Teaching While Queer: Willie Carver's Journey of Resilience and Activism in Kentucky

Bryan: 0:27

Teaching While Queer is a podcast for 2S LGBTQ+ 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 2S LGBTQ plus educators. I hope you enjoy Teaching While Queer. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Teaching While Queer. Today, I'm excited to have joining me the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Willie Carver. Hi, willie, how are you doing?

Willie: 1:07

Great. How are you doing?

Bryan: 1:08

I'm doing fantastic. So tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you teach? Or what did you teach how you identify within the community, all that jazz.

Willie: 1:17

Sure presentance is still okay for teaching. I have taught French and English for 15 years. I couldn't choose between the two and just naturally have done both. I used to teach at the high school level. That became more and more difficult in the last five or six years and I won't teach in K through 12 right now because of lots of different policies that are happening. So currently at the university level, I work at the University of Kentucky. I work at Bluegrass Community and Technical Colleges and some other colleges and teach online French and English at the time and some in-person classes as well. I'm a big gay Appalachian. I'm an author, so this year, the last couple of years, it's just been wild. I was teacher of the year. Then bad things happen and because of the bad things, I wrote a book and the book is being I'm very happy with the response to it. So that's now got me really busy doing speaking engagements. Otherwise, I'm a youth advocate, specifically for LGBTQ youth, because I think they're a group that rarely has any adults articulating their needs. I work a lot with Appalachian youth. I work for the Kentucky Law Project, for Fairness Kentucky campaign, for a shared future and some really super specific local groups, but our goal is to find those ever widening gaps, and that exists because of what's happening in schools and to fill those that's a lot of work.

Bryan: 3:02

That's a lofty goal, especially with all those bookbending. That's happening at the moment.

Willie: 3:10

So we just opened a Rainbow Freedom Library in Montgomery County, kentucky. The students actually won a grant $4,000 worth of diverse books, and their superintendent, who was my former superintendent rejected all of them. Imagine children having a dream. They wanted these books because one of their classmates had attempted suicide and they had all already been writing books. So they had this idea what if we got a bunch of them? So they made a great video project turn into it's better. These kids win $10,000 total $4,000 for books. They ended up giving half of those books to another school because that school lost a child, lost an LGBTQ youth, and they wanted to do something to show their concern. These are the kind of kids who are trying to change the world and the adults are just crapping all over them.

Bryan: 4:05

Advocacy at that age is so wonderful.

Willie: 4:07

It really is so we were. I basically contacted some groups, found an art center that said they would take it. We put a GoFundMe up and said here's our goal. If anyone in this county wants access to this books, we just want to make sure we can get them out. So we want some funds to. We made like $7,000 in a couple weeks.

Bryan: 4:27

That's amazing.

Willie: 4:28

So, yeah, we've been super lucky with it and I'll go now as to repeat that across the we have 120 counties. I don't know how many we're going to get.

Bryan: 4:36

Yeah, that would be super cool to hit them all, though, and the fact that it was like a grassroots movement from the children, it's just like it's a. It gives you hope for the future.

Willie: 4:47

Yeah, and that's what. That's what teaching is right. We're, we're looking at these young people and telling them imagine something better than what is, and then they articulate it, and then we're, we try to, you know, find whatever resources they need, find whatever learning they need to help their, their hope become reality. That's what's so particularly difficult right now is we see grown adults stomping on the hopes of children, and it's the opposite of education.

Bryan: 5:17

Yeah, I think that's so interesting because there's been this huge push as far as education goes on, like having a niche type programs, like business incubators where you can have shark tank at your school, yeah, and all that stuff, which is so brilliant and so amazing, and it's that same thing. It is allowing these students to address a problem and come up with a solution and then support it, and it's like we should be doing that all around and it shouldn't just be like because we have it's sort of like student led initiatives are great, unless those students are black, brown or queer.

Willie: 5:56

Yeah, and then no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's force you to read the straight white, non brown thing and stop talking about yourself. So that's literally what we do.

Bryan: 6:07

It's so interesting about how schools push back on that stuff too, because I worked for a school district where a student had committed suicide after attending, like the school. The student transferred to another school and this is right before I started there. Transferred to another school but was still being cyber bullied by kids from the school I was teaching. It committed suicide because he was perceived as gay. His parents went on to create a foundation and get laws passed in Texas and they're working on national laws about cyber bullying and all that. So this, this amazing work is happening, but I feel like in the last four years really the last three years that school district has gone backwards on their support of anti bullying Period.

Willie: 6:51

Yeah, I worked at a school that chose me 10 years ago to be maybe seven years ago to be the anti bullying person, and I brought this program in albias as what was called to sort of help implement it, and now it's the exact same situation that you're describing. Anti bullying equals, I don't know, being against people who want to be violent towards LGBTQ people, and that's their political beliefs now. So the schools respect that I had. When I became teacher of the year, which was such a beautiful thing, and it happened at the state level my county hated me. They hated, I would not have been teacher of the hallway not for a day, not even a favorite of teacher and had a five times. It was not going to happen because I was queer from my perspective. So it was really nice to be recognized from the state because we were doing some pretty awesome things in that school and it's really the students who are doing it that advocacy that you were talking about. So adults started attacking, first me. So they were going to board meetings. It was inappropriate that I existed really as a queer teacher there was. They were suggesting that it was nefarious that anyone should know I was gay and that was proof enough that there was something hyper sexual about me and inappropriate about me. And, on the advice of lawyers, I refused to respond. And then those attacks moved to social media and online and they got really big really fast and, on the advice of my lawyers, I did not respond. And because I'm not responding, they started attacking the children. So they were actually sharing pictures of my now former students at their after school jobs, sharing their faces and their names and where they were, and we begged the school to intervene. They could have done anything. They could have talked about what this group did. So this was it was technically an LGBTQ affirming positivity club, so the goal was positive systemic change and one of the positive systemic changes that they did was called it an LGBTQ affirming club so that there was a space. But their primary work was cleaning parks, raising money for hurricane victims. They taught themselves Black, brown and queer history. They literally taught themselves once a week because our schools weren't teaching them and the school would not speak up. Their response was we can't respond every time someone has a complaint. Meanwhile, students are being threatened. The police had to get involved because one of the threats was so sincere with one of the former students that they had to remove her from her home and the school protected those parents' rights to be hateful over the rights of those students. Yeah. So here's some I don't know a silver lining. One of the things the last events that happened while I was still in the classroom this student group was very concerned. One of their classmates had attempted suicide and these kids are smart, they follow the news, they understand the basics of psychology and sociology just from reading. So they knew about the importance of representation and they knew about the importance of directly addressing these issues. So they wanted to do a climate survey. So I was like, okay, let's talk about the climate survey. So they we met with the Kentucky student voice team. It's a nonprofit that had done a 53,000 response survey. So we met with them, talked about how to do this sort of work. We met with researchers at the University of Kentucky so that these students can make sure that they had a valid, reliable, accurate, authentic assessment that was fair. And then they made the assessment they presented to the English department about why this was important and every single English teacher said yes, let's share your survey in our classrooms. Any student who wants to access it can. No one will be forced. Obviously they banned that survey and I think it's obvious to anyone paying attention why they banned it. They banned that survey because they didn't want anyone seeing the results, because that survey was specifically measuring the levels of homophobia that kids faced at school, not just from their classmates but also from their teachers and their administrators. So I love not that they banned it, but that they banned it, hoping that that information would never get out. One I've got that information because over 200 students responded. Two there have now been something like 65 news stories about the homophobia in the school district, and those news stories have happened in the UK, australia, the United States, canada. So I love that we're not going to bury this, and so I was happy to quit, because that frees up for me the opportunity to consistently talk about this anytime that I can and to make sure that we're not covering up the intense transphobia and homophobia that are happening in our teacher 12 schools, because those students have every right to be just as free as any other student.

Bryan: 12:15

Absolutely. So let's dive a little bit into your background. What was it like for you? You've got these amazing queer and ally students that you've worked with. What was it like for you as a queer student?

Willie: 12:30

You know. Not that the short end answer. I think I'm really lucky in some ways growing up when I did, and mainly the 90s, and that I did not exist fully as a human. Yet I did not. There was no queer part of me that was articulated. I don't think I really had a language to articulate it, at least not to other people. The language I have was Jerry Springer. There are two poems about Jerry Springer in my collection because, if nothing else, I knew someday I will grow up and here's some version of me that's still alive. Right, maybe they're being made fun of, but they're still here. So I had that idea. I'll still be here. I just didn't know what it would look like or who I would have in my life, and I knew that by fourth grade. And then I was lucky that school was outside of that silence, not a place where people were trying to harm People, just didn't know how to help. So school was always a good and decent and positive place and a stable, warm place where I didn't have that in all of their aspects of my life. There were times when there was maybe no food or no electricity or no water, but school always had those things. So school was this like magic place that I loved from day one and I always wanted to be a part of it. For that reason and I guess I don't know, I look back I didn't come out in high school and try to come out in high school. It wasn't until college that I really did, and I was lucky. I come from a Pentecostal family in the back of Appalachia and everyone. My immediate family was okay, my mother had no issues, my father had no issues. All in all, considering what so many people I know had to go through, I was super fortunate and I think that sort of informs why it's so important for me to be an advocate now, because I know, I know it's almost like I owe the world right. If I got this great experience, if I had people who loved me and didn't turn on me when almost every friend I have had that experience, then I need to use that in some positive way. But once I came out there was no putting me back. So I was super out, super loud, very proud to be queer, and I kind of had this defiance when people were like why are you going to be a teacher? And I was like I'm going to make it work. And it was. There's something. Okay, I want to get weird, but we have two new kittens and one of the kittens is like this big, but she just assumes that she's going to run the world. And what I love is we have this adult male cat and he has like cowered to her multiple times because she just walks up like what are you going to do? And he, but the other kitten who is actually slightly bigger than her. That kid is Dahlia. She's clearly afraid of the world. And the other cat, our older cat right now, because he's trying to figure everything out kind of takes advantage of that. And I don't want just to sound like victim blaming, because it's not victim blaming but because obviously she doesn't deserve to have a cat go after her right. But I did sort of have this idea that, like I will refuse to let you make me feel bad, I will refuse to let you make me feel afraid, and that kind of defiance made it possible for me to be in environments that some other people couldn't be in. I think, and again, I owe that defiance, I think, to having a family that loved me and supported me, and not everyone gets that. So this is not defiance. Good, you know, protecting yourself. Bad. Some people need to protect themselves.

Bryan: 16:58

Absolutely. What I think is interesting about your story is that I wonder how many of us who grew up in the 90s had that experience of like not knowing what the future looked like because there weren't examples of it. Because, as you mentioned, like there's these people on Jerry Springer and they're alive.

Willie: 17:18

Yeah.

Bryan: 17:18

Because all the other news was you know, gay men die.

Willie: 17:24

Yeah, I Grew up like a lot of men in the 90s I'm sure, just like AIDS, just seemed like the inevitable right, like there was. That was the future, that was sort of laid out for me. I think so many of us thought that, because that was, that's the narrative right. And what does? What does narrative theory teaches? Now, humans think in stories. We don't think in other things. Primarily, I would have vivid memory. I would have a party on junior year and there was a drag queen. Did Reba drag Zachary up? And but we write this party and everyone Zach just kind of says look around, what do you see? And I'm like I don't know. Like 30 Hillbilly gay guys, like what is the answer here? And she goes you really don't see it, I don't know. And she says everyone is smoking and I'm like that is kind of strange in everyone in this room. And I said she said do you know why? And I said no, and she said none of us. Imagine we're gonna make it to 50 anyway, and you know this was 2001. But the moment she said it like the body sees us when it, when it recognizes, like this is an unarticulated thing that we've all been thinking. So I think there was a lot of truth. You know drag queens and their truth. They do beautiful thing.

Bryan: 18:43

Zach disappeared.

Willie: 18:49

He was there once and then just gone, so I didn't talk to him for years. I Didn't have social media either, which probably made it much harder for me to get a hold of people until this year of 2022. So I I had a moment, day before we meet the president actually, where I was just like I can't teach Anymore, I can't do this, and I tweeted something desperate. I had like 200 followers, something like I'm the 2022 Kentucky teacher of the year, I'm a proud gay man, but I'm exhausted and I cannot do this anymore. And then I went to sleep and then I woke up and I had like 65,000 responses and of all those people, I see this person being like hey, I made it and I'm, you can make it too, we're gonna be okay, you can be my friend if you want. And then I noticed it's actually Zach who had gone to Tennessee, gotten his doctorate and kind of made it. And there we are, like reconnecting a decade later. Anyway, I say all this to say the moment that we actually got back in touch, he was like well, here we are. And I was like here we are because we didn't. That's really beautiful.

Bryan: 20:01

That's really beautiful. I get so frustrated because I feel like I I've talked about this a couple times on the episode and on episodes that will air in the next month or two About like, feeling this generational loss, like I feel this generally generational loss, having grown up after an entire generation of gay men was all but wiped out and so like. And that's the thing for me is that I am a very spiritual person, I am Wiccan, so I believe in a lot in intuition and whatnot, and Sometimes I have dreams that kind of give me hints about, like, what life's gonna be like. And when I was younger I never dreamt past high school, and it wasn't until I was an adult and, like you know, doing things where I was like, oh well, I guess I have to have a future, because I I I never envisioned, even where I'm at in this moment, that I realized just how traumatic that was of like not Knowing if I would have a future just because of who I was, and the narrative that was being told about people like me. And it's so triggering now because that same playbook is being used now. I think of all the things that are happening right now. And then I just go right back to Anita Bryant and and it's like here we are, 30 years later and you're recycling the same, the same exact rhetoric. You're just Modernizing it.

Willie: 21:36

Yeah, and you know we paid attention right, you and I paid attention to what adults were saying in the room. You know we're every time the word queer, gay or whatever came in, like the conversation. We, we took every word in because we were desperate for any information. So I think it's much easier for us to remember the sort of things people were saying. You know, and in the late 80s and the early 90s and I think there's a lot of straight cis people who are, you know, regurgitating this same stuff, who think that they've invented it, who don't realize the extent to which they Heard this so often when they were kids. And it's easy for us to remember it and I think sometimes that might be harder for them to remember Because they didn't care, they had no reason to care, right, but yeah, it's, it is very traumatic and that's why it's all the more important to fight so hard. And I also think, you know, when we were kids, this, this concept of queer childhood, didn't exist, and for good reason. Um, keith Elston is the president of the katucky youth law project and he created this group Like late 90s, early 2000s I think, but it was a while ago. He created it to protect lgbtq youth on a legal basis. And he said he had this moment of realization where he thought Gay men don't talk about children. We don't talk about kids because we have been conditioned to fear them. We've been conditioned to think that if anyone even hears us talking about kids, they will somehow make an accusation. Right? And he said and the the result of that is that there are so many defenseless queer kids who have no one to take up for them. So he sort of said I will do this, I will create a group as a gay man and I will protect gay kids. Um, and I think what we're seeing right now is they're attacking the kids, uh, and they're doing it in some pretense of parental rights, which we all know is garbage. Uh, I can point to Senate bill 150 in the state of kentucky, which absolutely takes the rights away from parents, right, parents. Now can't. Decide what their uh kids health care is going to look like. Parents can't get blockers to their own kids. Parents who want that can't get that, because now other people's churches get to decide what your kids get access to, even when research and medicine and psychology all state that your kid needs this to survive.

Bryan: 24:13

It's that part right there the parental rights of the people. I want them to have to have parental rights.

Willie: 24:19

And even then those parents are getting no new rights. It's like, uh, it's like banning gay marriage and calling it straight rights, like in what way does a straight person get an extra right if I can't get married? That's ridiculous, do you know?

Bryan: 24:33

some crazy stuff that was on the floor of texas this year. There was actually like a bill on the floor I don't believe that it passed, but there was a bill on the floor that would give a tax credit to heterosexual couples with kids. I was Mind-blowing because at the time I was living in texas, I just only recently moved and, um, I was, I had my children With me and we went to the capital and we were boycotting, you know, with uh, jonathan venice and other people who have just moved to texas and um, and it was just Wild to me that it was just blatant bigotry and it was okay that to say like, oh, if you are a heterosexual couple and you're having children for the sake of procreation, Meanwhile. I've adopted children that heterosexual couples couldn't take care of.

Willie: 25:25

Yeah, it's the. Rules are gone. Basic rules of decorum, basic rules of politics. They're I mean we, I personally, our commissioner of it. So in kentucky you had me, the teacher of the year resigned and our Education reporter for the whole state she actually won multiple awards just resigned Because of the pressure from politics that would be put. From what I understand, even on the paper she worked out for her to talk a certain way our commissioner of education just resigned and and Effectively said. I will not harm queer kids, period, and I will not be a part of this. There's Because of how these these people are acting. Um, senate bill 150. I've never seen kentucky politics be so Ugly, insidious or downright fascist. They, um so the senate committee that created it. They posted it online at 11 pm At night and voted on it At 11 am the next morning. Do you know who wrote the first two amendments to that bill? I did because I was desperate, um, and I was like how can we? I don't know how to help. It didn't occur to me, like, maybe no one does. So I got here, googled some other amendments and tried to mirror the language and sent it to every human being I could. Uh, who was there? Because I was at work and literally at 11 am I saw it, um, posted as an official amendment to that bill. Um, they ended up changing that bill the last day of the session, while the democrats were at lunch, um, and so it was passed in such a fast time. It was 32 pages, we couldn't read it in time, um, so I mean, it's just absolutely disgusting. Kids were organizing protests and the republican Legislature inside of the capital was making fun of the kids who were. There were middle school kids Standing up in front of a thousand people talking about their civil rights and there were republicans inside tweeting about the kids hair being grown. And what an embarrassment these kids were.

Bryan: 27:39

That's so mind boggling and it's not unique to Kentucky. I mean we saw this with Tennessee, we're seeing this in Texas. I mean Florida has just gone off the handle, and even California right now. I I've followed a lot of California Advocacy groups because I'm originally from there and I'm seeing, like there it our bills that are being put in for propositions, and they're they're smart about. What they're doing right now is saying Remember what happened with prop 8, when yes on 8 meant no gay marriage? You need to be smart when you vote, because yes on this is going to mean Transchildren have no rights, and so they're being like really open and blunt about it, which I appreciate. I just hope that they do a good enough job with message messaging, because when these bills get before the public, I mean I don't know why anybody has the right to vote on our civil rights. But here we are. This is this is the Democratic Republic that we live in.

Willie: 28:39

Yeah, I remember the night Antonin Scalia died. It was Valentine's Day actually, or we at least. We were having a Valentine's Party. There was a lot of toasting after he died and Then we watched them refuse to give Obama a Judicial nominee and I said to my husband this is it Americans did, because we are, for the first time that I can think of outside of maybe the Civil War, literally seeing the government refused to do what it's supposed to do in favor of something political and that set into motion a series of events that gave us this court that we have now, which. How do we solve that court?

Bryan: 29:30

I look back at, like Roosevelt, who was help, you know, who is having a huge power struggle between executive branch and judicial branch, and Worked around it. I mean there's, there are things that we could look at from the past. It's just that I don't think right now that we have the politicians in place to do something about it, because the Democratic Party is playing business as usual and and the Republican Party is playing to kill literally.

Willie: 29:58

Yeah, oh, it's so funny when people call me a Democrat, like I'm just an anti-Republican. It's like I have a choice between I don't know some amorphous blob and Someone with a gun that wants to kill me. I'm gonna choose the blob, right, I don't think the blob's gonna do anything, but at least it's not the guy trying to kill me. And if that's the slogan of the entire Democratic Party, we are not trying to kill you, that's enough. They've really that. That's what. So mind-boggling. They don't have to do anything, they just have to galvanize Enough voters to win. Because so I live in rural, conservative, appalachian Kentucky. We are still majority Democrat, but nobody votes. So that's, that's the only goal of the Democratic Party get young people to vote. And there are enough issues that they should want to. And I've learned this I'm not a politician, but any stretch of the imagination but people want to do something right now. People don't believe in politics as an avenue to get things done, but people want to change things. And you know, it's been the lesson of the year for me, the last of the last couple years, that if I come up with this idea of what I think needs to happen to help these kids and I say it out loud, I get so much support, like immediately. We Are having an LGBTQ youth conference and it took just a couple of phone calls and I had senators, I had the governor, I had groups from New York and Tennessee and Ohio and DC all coming for free to come just talk to these kids and that that's what I know. People want to help. People just don't believe in politics at all and politics it is an environment that we have to use to help these kids Because otherwise we're gonna keep losing Rights and ground right, if you don't play the game, you're gonna lose, and that's kind of where we're sitting at.

Bryan: 32:00

If you, if you don't go and vote, then it's not gonna go your way.

Willie: 32:04

Yeah, and let's you know I Get it. Everyone has. Every teacher who has ever existed has at some point Wanted to do something because they knew it was right and chosen something else because of political expediency, because of Whatever was going on in their lives. I've been that teacher who, you know, I don't know, wanted to do this lesson but chose another. So I'm not trying to absolve myself when I make this criticism, but what I am seeing across the board and the state of Kentucky Is that the vast majority of teachers Just don't fight back and they refuse to play. They think maybe they're not playing the game, but they're playing the game when someone says take down the pride flag, when someone says erase this person from your lesson, and they do it. There is no amount of money or security that is going to make me pull the black names out of my syllabus. There is no amount that's going to make me pull the queer names. There is nothing anyone can do to make me out a trans child. It is not gonna happen. So I don't know. I don't know what playing the game looks like, but I do know this when our retirements were up to law be lost in 2017 or 18, teachers formed the capital. Where are they now?

Bryan: 33:37

There are some great teachers who are fighting and I'm not saying that all teachers aren't but I would love to see them fight for children the way they fought for their retirement well, it's interesting in Texas they Write it into your contract and your teaching license that you're not allowed to unionize, you're not allowed to critique the educational system without fear of having your license censured. And I'm just sitting here going like, yeah, but we, if we all did it, like what's gonna happen? What are they gonna?

Willie: 34:09

Yeah, so strikes are illegal in Kentucky, calling and sick isn't? So when we had our last governor who was Crazy it was, it was like all of us had the same idea at the same time. Like let's just call in sick, so I'm tired apartment. We were talking about it because they were. There was a sewage bill and they tried to add can teach your retirement to it. So we were all like we're sick, I'm really stressed to work. So across the state, schools were shut down for like five days because no one was going in and that brought them to their knees, right. Yeah, the whole idea that there could be a law to prevent a union ignores how union started. Right, they were never legally popular. The whole goal of a union is to disrupt the system, not be a part of the system. Yeah, here I am very proud to be a part of Kentucky 120 United. It's a new union here, and the other union has its uses. That's kea, which is a part of the anya, but it's very politicized. It's very sort of in bed with politics, as Is, as are. And so this group of Angry women five, about ten of them, half of them from Appalachia, half of them from the city we're like you know what we're done. We're starting our own union and they were laughed at like this is ridiculous, you're not gonna do it. But then there were 20, and then there were 30, and then there were 40, now there are thousands and it has literal political clout. And the American Federation of Teachers said hey, if you want to be sort of under our umbrella, you're welcome and we will help you in whatever way that you want. And they have been super outspoken. I'm trying to, and what we've seen is in those districts where they're fighting the hardest we don't have interpretations of that law, our anti-unreview law, that are as harmful, and I don't know if it's. I'm assuming it's the same way everywhere. In Kentucky. County's have control. So the best counties Basically the rule is if a parent asks, we have to tell and the kid gets to choose. Right, the kid gets to choose what to tell us or why not to tell us. And the worst counties it's like they're it's entrapment. They don't tell the kids the new policy and then try to get the kids to tell if they're gay or trans and then it's mandatory Reporting to parents and child protective services. Like it is deadly.

Bryan: 36:40

That's wild. I also like I really struggle with Party that's so focused on local control and it's like really getting down to like school boards, like I feel like school boards right now have more power than mayors and I feel like they shouldn't like all the all these laws that are being passed and then the way that they're being interpreted by school boards are the policies that are being put in place by a school board. It Just seems like overstepping. These are people who are just parents. It's a glorified PTA.

Willie: 37:24

Yeah, and the amount of so. We had a legal decision in 1991 in Kentucky that instituted something called the Kentucky Education Reform Act, because basically we found that kids living in poverty had really crappy educations and our state composition actually affords Austin's the right to an equitable education from the 1890s. It also prohibits religious funds Funds being given to religious schools from the 1890s. For anyone who thinks that's some new age idea that we separate, god forbid. They do right. But we just last year erased so what that did. In a lot of ways it created checks and balances in our school district. So we have the superintendent, but we also had a site-based decision-making council that was made up of elected parents and teachers who were elected. Here's the crazy thing they managed to erase that entirely and they called it parents' rights. So the only organization in the entirety of our education system that had actual parents who were in charge of curriculum was dissolved and Republicans won that by screaming about parent rights. I don't understand what's happening. Other, I think it's just people really hate LGBTQ people. I think they really hate black and brown people the easiest way to show off that height. I don't know how to turn this off. I'm sorry. The easiest way to turn off. The easiest way to demonstrate that height is to vote Republican, because all the polls show that most of the things that the Republican Party is doing are not popular, at least here. For example, our anti-LGBT cubil over 70 percent of Kentuckians did not want this to happen, yet it happened. It's not just gerrymandering. I know that it sounds far-reliant, but it doesn't explain the absolute fearlessness with which Republicans act irresponsibly and inept.

Bryan: 39:45

Yeah, I don't believe in an afterlife per se. My goal is just to be recycled back in here and many, many different iterations. But I fear for people who believe in an afterlife and think that they're doing the right thing when the right thing is harming others.

Willie: 40:05

I don't often believe in hell, but when I see Mitch McConnell I certainly hope just for a moment. That's basically my belief. Sorry, I don't believe in hell, but I think it would be nice.

Bryan: 40:18

Yeah, there was a video recently where he stopped speaking. It got a lot of attention and people were making fun of him. I'm not here for the making fun of older people, but what it made me think of was why are these people running our government? Because I look at him and I look at Feinstein, who I'm from California, and my entire life she had represented me until I moved out of the state. My entire life. I'm just looking at it, going like we had all these options with the Democratic Party in the last election and it came down to two very old white men. I mean, bernie Sanders is fantastic. I know that there's a lot of young people who love what he's doing and he's doing great things, but he's still an old white man and we have so much diversity. The median age in this country is a millennial, so why aren't there more people in our government who are my age or younger or slightly older, or even just a span of all of it? That video came out, and one. I don't like him in general, but I'm not here to make fun of him. I feel that same way about the governor of Texas. A lot of people make fun of him because he's like a horrible person, but he wasn't an accident that left him in a wheelchair, and so they make fun of him because he's in a wheelchair. But I'm not here for that. Let's just talk about the fact that he's a horrible person. He benefited from an accident where he sued people and made millions of money off of it and then promptly passed a law saying that you can't do that. So yeah, he's a horrible person, but I'm not going to go after him because of that, at least not because.

Willie: 42:09

I would definitely go after other stuff.

Bryan: 42:11

Yeah, absolutely.

Willie: 42:12

But not the physical stuff, because it's gross.

Bryan: 42:15

But agreed. I look at Mitch McConnell and I was like God if a hell exists. Please, by all, means.

Willie: 42:29

I 100% concur with every thought that you're having on this. I know and I also am very spiritual, do not believe in any traditional sense of the afterlife or even religion and what people tend to. In fact, I would probably even go to parts to call myself Christian, and that's only because I've read the Bible. But there's nothing to do with these people around here. I don't see some you know hell to torment trans people in that Bible. I just see this idea that we should be kind, we should care about the poor, which is not to excuse the Old Testament or lots of other parts of the Bible.

Bryan: 43:13

No, there's some pretty horrible things in there, but I believe my like. When I read it, it was like Jesus died for the sins of everybody, everybody.

Willie: 43:24

We don't even have to get into theology. But yeah, he says the whole like I came to, I didn't come. I kind of fulfill this. I am saying you free, you are not bound to this stuff. So I don't understand what people are reading.

Bryan: 43:38

Yeah. I will tell you when I was younger, I went through this like it was part of my sexuality journey, I guess. That like I didn't try to pray the gateway, but I knew that like maybe if I projected this like Christian life, that maybe I wouldn't have to deal with this anymore. And so I went through this whole process when I was a teenager of like reading the Bible and all that stuff. And I don't have a problem with Christianity from what I read. I have a problem with how Christianity is playing out.

Willie: 44:14

Yeah, and I think that can probably be said of anything that takes power. I think what causes me to be so particularly outspoken on that issue is that it's the irony of it all Right, and that is that harm not the poor becomes, let's harm the poor. It's the don't judge your neighbor becomes, let's judge our neighbor super harshly. It's the suffering to me, children which becomes. Children are idiots and have no rights and don't you know it's, it's let's take this and twist it until it somehow becomes the act opposite of what it says and then use that word Right. There was a newsweek article last week, I think, and they were interviewing all these pastors and priests who are like OK, this moment we're having this sort of fascist post Trump, or sparked by Trump moment has caused people to be so violent, vicious, angry and hateful of this concept woke that they can't understand. So they define anything remotely progressive as well that people are starting to get angry at sermons when Christ decided, and so they. There's a particular pastor who says that he was reading the term the other cheek sermon and that people were coming angrily and saying you shouldn't be reading this woke garbage. And he was like this is Jesus, but he said someone said maybe that was good then, but that doesn't work now. So I'm like wow, christianity hates Jesus is an interesting Christianity.

Bryan: 45:59

It's a very interesting time that we are living in. And like and I don't know. I'm at one of those places like I was when I was a kid. I don't know what the future is. So, before we wrap up, we've got all these laws being thrown around in pretty restrictive environments for school communities. What are some things that you think the schools can do to help create inclusive spaces, Even if these laws have restrictions for them?

Willie: 46:31

I will cite Kentucky Commissioner for Education, jason Glass, whose number one piece of advice is do not obey rules in advance. And I think, do not ask questions about the rules in advance and what. What teachers sometimes have a tendency to do, because the rule followers and teachers are communicators and they like clarity. I'll give you a. So if you're, if you're superintendent, says remember, we don't have wall hangings about sexuality. Do not ask does a rainbow flag count, right? They're hoping that you will. You will tell them it does. In your own words, they're hoping that you will just preemptively take it down. I say whatever role that you're seeing, take it in the least restrictive way possible and refuse to do harm. So if we look at the example that's I know, which is Kentucky's example which is no instruction or presentation on gender, gender identity or gender expression, okay, all human beings have all three of those, so it has nothing to do with LGBTQ people. We know the intent was that, right, but they wrote it ambiguously so that they could say we weren't trying to be the LGBTQ. Meanwhile, we're taking out books about gay penguins, right? So I say read the bills, do not obey in advance. Fight the system. This is just a truth for any teacher teaching in Kentucky, tennessee, alabama, georgia, texas probably all the square states over there too. You can't follow the rules and be a good person Period. You cannot enforce every role that they're telling you and be a good person. Every single teacher out there knows that. There are times when you let the kid retake the test. There are times when you say you know what. We're not worrying about homework this month because you have other needs that matter more than what the paper says, and your LGBTQ kids have lots of needs that matter more than what that paper says. So refuse to be a part of it. Do whatever you need to do to sleep at night, and it's really possible to make inclusive spaces. It really just means refusing to pretend that queer people don't exist, taking lessons from the past and coding things as queer even if they're not queer. There are so many ways to do that If you're willing to think about what it looks like and what I my biggest piece of advice, just from a legal perspective, there is one human being in your school who has the most rights of anyone else, and that's the student. So if you're not allowed to say gay. They are encouraged them to. If you're not allowed to present them with short stories about queer lives, then let them write short stories about their queer lives and share those. That's my big dream right now is creating some curriculum that is created on the spot by students and is shared with each other, and I was doing that my last semester. My school had a no racial role which we broke heck out of, and the students created the lit. We talked about the lit. Sometimes it was anonymous, sometimes they're names on it, but it was great because they were creating and we were also getting to talk about their lives. So include your students as much as possible and signal to them that you care about their lives.

Bryan: 50:33

Awesome. Before we wrap up, you have the opportunity to ask me a question, whatever comes at the top of your mind.

Willie: 50:42

All right. So you were almost Texas teacher of the year. What would your platform have been?

Bryan: 50:52

So let me preface this for everybody. I was competing for Texas teacher of the year because I'd won at my district level and gotten like designations that come with that and whatnot, and so I made it to the round just before the teacher of the year round, which is the regional round. And so when I did that, I had to come up with my platform, which was love the children. When I give my speech at convocation, which is not common everywhere. I don't think I don't know how many schools do convocation. It was new to me when I came to Texas, but at convocation when I give my speech, it was about how I was outed in high school. I was ostracized by students and teachers and had a really rough time in my family for a little bit. The irony is my parents don't even remember, but I had one teacher check on me and asked how I was doing, and I am still connected to that teacher 20 years later because she made the biggest impact for me and I only had that person for one year because she left the school, and so she showed what it means to me to care for your students, to love your students, and that was what I said is as my big platform is that, at the end of the day, we've just come out of isolation. I'm not going to say we came out of a pandemic, because it's still happening. We just came out of isolation and what these kids need most is someone to care for them. And so, as my teacher of the year platform was, we have to get back to caring about the students. And here's the thing. That's not what's happening. And when we look at all these policies that are being enacted and things that the education associations or administrations are coming up with at the state level, it's really not about caring about the students. Especially when you say things like parental rights, like where is the student in that? It's nowhere.

Willie: 53:06

I say to any student in Kager 12 in the United States do not trust your teacher unless they prove otherwise. Obviously there are situations where the teacher might be the most trustworthy person, but especially middle school, high school, I would tell my nephews make them prove to you that they're trustworthy, or else just assume, because you don't know who, what side they're on. And I think that's a lovely message that if we just love them all first, they wouldn't have to ask these questions 100%, and I think that I tell my students I told them a lot that teachers are the best actors.

Bryan: 53:38

You really don't know what you're getting, which is why it's so important to make sure that they prove that they're trustworthy, Because we don't share 100% of ourselves with you, just like I don't share 100% of myself with my children. Children get a portion of who an adult is, so I think that that's a really important message is to make sure to ensure that someone has proven that they're trustworthy to you. And that can look different for everybody, so a little bit of it has to go with your gut instinct, but a little bit also has to go with how they treat you. The things that they say, pay attention to, how they respond to other people and you had mentioned that you and I because we were queer or future queers as kids we listened, we heard things and we paid attention, and I think that you have the ability as a student to do that as well. Now is like pay attention to what the adults are saying. That's going to tell you whether or not you can trust them.

Willie: 54:50

Very good advice. I like how it ties to your platform, or your would be platform.

Bryan: 54:58

Before we sign off, what is your book? Tell us where we can get it. What's the best way to get it, to give you the most money.

Willie: 55:07

I luckily I get the same amount no matter where a person gets it. You can get it at any major bookseller that's out there, so Amazon or Barnes and Noble, etc. It's called gay poems for red states and let's see what else. If you go to your local bookstore, ask them for it, just because it's nice to have local bookstores and ask for it. But yeah, anybody out there wants to let some plan contact me, wants to do anything with it. I've really am interested in it works that help young people feel that poetry is accessible.

Bryan: 55:52

And this is super accessible work.

Willie: 55:57

And my biggest hope this is just something I honed as a belief when, not when, I was a teacher it's that if you can be super vulnerable, if you can literally sort of lay out in front of someone standing right in front of you, here is who I am, they. They almost always mirror back that that energy to you, because I think we're all really desperate to really connect with other human beings and so I thought well, what if? I did this in poetry. Well, would people respond in poetry? And it's amazing the number of people who've read this and then who send me poems. And it's not like I'm, it's not like in the book, like writing a poem with this hope that I had that somehow this would make people write poetry and people are writing poetry. So, anyway, that's that's plug for the book, but do whatever you need to do to make sure that your students feel that they can express Well, thank you so much for spending the afternoon with me.

Bryan: 56:57

I really appreciate it, and thank you all at home for enjoying this episode of teaching while queer. Thank you, brian, you're beautiful I appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good day you too. Bye. 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.