to process that, and I can talk about my experience and that was one of our assignments. You'll remember this the DNA play. Yeah, that was what I did. I talked about my outing and how I was just mired in an online dating addiction. That was awful, but that's how I met my husband and so that was like the path that I took. Now I put that out there because yeah because I was ready to talk about it. I had kind of worked through all of that into a place where I was healthy enough to present it for my peers. But not everyone is there Right, especially at our students age, where they may not be able to articulate some of that. So you work with them in finding ways to express a character on stage, but it doesn't need to be exactly the circumstances that you're getting to, and that's one thing that I've really learned this summer of how to express that and how to get them to that place in a way that's going to be healthy for them and not going to, you know, make them just like dissolve into a puddle after they're seen, or make them a little more confident and less apprehensive to perform in front of their students. Because that's really what that's what our job is. That's what it comes down to is we have to find that balance. I keep coming back to that. I'm trying to find balance and really everything that makes me sound like a, like a monk or something when I say you must find balance and all things. So that's true, I want to be invested in their education and their humanity, but not so much that they're like texting me after school hours. I'm like, yep, nope, not going to do that. It's very unprofessional Because, yeah, you see examples of that everywhere, right, you see the oh well, this teacher, because that gets into inappropriate relationships and that's a whole, and I feel like queer people are often the targets of that.
Speaker 1:So when someone it's wild, because we're often the targets but not necessarily the people doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah exactly. And so there are people who have perpetuated that cycle of abuse because they perhaps were abused themselves and that's just how they know it, and so they, as adults, will begin an inappropriate relationship with a minor and it just I don't need that. So I'm like that's where that's a lot of where those boundaries come from, especially in theater. I think it's already. It's already a conducive environment for that, because we're sharing a lot of emotions and we get to a really vulnerable place. But then it's. I think it's really healthy to come back to it and say, okay, now we can release that, we can go back to being professionals or we can go back to that. That's stasis, I guess. Does that make sense? Am I getting too far off?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely no, you're correct. That's fantastic. I think that working with students is incredibly difficult, especially right now because there's this this highlights this spotlight on queer teachers and the word groomer is being thrown around left and right with no real weight behind it, but it's just there to for defamation purposes, right.
Speaker 2:I try to emphasize this with students and staff, because even the adults and our staff don't realize the historical parallels. Queerness whether someone's gay or lesbian, trans, whatever that's always been equated with like pedophilia, right, uh-huh, and it's like because it used to be that homosexuality or trans identities were considered deviant behavior, and so it gets lumped in with. It gets lumped in with all these other mental illnesses, but it's not a mental illness, right, and that's been so 1973, it was, and that's the last part is that people don't know that history, that, like 15 years ago, it was a mental illness. And so now, when people in the 2020s are saying, oh well, these, these, these queer teachers are just grooming their students to, to want to, you know, boys, to dress up in dresses and, you know, using, using all of these different bathrooms, I'm like, oh my God, they just want to use the bathroom, it doesn't matter. Just wash your hands.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Just wash your hands. It's, it's, but there's, that's a historical parallel. It's something that didn't really go away. They just called it something different and it's still around. But that's where, if you have an awareness of that, you can teach people like, hey, you can spot the signs of here's where it's happening again and it kind of goes. It gets lumped in with book bands and banning of certain teaching practices, which I I also feel I know this is off topic, but it just pisses me off. Every time I see well, they're teaching critical race theory in the school, I'm like no, they're not critical race. There is like at the graduate or doctoral level.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:That's not a thing.
Speaker 1:Like we're not. We're not teaching theories at all. We're just trying to get them through the fundamentals man.
Speaker 2:Right, we're not, yeah, not teaching any theories. We're teaching facts Anyway, but that I think that that often gets lumped in with with all these kinds of civil rights struggles. You know we want rights for everybody. I can remember when same sex marriage was coming before the courts and God, I hope it doesn't come up again. But the the the opposition was. Well, if you allow marriage to be more than just a man and a woman, then what's going to stop people from marrying animals? I'm like God that they always carry it to. I feel like conservative folks carry it to such an extreme, or the loudest voices do rather Right.
Speaker 1:It is wild.
Speaker 2:Like it's not up for a debate, why, if you're, if your religion says marriage is between a man and a woman, that's fine, but that's the, that's the religion, that's not government. And then it goes back to we're not, we're not separating church and state like we really need to.
Speaker 1:Especially at the moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we put God on our money because we were afraid of Godless heathen commies running around. But that also goes back to queer. People were largely victims of that too. The house on American Activities Committee learn our history folks. But yeah, I try to. That's what. That's kind of what we end up talking about some sometimes in our GSA, because it's like I said in my in my answer form we have this like three way Venn diagram of social. It's a social group, there's a support aspect to it and then there's an activist aspect to it. I want to educate those kids who are in that group. So I'm like y'all need to learn, learn about this history, learn about you know where we've come from, because they'll even forget about the AIDS epidemic now because you know the height of the epidemic was 30 years ago, you know.
Speaker 1:So that's largely in at risk of being forgotten and it's a wild because I'm not a huge proponent of like the television should be teaching us things, but I think that there are so many TV shows or Netflix series or whatever the service might be that are coming out that are about that era. You know period pieces about the 1980s and 90s and the height of the AIDS epidemic and I'm just like the good things are it's letting a new generation know that these things happen. The bad things are. sometimes students think that Titanic was a movie and not a real thing, and so it's having to connect that dot, that this TV show is actually like it's something that really happened. It's just they've changed the names, they've changed the circumstances, but this is the same like through line for any number of people during that time period.
Speaker 2:Well, and I'm glad that these stories are being told and in some cases retold, because we have a deeper perspective on it. I think when shows from that were produced in the 90s come at it from a largely cis white area, like I can remember just anytime somebody had AIDS. They were a skinny white gay boy, I'm like. But more people got AIDS than just that, you know. But I think that was, that was palatable, which is why I kind of consider like my own identity a novelty, because I'm a cis white gay guy, right, I go, there's much more stories than me. So I'm glad to have the students that I have so I can elevate their voices. You know, we've heard my story, we've heard that one. So, but there are way more out there. So that's why I'm excited when a student goes oh my gosh, I watched, I started watching Pose. I'm like, good, now go and watch. Paris is burning. Yeah, right, because because poses I love that show so much I really did. But that's, that's also dramatization, you know, get to the get to the go, to the real, the real story. So I like kind of scaffolding that you know you start them off with something that Can be enlightening. I do try to make sure that, if I'm recommending something, that it's not like super graphic, because I think as queer teachers we kind of have to thread that that needle a little bit. You know, where are they ready to see this material? Where they're not going to giggle at it and kind of approach it how it's meant to be, because I know that I don't want a student go. Why did you recommend this? And there's all this kind of cussing at it and making people. I'm like, okay, no, no, no. I need to make sure that I that I avoid that and do it in a safe way, but they can still, in a way that they can still learn where, how we got to where we are now. I think if we don't recognize that, then we just end up repeating a lot of the same mistakes. No, we don't. We don't learn from any of that, yep.
Speaker 1:Oh. So before we wrap up, I want to ask you one final question. Basically, you know it is, it is hard, especially right now, to be a teacher, but even more so to be a queer teacher in the, in public eye. And so what advice or inspiration can you give to somebody who is like trying to to just, I don't know, keep on, keeping on or grow in this time frame, maybe based off of some of your experience the last couple of years, because the height of all of this is really happening in the moment, right now.
Speaker 2:Right, I think what, what I would offer to teachers queer teachers especially, who may be teaching in an area or a school that isn't as supportive. I recognize that I am very privileged to have a supportive administration I really am I that I'm able to thrive where I don't have to kind of tiptoe around them. We were able to produce a student drag show in the past year. I was so, so happy about that. It did take a lot of discussion with the. If we don't have a superintendent, we have a CEO.
Speaker 1:That's right Charter schools.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's all Again, another Black podcast series, but anyway, our CEO was very supportive once I explained what it was and that's where I kind of come in with that that knowledge and history of LGBTQIA plus where I can take some of the stigma off of the word drag. So the advice I would give is educate yourself, because the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to in some ways defend it but also to educate others and hopefully it becomes less antagonistic and more of a discussion. I hope that you have the support of your administration. I know that in many places that it's just not there, but one of the benefits of the past two years is, even though we were all disconnected in person, I am so excited to have connected with people all over the country and beyond. You know you connect with international teachers, but it's mostly while we were all at home. We started talking. We all started connecting with social media groups that are all sharing these resources. So that can become your support, right. If you can't lean on anyone at your school, lean on some of the friends that you made during the pandemic, right. That can make sure that you can feel confident in those times where you feel like you're the only person who's fighting for this and you can feel attacked and you can feel just beaten down. You're not the only person who's going through that. There are plenty of other people who are going through the same experience that you're going through. So that's when you lean on those people and hopefully it changes. I know it's a little tried to now to say it gets better, but it doesn't always get better right away. It doesn't get better just by itself. It gets better when we all have to kind of do the hard work. So, yeah, I hope that if yeah, that you get the support that you need, and definitely parents too, if you can get parents on board, that's who your administration really listens to. They listen to parent voices more than our voices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely hey. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate that you joined me on the podcast.
Speaker 2:I am too. It's fun. I like having these discussions because then, now that I know that someone on the other side of the country had a parallel experience that I did in the early 2000s All right, well, thank you for having me and I will see you around- Right.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of teaching while queer. If you haven't done so already, please consider subscribing on your favorite RSS feed and sharing the podcast with your friends and family. New episodes will come out every other week during the school year. If you're interested in joining us on this teaching while queer podcast, please email us at teachingwhilequeerpodcastatgmailcom. Have a great day.
Michael Musgrave-Perkins
Theatre Teacher/Geek
Theatre department chair at Grand Center Arts Academy in St. Louis, co-sponsor of our school's Gender-Sexualities Alliance (GSA). Regional theatre professional, specializing in sound & video design. BFA in Directing Theatre from Lindenwood University; currently pursuing an MA in Theatre Education from University of Houston.