A Study of Labor and Fire: On Being a Queer Educator in the Second Lavender Scare by J. Bonanni
I
It is December 2022 and I am reading A Raisin in the Sun with my four classes of 8th grade students at a middle school on Cape Cod. Desks are arranged in a circle so that we can perform cold readings of the play, allowing each student to be different characters on different days. We are midway through the book, an edition I’ve chosen because it adheres to Hansberry’s original intentions with the play, scenes and words which are often deleted for schools—Mrs. Johnson, the word faggot, the n-word.
Before we encounter the slurs, I ask the students to have an honest conversation about each one, a practice I picked up from Matthew Kay’s book, Not Light But Fire. With the students, we have just covered a whole week of Black history from slavery to Civil Rights in our ELA classroom because this won’t be taught in their Civics classrooms as 8th graders. For each slur, I ask them to consider:
What does this word mean for you personally?
What images does this word conjure?
What is your relationship to the word?
Who gets to use it? Why?
If I have done my job as an educator—building trust and community within each classroom—there is an exchange of dialogue. Maybe there are some arguments, and eventually there’s a consensus that certain words are now reserved for certain communities because of the violences enacted on those communities by people who historically held positions of social power. Equally important, there’s a consensus that no one can give another person permission to use these words.
But, if the kids don’t like each other, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like themselves enough to speak, then the room stays quiet. One or two students may not be afraid to articulate their thoughts, in which case I will converse with those students. If no one speaks, I model my own relationship to these slurs, and hope that this can act as a guide for them.
Today we are approaching page 56, where Hansberry’s character, Walter, is about to call George’s shoes “faggoty.” George has more money than Walter. I warn the students before we see the word.
When I look over at Aiden, he has turned to Steven, his close friend. He is trying to grab Steven’s attention. He is smiling at the word faggot. I pause. I wait for his eyes to meet mine.
When they finally do, the room is quiet. Having worked with kids for over fifteen years, I have learned to perfect my death stare. Here, though, I can see it all: death stares back at me.
Equally important, there’s a consensus that no one can give another person permission to use these words.
Before I was a teacher, I was a writer. Working at a residential school with kids with developmental disabilities from 2008 until 2015, I learned to compartmentalize my creative life with my working one, and therefore, never bothered to create a pen name. During this time, earlier poems of mine focused largely around issues of class and mental illness. I think much of this preoccupation stemmed from the political climate of the time—Obama was president and the U.S. momentarily looked poised for movement in a direction of Queer inclusion, something I had craved since my early childhood.
I think, sometimes, about the poets of the New York School—O’Hara, Schuyler, Ashbery. Frank O’Hara’s poems were Queer. They were out. Ashbery, despite identifying as gay, read as much more cryptic. In a 1982 interview, Ashbery commented:
“There might be a lot of suppressed or sublimated eroticism in my poetry because, as I say, I write off of people whom I’m thinking about. Some of them are people to whom I’m sexually attracted. But I try to keep that quiet, not out of prudery, but just because it seems there are more important things, though I don’t yet know what they are.”
In 2021, Jay, an 8th grade boy, was teased for being effeminate. He was in another teacher’s ELA class, though I wish he had been placed in mine so as to protect him, at the very least, for fifty- five minutes a day. In one of my classes, we read “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury, and after discussing the protagonist, Margot, who is locked in a closet by her classmates, the conversation orbited around bullying. Some of the girls in the class started to share about “someone” who got teased for being gay.
“Well, he doesn’t even know he’s gay,” one girl tried to explain.
“If he hasn’t identified as gay, then we can’t be calling him that,” I said. This poor kid. “He’s fourteen,” I said with an exhaustion that felt both overworked and personal.
Jay had not yet stated to anyone that he was gay. He shouldn’t have to. And no one should be bullying him in the meantime. I came out when I was 21.
Jay had befriended one girl, whom another student, Darrell, then began dating. About 100 feet from campus, outside the town library, Darrell tackled Jay, shoved him with both hands to the concrete parking lot, wailed on his face with his fists. Jay left the scene bloodied, brushing off the small stones from the skin of his scraped knees.
Some faculty theorized that Jay was attacked because Jay is friends with Darrell’s girlfriend. Anyone who’s gay knew this was bullshit. It was a hate crime, and no one wanted to call it a hate crime because the school is wealthy and predominantly heterosexual and white, and therefore, runs on the electric pulse of Stepford.
Jay’s parents chose not to press charges. In the meantime, Jay’s teachers changed his schedule; not Darrell’s.
Later in the year, Darrell got in his third first fight. Besides a few in-school suspensions, nothing happened. By June, I emailed the district’s Director of Special Education and the Superintendent. “In my time in Special Education, I’ve seen students outplaced for worse. It is not safe here,” I wrote.
The district’s Director of Special Education replied that we could not discuss the matter because of “confidentiality.” I reminded her that Darrell was under all of our care—in fact, I was the primary English teacher for Darrell.
Around that same time, one boy hacked into Jay’s friend’s phone. He found a series of text messages with Jay that “proved” he was gay. That student shared these texts with his friends, all of whom were vying for the same alpha male status. When the guidance counselor interviewed both Jay and his friend, she chose not to tell the administration. Or the police.
Jay had not yet stated to anyone that he was gay. He shouldn’t have to.
What else do we bury? Ray Bradbury writes, “The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.” Margot, too, was locked in a closet.
In October of 2022, a math teacher arrived at my classroom door to tell me a group of boys had uncovered a reading of mine on YouTube in which I read poems that dealt specifically with Stonewall’s history. The boys, of course, were laughing. Karla, an educational assistant in the room, said, “Mr. Bonanni is a friend of mine. Do you even know what Stonewall was?” She ensured they knew. The room went quiet. I was thankful for Karla’s support, though still, a part of me wishes that the math teacher just wouldn’t have told me anything.
Back in September, some of the kids had googled me, found pictures of me reading poems, my author photo. They screenshotted them to their iPads, their phones. At first I didn’t know what happened to these photos. I found it creepy, but didn’t address it; let the teachers who know about it report it, I told myself. Let the administration handle it, there are more important things. When the principal approached me in October, she said that she’d taken away the culprits’ iPads.
“Was there anything homophobic?” I asked. It was hard for me to ask, but I knew enough to ask it. She told me there wasn’t, but she had been working at the school for three months, our fifth principal in three years. She was new and cisgender and heterosexual.
In February of 2023, they find, on one student’s TikTok account, videos he created using photos that he’s taken or found of his teachers. I am one of the targets. “Is there anything homophobic?” I ask again. No. Again, I won’t believe it. I ask to see them. I want my own copies.
I am called out of my last period class for an impromptu meeting. I fumble through papers, give instructions to a sub, and walk to the principal’s office. Two police officers are there sitting, next to three other teachers.
“You are allowed to have union representation,” the principal says to the teachers. Why would I need it? I did nothing wrong. No one asks for it.
At the principal’s large conference table, we sit down with the Orleans Police Department, and Detective J. tells us that there’s nothing criminal about the kid’s TikToks because there’s nothing sexual. The student had taken a picture of a science teacher bending over. When I tell them this is sexual, Officer J. says that it’s “arguable.” He says there’s not a pattern yet, even though this same student had shared my home address with other students in the beginning of the year. He says there’s nothing “threatening.” I am a rabbit in a corner.
“I don’t feel safe,” I tell the room. “And I want to know if there are guns in the home.”
In March of 2018 a technology teacher, hired at a neighboring elementary school within our district, had been found to be molesting children. It was in the local paper. Another special education teacher stepped into my class to check in. It had been awhile since we talked. Because we were both, at that time, within the silent, often ignored, world of special education within the building, we occasionally bonded over being left out of scheduling or a field trip or an assembly. When we began to talk about the horrific nature of the incident, she said she knew the child molester, and that she had met him before. Then she said, “We all knew he was gay.”
Did she not know the difference between gay and pedophilia? I didn’t correct her. She knew I was gay, I knew I was gay, and therefore, my place there must have been to ensure I am not to be confused with grooming, with a pedophile, so I just allowed her to talk. “Terrible,” I said.
II
During February break of 2023, I like some thirst traps on Twitter, now X, without fully realizing that when you like something on Twitter, the activity is public. Shirtless muscley blondes, hot Latinos, wet Black men, and cut Asian men pointing their hard dicks at the camera. Instagram fluent, but not Twitter fluent. This is why they call it a trap.
The students who stalked me find this. One voice says I brought this on myself. It was an amateur move. Unprofessional. How could I not know my likes were public? Okay, Boomer. But the embarrassment is not embarrassment because embarrassment is temporary. What is this feeling that shakes each muscle in my body? Shame. The blood moves into my face, and I shiver at night for a week while I ruminate over it.
Detective J. tells us that there’s nothing criminal about the kid’s TikToks because there’s nothing sexual.
When the kids talk about it in the new teacher’s math class, she tells me. I make the account private, then ‘unlike’ the thirst traps. How sad that good nudes got unliked.
I apply to a job that I know I will never get at a university in Boston.
I get a request to follow me by a fake teacher at the high school in the next town: it’s clearly another student trying to harass me. I follow them back, then block them. I make my Twitter public and write: Being a Queer educator is like being assaulted every day. The next day, I make the account private.
This is the same week that the state of Tennessee passes a law that outlaws drag shows. Close to a dozen bills just like it work their way through Republican led legislatures, as though a fire’s embers rise, propagate, then land on each capital courthouse steps. The same week, Biden’s student loan debt relief is challenged in the Supreme Court. I now have another 10 grand to pay back and a car with 160,000 miles on it. I start an application to teach at a prestigious private school, fooling myself into thinking that this will make it any better.
More fake accounts have requested to follow me. They all claim to be Asian men, which is the race of one of the thirst traps I had liked and which had been posted by my friend, a queer Chinese-American poet. Some of the fake accounts are more impressive than others in their homophobic racism.
One fake account pretends to be an Asian man who teaches at the public school in the next town. Another fake account pretends to be an Asian writer. Another account just says “I like farts.” One has some handywork. The person has doctored an Asian American man’s face onto people saying, “Me at my writers’ conference.”
Queer baiting by 14-year-old boys. I try to think of a time that this level of bullying and harassment occurred in my life. I remember it now: I was 14.
Alex Chee’s course description for the 2023 Summer Fine Arts Work Center Catalog reads:
“Self-censorship is pervasive for LGBTQ+ writers, whether we are considering being out at work or addressing intergenerational trauma. How can we recuperate what we have hidden even from ourselves — much less others — as we set out to write fiction, and how can we write about it meaningfully, without harming or re-traumatizing ourselves or others?”
His course is sold out by the beginning of March. I won’t attend. It’s too expensive on a teacher’s salary. That first weekend of March, I delete my Twitter account.
One of my favorite drag queens, Headda Lettuce, has a joke: What’s the difference between an onion and Ron Desantis? You don’t cry when you chop up Ron Desantis. The last time I saw Hedda Lettuce was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She belted out show tunes, insulted the audience, and paddled ping pong balls from beneath her skirt. On the same vacation, I dropped in to la farmacia to stock up on things I might need for later in the U.S., where everything requires a reason, an explanation, a prescription. I bought antibiotics and some variation of speed. I bought sixty dollars’ worth of Clonipin, an antianxiety medication doctors in the U.S. have been hellbent on controlling since the opiate epidemic ravaged our country. I smuggled the pills home in a Tylenol container in 2020, some still in a drawer somewhere. Surprisingly, the whole U.S. population is not all addicted to downers. But we’re not all pure either.
In March of 2023, my paranoia keeps me up at night. In my mind it plays out in the worst possible scenario: The kids will tell the other kids. Some kids will tell their parents. Maybe the parents won’t mind? Doubtful, it’s New England, where the Puritans landed and where their boat-shoed ancestors still reign in moral superiority. The parents will tell the administration. The administration will tell the Superintendent. They will get the lawyer. No one tells me, but I can feel the clock tick until I get called into an office to have my sit-down about professionalism. I could say the account was hacked. I could say one of the kids did it, that it was a fake account, which is the least believable. Shame rises through me like a snake, starting in my stomach and moving into my head. My blood flushes. At night I shiver.
I apply to more jobs. Fight, flight, freeze.
I take the Mexican Clonipin. I make an appointment with a nurse practitioner for antidepressants, SSRI’s I haven’t had to take since I was in college 15 years ago. When I was coming out. It comes to me when I make that appointment: I’m not here to inspire the next generation of writers. I’m here to survive.
Here’s a headline I saw: “Teacher Fired After Students Discover OnlyFans Account.” Apparently, she had filmed herself having sex with her husband, created an Only Fans, uploaded it for her followers under a different name, and students discovered it. The school administration then fired her. When they discovered that this teacher had performed sex for money, parents were “outraged.”
I consider how boundaries between coy posing and porn can blur—first a person posts their own thirst trap to Instagram, and then they get likes. They hit the gym more and work on their body. They post more thirst traps, they get more likes. They think: Maybe I could be an influencer. Maybe I could profit off of this somehow. What if that could get me the vacation I wanted this year? But when, exactly, do thirst traps become porn?
More importantly, why was my first reaction: At least I’m not her.
Why was my second reaction, Wait. This girl needed a side hustle. We all do.
In 1595, Shakespeare wrote a play titled Love’s Labor’s Lost which centers around three lords who are recruited by a king to study under him for three years. The conditions the king requires for the three-year period of study: one day of full fasting weekly, with only one meal on the other days.
I try to think of a time that this level of bullying and harassment occurred in my life. I remember it now: I was 14.
Each student must also only live on just three hours of sleep per night. The final condition? Celibacy. The lord Berowne says, “O these barren tasks, too hard to keep—/ Not see ladies, study, fast, not sleep.” The play is performed for Elizabeth I one Christmas. The play is a comedy.
It’s still March 2023, and I am losing sleep. My coping skills—running, meditation, writing—help with this, but the sleeplessness continues. I run 4-mile bursts outside or on the treadmill at the gym, but because my anxiety prevents me from eating adequately, it starts to feel like something akin to an eating disorder. I am 130 pounds as a 5 foot 8 inch 38 year old man. It’s a weight people strive for, but in all my burning, I can see in the mirror the way my jaw extends wider over my thinning neck.
I don’t report any of the fake Twitter accounts to the administration. Why? It’s cyber-harassment and it violates the school’s technology policy. The police could likely hunt down the IP addresses of these kids. But I liked a nude. I liked multiple nudes. If they know this, it’s a conversation about professionalism, and, in likelihood, one in which I apologize for thinking that my Twitter was private, or, one in which I lie and claim the account was made by a student, or lie even further and say that my account got hacked. I’m not sure what they know, what they’ve already hunted down. Perhaps they’re extending me a small forgiveness? Perhaps they understand that becoming the pariah of 8th grade boys is punishment enough for my actions? Perhaps they realize that, with my union, I can easily obtain a lawyer and call this exactly what it is: discrimination against someone for being too faggoty. And perhaps they know how much that costs. I certainly don’t.
I now realize why my tweets had more views—the students were viewing them—why my LinkedIn Profile kept “getting noticed.” Parents could have been googling me. For weeks I hope it will blow over. I don’t tell my partner or even my closest friend. I bury it. Like so many Queers are taught to do.
In Kansas in 2022, Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. won Teacher of the Year. After being warned not to discuss his identity with students, not to discuss “gay issues” in his high school classes, after bearing witness to harassment, after being harassed himself, Willie quit teaching. He wrote a book: Gay Poems for Red States.
I like to think that my situation is different, and it is, in that my environment is slightly less hostile: In Massachusetts, there would, at least, be conversation about whether it was homophobic or not to harass a Queer teacher. In Kansas, of course, in Appalachia, they just fire you. Willie’s administrators said, “We will not protect you,” on the subject of being an out teacher. “At least they were honest,” Willie says in an interview.
My administrators are actually required by law to protect me from homophobic harassment. Does that make me lucky? Should I be happier because of this? In so many ways, the similarities are there: I was searched out by kids. When they learned that I was gay, those kids made fun of me. I order Willie’s book.
When I talk to Willie about what happened, he says, “It’s a hate crime.”
Love’s Labor’s Lost, Shakespeare’s play about having to famish oneself through fasting, lack of sleep, and suppression of sexual desire, all for the trade-off of an education, is considered a comedy. But rather than everyone marrying at the end, as they do in most Shakespearean comedies, this play culminates when the Princess’s father dies. Shakespeare’s comedy about education, about famishment, about sexual repression, ends, instead, with death.
My biggest inner Queer wants to say I knew they were following me. I want to say, I knew my likes on Twitter were public. Seek me out? Stalk me? Make fun of a gay? Here. Try a nude. Fuck you. I did it on purpose. I really want to be that Queer. I’m not. At least not yet.
That Friday, I take my doctor’s appointment through telehealth. Parked at a state park, it is me and the pine trees and the Bluetooth and a decision to go on pills for my happiness.
I’m not here to inspire the next generation of writers. I’m here to survive.
“So you’re a teacher and you’re having some stress at work?” the PA asks.
“Yeah, I haven’t had this level of anxiety in a really long time,” I tell him.
“So we’re going to start you on small dose of 10 milligrams, and then we’ll up the dose to 20,” he says. “And for the anxiety, I have a script that I’ll send over to your pharmacy that’s non habit forming, take it over the weekend. Some people say it makes them tired, others say it makes them a little dazed. You’ll have to see.”
“Thanks,” I say, “I just need to get to June.”
“Sure thing. We can taper it off in the summer, and then, if you need to go back on it in September, we can taper you back on it. We’ll schedule your next appointment in four weeks to see how you’re doing.”
“Thanks,” I say. Back on antidepressants in September? Really? What kind of advice was that? Why didn’t he ask me if I had reached out to my support network? If I had a therapist? Have you thought of different jobs, John? Your transferrable skills? Is this how it all worked? You tell a doctor you’re a teacher, and they write you a script for whatever psych med you need to keep teaching? Power through it. 180 days; you can hack it or you can’t.
The anxiety medication gives me cotton mouth, dry eyes, and a hazey vision clouds my perception. When I look it up, it’s an antihistamine. Basically Benadryl. The first week on Celexa, my side effects are worse than anything I experienced the week prior: insomnia, hot flashes, panic attacks, headaches, fatigue, exhaustion. I almost abandon the med completely. The only times in my life I have taken an SSRI has had to do with the way the world perceived my sexuality. Coming out in the early aughts. Homophobia.
I read some Celexa reviews online and resolve to stay the course.
I stuff the Benadryl in my nightstand drawer, and pull out something stronger: that stash of Mexican Clonipin, smuggled here, just before our world shut down.
By the end of March 2023, Ron Desantis attempts to expand the Don’t Say Gay bill from its initial legislative K-3 to grades 4-12. If I taught in Florida, I couldn’t teach my curriculum: Sara Denizan’s short stories, The 57 Bus, the excerpts from The Men with the Pink Triangle.
Meanwhile, I have started a unit on literature of the Holocaust with my 8th graders, and, to provide appropriate context, I lecture about WWII history and Hitler’s rise to power for a week. I say, “In a democracy we must have free exchange of ideas. That’s why we can’t burn books here.”
My administrators are actually required by law to protect me from homophobic harassment.
“Unless you’re in Florida,” one of my students says.
“Or Texas,” another chimes in.
My heart and how it beats so. My heart, my heart.
I facetime my poet-friend, Michael Bondhus. He has written three books of very Queer, gender- bending poetry. When I tell him what happened, he relays a similar story about middle schoolers finding a picture on his MySpace. “This was after I had left the school though,” he says. He now works as a professor at a community college in New Jersey. He pauses for a moment. Looks up. He says, “Albert Camus says, ‘We must imagine Sisyphus happy.’”
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Berowne confesses his inability to suppress sexual attraction for the sake of his schooling: “From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive. They sparkle still the right Promethean fire. They are the books, the arts, the academes.”
I apply to a local private high school. The charter school in Hyannis. I apply to Phillips Andover Academy. I apply to Deerfield Academy. Boarding schools far, far away. I apply to a pharmaceutical company as a trainer—I think it’s a trainer? Once, when I worked at a residential school for children with comorbid disabilities, I was certified to distribute psychiatric medication. I put this on my resume.
Around this time, some of the writers I met when I was in Tahoe studying poetry decide we need a Zoom call. We pour ourselves a drink and check in about our writing. All of us, except one, is looking for another job. I tell them I have also been on a search for something else. It’s as though after holding it together during the pandemic, during lockdown, during remote learning, hybrid learning, in-person learning, policing masks and 3-foot distances, I am only now unraveling. I tell them I got cyberbullied this year. That a kid made a TikTok with my face that he had found off the internet, and that my administration did nothing. Not even an apology.
“That happened in my building,” another teacher says. “And all the teachers that were subjected to it quit.”
One of my friends is a UX Writer for a major bank. None of us know what this means, but she tells us to look into it: UX means user experience, where a writer would write for the tech, keeping in mind the ease of the user’s journey through that tech. She calls herself a glorified copywriter, works remotely, and shares her salary, which includes six digits none of us have ever dreamed of making. She emails all of us, then proceeds to walk us through the process of applying. She sends us an annotated job description that translates all the corporate- speak into language that reflects our transferrable skills.
“I might sell out,” I tell my friend, Keri. We had worked together at the same residential school for kids with disabilities and tonight we’re drinking boxed wine out of mugs. She has decided to quit her job as a special educator at a charter school outside Boston. “Sell out!” she says,“ “Then you can help me.”
I am only now unraveling. I tell them I got cyberbullied this year.
Once at that same residential school, Keri guided the kids and me through a meditation to help us find our “animal ally.” White people like us used to call these spirit animals before we realized how culturally appropriative it is to do so. Regardless, I very much believe that animal guides shift throughout the course of one’s life. In my twenties, a rabbit approached me in my meditation. The interpretation said, “Be careful to always have one foot out the door.” What I learned with my jobs: Always have one foot out the door.
By the end of April I take myself off the antidepressants completely. I go for long runs at the state park and try to avoid alcohol. Sometimes I can avoid alcohol.
Phillips Andover has hired someone else by May. I wasn’t their pedigree anyway, and the thought of having my life taken from me by a school—dorm parent, coaching, teaching—makes me wonder why I ever applied in the first place.
In one interview at a top ranked public school in Massachusetts, with an International Baccalaureate curriculum, I am asked to observe an English classroom. Watching from a chair in the back, I observe one student open up her homework and dual-screen between ChatGPT and her graphic organizer. She copies and pastes, then changes some words. Another student opens up his Chromebook, looks back at me, tilts his screen so I can’t see it. Two other students are deep into a discussion of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which I haven’t read since 9th grade. A few others are listening intently. It is a typical public school classroom. It is very much my current classroom. Read, arrive, take out your work, and let’s discuss it. It should be simple. It’s not.
We now compete with social media, which we know arrests development. We now compete with AI bots who write papers.
In May of 2023, an eighth grader named Bob gets sent out of his class by a substitute teacher. He feels slighted, and on his way out, he screams the word, “Faggot!” The art teachers hear it. The French teacher hears it. Sixth graders hear it.
Administrators will do nothing. There will be no “restorative task.” They will bury it because they are cisgendered and heterosexual and white and don’t fully comprehend that this language is inexcusable, even from a child.
He is not my student, but he has always said hello to me in the hallways. He is well- liked by his classmates, a good baseball player, and occasionally, goofy. When I see him walking out the door, I ask to talk to him. When I ask him about what had occurred, he denies it, lays the blame on the substitute, and, like most eighth graders, reaches slowly for creative excuse-making, brown eyes grasping toward the ceiling, showing clear signs of lying.
“You might not understand the violence or the history behind that word,” I tell him. “But when you use language like that, it hurts me. And it hurts this entire community,” I tell him. I am shocked at my ability to articulate, to educate, on something so personal. My eyes tear when I say it again, and in my head I am channeling so many. Sylvia Rivera. Harvey Milk. Frank Kameny. Pedro and Danny from the Real World: “When you use language like that, it hurts an entire group of people.”
The next day, a teacher approaches me to tell me Bob wants to talk to me. She steps back into her class, and we’re in a cold hallway with no else is around. “Mr. Bonanni,” he says, “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for what I said.”
I thank him. Peter Staley. Marsha P. Johnson. Mark Harrington. Vito Russo. Willie. Michael. It’s the most meaningful apology I’ve ever received in my life.
By June 2023, I have applied to be a UX Writer for an international bank. Like most jobs with any whim of hope, I know someone, or someone knows me. My friend has walked me through the application, provided feedback on my portfolio and my resume, which I cater to the position. I call my brother, a seasoned copywriter, and he tells me to “use the client as your editor,” to “maximize happy paths” and to “empathize with the user journey.” I learn the corporate lingo and try my best to speak it. And because of friends, there is a small hawk perched in a birch tree above the school where I work. He looks down, almost nodding.
III
At dinner, alone, on a Friday night in June, I answer the phone. It is a recruiter offering me a job as a UX Writer. I confirm the salary, a 15 percent raise, and tell him, “I’d like to accept.”
He is not my student, but he has always said hello to me in the hallways.
Love’s Labor Lost, the Shakespearean comedy that comments on learning and education, ends, unconventionally, in death. When I meet a British lit scholar at a museum in Provincetown, he tells me that Shakespeare knew full well that a comedy in 1500s Britain should have everyone married at the end. He wrote a comedic play that allowed people to laugh at the belief that in order to learn fully one must starve, chasten, and deprive themselves of rest. To learn, one must repress, repress, repress. The repression is the humor. All of the characters behave completely against their human nature. No one marries; the princess’ dad dies. But the play also ends with spring. Blooming. Nature. Shakespeare laughs at education’s demands to remove our natural instincts, and then concludes the whole comedy in birdsong.
To prepare them for their transition to high school, I read my students Charles Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart,” knowing full-well I won’t be back next year. Because of his misogyny I’m not particularly a Bukowski fan, but this one resonates. The poem begins:
your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. And continues: the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them.
I look over Thank You notes, gifts from old students, one Lego man that a student spray- painted with gold paint. I look over at the bookshelf Tyler made me in woodshop. It’s crooked and unfinished, but I’ll take it with me. I make one last trip to the laminator so I protect my National Poetry Month posters with a smooth sheen, to prevent their tearing and warping in my trunk. As I pack up my things, I have told no one that I won’t be returning. Those that know me suspect I won’t be back. Theresa, the science teacher, looks in my room. “It’s looking pretty sparse in here,” she says, and squints her eyes.
When we read aloud A Raisin in the Sun, the kids respectfully blank out Walter’s “faggoty” in every class, or at the very least, knowing enough to pause, say, “Can I say that word?” Every Walter I have taught well. “No one can give someone permission to say that,” I say, “we either understand its consequences or we don’t.”
One of my main discussion points that day, annotated in the margins of my copy of Hansbery’s play, is Walter’s insecurity. Why is he calling George’s shoes faggoty? Remember: Hansberry was a lesbian. Her word choices are precise here. I lead into this with very literal questions, followed by a deeper character analysis.
“Well he says that because he’s drunk,” Billy says.
“Okay, but I know plenty of people that drink and don’t use that language.”
“Because it’s the fifties,” Sally says, knowing full well that these terms were thrown around casually then.
“Maybe,” I say, “But what’s actually happening in the scene? I mean, with Walter? Summarize the dialogue.”
“He has just asked George to go into business with him—I mean, he’s not really asking George to do anything yet, but just, you know, to consider it.”
“Good. And then what does George do?”
“He totally blows him off. He is completely disinterested while he waits for Beneatha.”
This is usually the moment where kids start to call out, and I allow it, because I don’t want to interfere with the pacing of getting this out in the open.
“How does Walter feel about this?”
“Walter reads this as a rejection by someone that knows business, and so he responds by calling him a slur.”
“So what leads to the slur?”
“Not being able to go into business with someone rich.”
“Exactly. They call this projection in psychology: he calls him a faggot. In other words: ‘Who are you to insult my masculinity? You’re less masculine than me because, well, look at your shoes. You’re a girl.’ The biggest insult you can call a man is to call him gay because gay people aren’t considered men; in fact they’re dehumanized. In the fifties you’d lose your job, family, and housing for being gay. How does George respond?”
“Good night, Prometheus.”
“And what does this say?”
“I’m smarter than you.”
“Yes! George not only insults Walter by calling him Prometheus, an ironic Greek allusion about him saving the family—he also insults Walter’s intelligence with this allusion that flies straight over his head. He’s basically saying that power, and masculinity, in this society relies on a person’s intelligence, and that Walter really has none.”
As I pack up my things, I have told no one that I won’t be returning.
This is where I bring it home for those in the back, those who use these words casually, those who tease Jay, those who make TikToks with my face on them, those laughing at my Twitter account.
“In other words: You can call me whatever you want, but if I have more education than you, then I technically have more opportunity, and I will always have more power.”
Bukowski’s poem ends:
you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.
In June of 2023, I stare at the walls of my empty classroom. Students have stacked desks in the back of the room. The empty bulletin board held tight to a few staples puncturing rips of paper. The once clean, shellacked floor bounces sunlight and my own reflection. I glance out the small basement window, then take note of all the floor’s scratches.
“Goodnight, Prometheus.”
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