Out of idle curiosity, what if anything is taught about homosexuality in high school history classes these days?
The Red Sox episode of Queer Eye came up over the watercooler yesterday with passing reference to one of the five's Gay is the new Black t-shirt. Someone youngish wondered to what extent American gays had faced oppression in the past and whether it at all compared to what blacks faced in the South.
Time and context didn't really permit in-depth discussion but after the fact I can tell you what I know: Same-sex relationships, particularly any PDA whatsoever, were treated as a vice and cracked down on by, well, Vice cops. Gay bars and meeting places would be shut down by raid, suspects (or random bystanders) frequently beaten. Prosecutors would treat gays along the lines of drug users or pedophiles. Lots of blackmail involving positions (teacher, government service) where being gay was a firable offense.
All the more on-topic I should mention that none of the above came from my school education; rather, most of it came from lectures (figuratively - literally they were posts to a members-only Usenet server) by people more aware of these issues than I. It may have been better actually to cover these things in school, though in Tulsa circa 1980s/early '90s who knows what the discussion would have been like.
A recent Family Feud question claims that one of the most common ways people get out of jury duty is to claim to be racist. Now, growing up we saw Eyes on the Prize in elementary school (Tim wrote awhile back on the travesty of overzealously enforced IP rights preventing that from being shown anywhere lately) and learned enough more along those lines that the idea of falsely claiming to be racist (or worse yet actually being) is indescribably galling to me.
Getting back to gays: The natural tie-in would be to supply historical context to current political issues, though I should point out that it's not at all clear that this historical context should sway anyone in any particular direction on current issues. For gay marriage, for example -- you know already if you've read this weblog for a long time that I bristle at the comparisons of the fight for gay marriage to the civil rights struggle. The fight against persecution of gays, of course, compares appropriately, but using the civil rights mantle to agitate for gay marriage strikes me as comparable to invoking Little Rock and Selma to agitate for affirmative action policies.
(N.B. I do favor gay marriage as the most sensible policy alternative, though I see it as something far short of a fundamental right. In theory I strongly oppose affirmative action (preferring genuine color-blindness), though in practice by the time I was old enough to be affected those policies were so universal that dismantling them isn't much of a priority in practice.)
Cutting to the chase, whatever (if anything) is taught about gay rights history in high schools now, I'd probably favor teaching a good deal more of it. This would be on the condition that people make reasonable judgments of what qualifies as historically significant and don't do what seems to be the current practice of throwing in token references to random chapters where they don't enhance anyone's understanding of anything.
Posted by Matt Bruce at June 21, 2005 12:20 PMone paragraph and a picture in 11th grade. Of course, what makes it into textbooks is never all that's taught in a given classroom.
The industry is too beholden to Texas and California to do much more.
Posted by: greg at June 21, 2005 12:42 PMSince there are still district waging war against evolution, I am inclined to believe that there is very little if any discussion of gay history in most high schools.
To an extent, it has to be that way, right now there isn't much time for teachers to discuss anything beyond the core material that will appear on the standarized tests.
Given the number of teachers that frequent your blog, I'm interested to get their take.
Posted by: OTC at June 21, 2005 12:44 PMOTC, you're probably right. Sadly, the set of historical knowledge that I think of as "no well-informed person should be without" far exceeds the time available to cover it.
Posted by: me at June 21, 2005 12:50 PMOut of idle curiosity, what if anything is taught about homosexuality in high school history classes these days?
I can't speak for teachers, but I can tell you about textbooks. A recent edition of our 11th grade U.S. History book's only mention of homosexuality didn't use the term, but did mention the AIDS epidemic, and that "some people believed" the disease was a punishment for the lifestyles that the people engaged in. I succeeded in taking that out and replacing it with "some people were unhappy with the money that was spent" on treating AIDS, which was enough to mollify the conservatives who control the book-buying process and keep us from being blacklisted without making me retch.
The first edition of this book included much more coverage of AIDS, but that was hacked out after the book was effectively blacklisted for that and other reasons attributable to "multiculturalism."
There is nothing about gay rights or gay marriage. "Gay liberation" is considered a bias term and would only be discussed by its mirror image, e.g. "many people were disturbed by challenges to traditional family structures and morality in the 1960s and 1970s" without us spelling out what those were. Certain we would never discuss Stonewall.
In the U.S. Government textbook, we may reference DOMA in a matter-of-fact definition, but anything more would cause problems.
I'm sure our coverage of the 2004 elections will discuss Bush's winning coalition of voters concerned with traditional values and traditional concepts of morality. We may discuss abortion, but I don't think we'll mention homosexuality in any form.
All that said, individual teachers may have more leeway than we do. Not in the South or Midwest or anywhere else where they risk having one student go home and tell conservative parents "we learned about gays in school today," and the teacher could find himself out of a job--that's pretty effective at policing teacher behavior. In the northeast and I imagine California, school districts are more willing to stand by teachers who discuss issues like this, so it may come up.
In my personal experience in a liberal school district the early 90s, it never came up in Social Studies, nor in health except in clinical terms relating to STD awareness in 9th grade as a risk group that students weren't part of.
Posted by: M.S. at June 22, 2005 06:23 AMone paragraph and a picture in 11th grade.
Greg, give me the title and I'll fax that page to the Gablers. More money for my bonus! :P
Posted by: M.S. at June 22, 2005 06:25 AMBy the way, I didn't see the show, but I have a completely different interpretation of "gay is the new black." Used elsewere, "the new black" means "the new standard color that you see everywhere in clothes" or just "the new popular thing," and you'll find people saying "pink is the new black" and "plaid is the new black." "Gay is the new black" was pretty true about tv shows two years ago and I can understand the QE guys promoting themselves that way.
It's not a comparison to the civil rights movement.
Posted by: M.S. at June 22, 2005 06:29 AMI was about to post a less-polished version of what M.S. posted right above here sometime last night. But, looking at the capitalization, I think it refers to civil rights (or at least race-relations), since indeed I think the "Black" here in question is African-Americans and not fashion-related.
But the saying, obviously, *is* taken straight from the world of fashion. I guess my point is, that's one of the most clever slogans I've seen in awhile. Talk about your smooth double-meanings...
In somewhat related news, I'll stop growling at the "Everyone Loves an Asian Girl" shirts when I see a *non*-Asian (perferably non-)girl wearing one.
Posted by: ZD at June 23, 2005 12:01 AMUnless you've seen the shirt itself (e.g. via the show itself) I wouldn't draw any conclusions from my post. As this is second-hand from an oral conversation, I have no idea whether I capitalized correctly.
Posted by: me at June 23, 2005 09:29 AMAnd similarly, I haven't seen that episode (and thus the t-shirt) despite it being promoted to hell and back in Boston for months before it aired. I can't stand Queer Eye. I find it boring and repetitive.
Posted by: Brittain33 at June 23, 2005 10:32 AMOh, oops. This site is the only place I go by M.S. so I forgot I used it.
Posted by: M.S. at June 23, 2005 12:50 PM