Sex Education

Sexuality, Society and Learning

ISSN: 1468-1811 (Print) 1472-0825 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csed20

Gay and lesbian literature disrupting the

heteronormative space of the high school English
classroom

Kirsten Helmer

To cite this article: Kirsten Helmer (2016) Gay and lesbian literature disrupting the
heteronormative space of the high school English classroom, Sex Education, 16:1, 35-48, DOI:
10.1080/14681811.2015.1042574

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2015.1042574

Published online: 02 Jul 2015.

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 Sex Education, 2016
Vol. 16, No. 1, 35–48, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2015.1042574

Gay and lesbian literature disrupting the heteronormative space

of the high school English classroom
Kirsten Helmer*

Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies: Language/Literacy/Culture, College of

Education, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
(Received 1 June 2014; accepted 15 April 2015)
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This paper offers insights into how the teaching of queer topics in English language arts
classes can be reframed by bridging the goals, practices and conceptual tools of queer
theory to literacy teaching. Drawing on an ethnographic classroom study, which
explored a 13-week high school Gay and Lesbian Literature course, this paper
discusses how teaching an English literature curriculum centred on the voices and
stories of LGBTQI people constitutes a meaningful site for learning and teaching.
In the process, I show how a queer-themed literature curriculum not only intervenes
disruptively into the heteronormative space of school through its content but also
through pedagogical practices that open up new lines of thinking for understanding
diverse sexualities and genders. Through vignettes from the classroom, I illustrate how
queer moments were enacted in this high school course as the class (a) deconstructed
literary and media texts; (b) used moments of discomfort for learning; (c) produced
counter-narratives through creative acts; and (d) engaged in experiential learning
activities that troubled commonsense understandings of sexuality, sex and gender. The
paper aims to provide educators and administrators with ideas on how a comprehensive
queer-inclusive English literature curriculum can be implemented in high schools.
Keywords: LGBTQ; queer pedagogy; queer literacies; English language arts;
secondary education; USA

Amazing. Everyone needs a class like this. (Jenna)

It’s the most relevant and therefore the most interesting English class that I have taken.
(Denise)
This class has been an absolutely phenomenal experience! Although my life revolves around
gayness and it is certainly not a new topic for me, I have never been able to discuss it in a
school setting. (Dominik)
What happens when high school students are afforded the opportunity to engage with a
queer-themed literature curriculum over the course of a school term? The above student
quotations powerfully show how relevant such a curriculum may be for young people.
Drawing on a larger ethnographic classroom study, this paper explores how teaching an
English literature curriculum centred on the voices and stories of LGBTQI1 people
constitutes a meaningful site for learning and teaching for high school students. In the
process, I will show how the conceptual tools that queer theory offers can promote
pedagogical shifts that will allow teachers and students to engage with diverse sexualities
and genders in new and productive ways, opening up new lines of thinking and
understanding.

*Email: khelmer@educ.umass.edu

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2
36 K. Helmer

It is increasingly recognised that ‘Queer theory offers educators a lens through which
educators can transform their praxis’ (Meyer 2007, 15). But, how do we develop queer
praxis, particularly in high school classrooms? Much of the literature on sexualities and
gender diversity in such classrooms represents general calls by scholars and educators for
curriculum changes or offers strategies that seek to make classrooms more inclusive of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students and their concerns and
needs (e.g. Blackburn and Buckley 2005; Killoran and Pendleton Jiménez 2007; Spurlin
2000). In particular, English language arts classrooms have been envisioned as
transformational spaces in which students can learn sensitivity to diversity and work
against stereotypes as they consider perspectives and experiences different from their own
through their engagement with gay- and lesbian-themed literature (e.g. Blazar 2009;
Comment 2009; Schall and Kauffmann 2003). Such a focus on changing students’
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perceptions of and attitudes towards lesbian and gay people in positive ways through an
LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum has been critiqued. As a result, additional lines of research
have sought to explore a queering of curriculum and pedagogy; however, it is often from a
theoretical perspective and without providing clear examples of pedagogical practices
from actual classrooms (e.g. Kumashiro 2002; Meiners and Quinn 2012; Pinar 1998;
Rodriguez and Pinar 2007). Yet other scholars exploring the queering of reading practices
as pedagogical interventions against heteronormativity in schools and beyond have
examined mainly out-of-school contexts (e.g. Blackburn 2012; Blackburn and Clark 2011;
Blackburn and Smith 2010), focused on the elementary school level (e.g. Atkinson,
DePalma, and No Outsiders Project 2010; DePalma and Atkinson 2008, 2009; Schall and
Kauffmann 2003) or explored a queering of literacy practices particularly through the use
of children’s literature (e.g. Cumming-Potvin and Martino 2014; Martino and Cumming-
Potvin 2011; Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth 2013; Ryan, Patraw, and Bednar 2013;
Threlkeld 2014). To date, few reports exist that explore classrooms in which students
engage with LGBTQ-themed texts or topics in a sustained fashion over a longer time
period (Blazar 2009; Sieben and Wallowitz 2009; Young 2009).
This paper builds on and extends the work of these writers through an exploration of
how queer praxis was enacted in a high school English literature class, illustrating how
queer moments surfaced as high school students engaged with queer texts. It presents some
of the findings from an empirical study that examined a 13-week high school literature
course titled Gay and Lesbian Literature.2 In particular, this paper investigates how the
following pedagogical practices in the Gay and Lesbian Literature class queered the space
of the high school English classroom: deconstructing subtext, using discomfort as a
catalyst for learning, producing counter-narratives through creative acts and engaging
students in experiential learning activities that trouble commonsense understandings of
sexuality and sexual identities.

Theoretical framework
The teaching of sexualities and gender diversity in schools can be conceptualised through
various theoretical frameworks and approaches that have different underlying practices,
goals and conceptual tools, such as multicultural education, critical pedagogy, social
justice education, queer pedagogy and anti-oppressive education (DePalma and Atkinson
2008, 2009; Kumashiro 2002; Meyer 2010; Nieto and Bode 2012; Pinar 1998; Rodriguez
and Pinar 2007; Spurlin 2000). In this paper, I explore how the teaching of LGBTQI-
themed literatures and texts can be reframed by bridging the goals, practices and
conceptual tools of queer theory to critical literacy teaching. Drawing upon queer
 Sex Education 3
37

theorising which emphasises the discursive, relational and performative production of

identifications (Butler 1990; Meyer 2007, 2010; Youdell 2005, 2009), it is my intention to
open up spaces for new imaginaries for teaching issues around norm-disruptive sexualities
and genders as well as social justice in schools (DePalma and Atkinson 2008, 2009).
Stories are powerful and can provide transformational reading experiences through the
imaginative connections they provide. Reading queer-themed literature with high school
students can offer students metaphorical mirrors that offer possibilities for ‘identification
through representation’, windows that seek to ‘expand’ students’ understandings of the
world as they ‘go beyond themselves’ and doors that invite students to critically engage
with ‘the ideologies embedded in literature’ (Botelho and Rudman 2009, 265). However,
it matters how teachers engage students with such literature. I propose that the assumed
tension between critical education approaches and queer theory can be productive,
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specifically, in the area of literacy teaching where bringing critical and queer pedagogies
to bear on each other can provide students with alternative reading experiences.
By queering literacy practices, English language arts classrooms can become spaces in
which not only homophobia but hetero- and cisnormativity are interrogated, challenged
and potentially disrupted. This means moving beyond reading practices that continue to
teach about or for the ‘other’ towards readings that trouble privileging/othering practices
as well as commonsense hegemonic constructions of normative sexualities, genders and
sexes. It is through the representative function of literary texts in conjunction with a
critical analysis of how the texts discursively construct realities, identities, differences and
subject positions for readers that queer’s discursive and performative approach to
transformation connects with critical education’s identity-based approaches in relation
to literacy education.

Methodology
This paper presents findings from a larger qualitative case study in which I explored the
classroom as a learning and ‘interpretative community’ in which the students as readers
and members of the class ‘make sense of texts and their interpretations of those texts
collectively’ (Wallace 2003, 5). It was guided by ethnographic practices to provide
a ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of the classroom discourse and interactions around a
teacher and her high school students’ engagement with a Gay and Lesbian Literature
curriculum.
During the spring term from March to June of the school year 2012– 2013, I observed
three to four class sessions per week, conducted interviews with the teacher and the
students, asked students to complete two questionnaires and collected numerous artefacts,
such as the teacher’s master’s thesis which serves as the curriculum guide, class handouts,
readings and the work students produced. For the purposes of this paper, I draw in
particular on my observations, the transcribed recordings of class sessions and student-
produced work to examine how students’ creative acts became queer acts. The analysis of
‘empirical materials’ (Denzin 2013) followed a modified grounded theory approach as part
of a recursive research process to generate overarching themes through a multiphase
process of coding and interpretation (Charmaz 2006; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011).

Research site and participants

The research took place at a public regional high school in Western New England
that offers Gay and Lesbian Literature as an elective English literature course for 11th and
 4
38 K. Helmer

12th grade students (ages 17 –18 years) who have completed their English language arts
requirements. Depending on scheduling, up to 150 students per year can take the class.
Sara,3 a veteran teacher with nearly 15 years of teaching experience, whose classroom I
observed, is not only the main teacher for the class but she also designed the curriculum
and has taught the course since its first implementation in 2002. As an ‘out’ lesbian teacher
and long-term advisor of the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, Sara performs important anti-
homophobia and anti-heterosexism work at her school.
During the spring term 2013, 24 students were enrolled in the course, most of whom
(17 students) identified as heterosexual/straight. This is significant because much of the
literature focuses on the impact queer-themed curricula have on LGBTQ-identifying
students while ‘straight’-identifying students are often framed as homophobic or resistant
to engaging with LGBTQ topics, which offers only certain, limiting, reading positions for
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these students (Clark and Blackburn 2009). However, almost all of Sara’s students
mentioned that they had LGBTQ-identifying friends, and a considerable number of them
(11 students) had LGBT-identifying family members. Almost half of the students in the
class had deeply personal connections to LGBTQ issues through the experiences with their
family members. This shines a light on the relevance a queer-themed curriculum holds for
large numbers of students beyond the smaller number of students who identify as LGBTQ
themselves.

The Gay and Lesbian Literature course

Schools as micro-social environments are sites where social identities around gender and
sexuality are developed and negotiated, and normative notions of masculinity and
femininity are practised, actively produced or contested (Tharinger 2008). Particularly,
high schools are places where young people experience ‘the meanings of various social
locations and non/dominant social positioning by class, ethnicity, disability, sexuality,
gender, and race’ (Bertram, Sue Crowley, and Massey 2010, 3). It is in the everyday life of
schools that homophobia, hetero-/cissexism and hetero-/cisnormativity are routinely and
performatively constituted and regulated (Gorski, Davis, and Reiter 2013).
The Gay and Lesbian Literature class intervenes disruptively into the heteronormative
space of a high school. While reinforced by an institutional culture in the form of two
policy frameworks that support teaching and learning through an anti-oppressive
framework – the school has developed a Vision of Multicultural Education and a Social
Justice Commitment which explicitly include sexual identity – the class still occupies a
special position. The following statement by a student is exemplary here:
It’s the only course of its kind being offered at a public high school. So it definitely queers the
general English class because it’s all, you know, they’re all gay books. And some of them are
very explicit. And you don’t read explicitly gay things in high school generally. So,
I definitely think it queered the class. Yeah. ‘cause it’s a new topic that most English classes
don’t focus on. Don’t even go close to covering, you know. They don’t. I’ve never read a book
with a gay character in any other English class in high school. They’re all in that one class. I’d
definitely say that’s queering the English class. This curriculum. (Dominik, Interview, 10
January 2014)
However, having a course like the Gay and Lesbian Literature class also normalised
talking about LGBT topics, something highly unusual within an institutional context in
which issues around sexuality are generally tabooed. As Emily pointed out:
A lot of people want to take this class. It’s like the most sought-after class, you know. And I
think the fact that people do take it and enjoy it and then recommend it to other people,
it becomes just this kind of normal thing. And it’s this good class that everyone wants to take.
 Sex Education 39
5

So I feel like it definitely affects the school as well, ‘cause people want to talk about this stuff
and once they do that it spreads to their friends, too. (Interview, 29 May 2013)
As a special topics elective, available only to students who have fulfilled the general
English requirements for graduation, the Gay and Lesbian Literature course is further
positioned outside of prescribed curriculum frameworks, which opens up spaces
for pushing the boundaries of curriculum and pedagogical practices. This is reflected
in Sara’s approach to her curriculum design as documented in her master’s degree
thesis:
Curriculum is more about teachers fully educating their students – intellectually, spiritually,
and emotionally – than it is about educators following a script . . . . Since this is the case,
teachers must constantly push the boundaries of curricular norms and expectations in order to
satisfy their students’ true curiosity. The curriculum I came to design reveals my own pushing
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of boundaries, not only in its controversial subject matter but also in its corresponding
activities that ask students to insert personal voice again and again, to design projects of
interest to them, and to attempt to better understand justice and equality through literature.
(Barber-Just 2002, 3)
Sara developed the curriculum for the Gay and Lesbian Literature class as part of a
master’s degree thesis in 2002 coming from an explicit feminist and activist stance
committed to transformational education, specifically as ‘a multicultural, anti-oppression
curriculum’ (Barber-Just 2002, 2). Sara believes in the transformative potential of a
curriculum that does not seek to ‘implant knowledge’ but that is ‘voice- and experience-
based’ and utilises ‘performative classroom pedagogy’. For Sara, this means ‘opening up’
and ‘integrating personal voice and experience into the classroom’ while also ‘moving
beyond the self’ through open dialogue (Barber-Just 2002, 29). This voice- and
performance-centred pedagogical approach was critical in queering the space of the Gay
and Lesbian Literature class beyond the queer-themed literary content. It afforded students
opportunities to engage with the class texts in ways that produced queer moments which
troubled heteronormativity.
Modelling the class after two courses that had already been well established at her
school – African-American Literature and Women in Literature – Sara took a historical
approach to her curriculum design. Organised around several focal novels, students in
the Gay and Lesbian Literature course encounter the stories, experiences, cultures,
histories and politics of LGBTQ people through a literary journey from the early 1900s
to the 1990s.4 In choosing the focal texts, Sara selected novels of literary merit that
‘address more complex themes’ and ‘move beyond the “coming out/coming of age”
genre’ common to young adult literature because she wanted to create a rigorous class
that would stand up to the high standards at her school, especially because she was
designing a controversial course (Interview, 14 February 2011). The course begins by
challenging students to read queerly Cather’s (1923) novel A Lost Lady as they are
asked to deconstruct the text’s lesbian subtext. This is followed by the reading of
Giovanni’s Room written by Baldwin (1956) through a psychological framework.
Students then encounter in Brown’s (1973) novel Rubyfruit Jungle a groundbreaking
work of feminist lesbian fiction that provides a disruptive counter-narrative and radical
rethinking of female sexuality and gender. Cunningham’s (1998) Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel The Hours moves students to reconsider the defining status of same-sex desires
and relationships.
While these focal novels provided the anchor points for the course, the students’
engagement with the multiple other texts of the course – documentaries, movies,
magazine articles or Internet resources – as well as the varying learning experiences and
 640 K. Helmer

course projects added a critical layer to their learning. As Sara pointed out, this curriculum
‘reveals my own pushing of boundaries, not only in its controversial subject matter but
also in its corresponding activities’. And, while Sara’s pedagogy and curriculum were
decidedly not queer in their intent and planning, the following examples of classroom
interactions and student projects show that the Gay and Lesbian Literature class offered
many opportunities for students to queerly engage with the curriculum.

Reading beneath the surface and deconstructing subtext

The Gay and Lesbian Literature course begins by challenging students to read queerly by
‘digging beneath the surface of the text’ (Sara) through the intersecting texts that students
encounter during the first unit of the course. Linking the texts of this unit is the
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deconstructive literacy work students are asked to perform. Such deconstructive reading
practices engage students in analytical processes where questioning assumptions
and asking critical questions perform important work in disrupting hegemonic discourses
that structure knowledge about sexuality, sex and gender. Deconstructive reading
practices demand that students explore how ‘texts are constructed by interrogating and
denaturalising the text’s manifold assumptions’ (Giffney 2009, 7) as readers pay attention
to textual presence as well as absences, silences, secrets and exclusions.
Students began to engage in deconstructive reading practices as they read Willa
Cather’s novel A Lost Lady through its hidden lesbian sub-text that appears when readers
consider a literary gender switch of one of the characters. As Sara explained to her
students, ‘One way to tell the homoerotic story was to change the gender of one of the
characters, to create a heterosexual fac ade to mask homosexual desire.’ Sara opened up the
queer potential of A Lost Lady by scaffolding students’ developing deconstructive reading
practices through deconstructions of the rich symbolism of the novel. Asking her students
to consider that one of the characters was indeed a girl – ‘Did you all think Niel is a boy?
. . . Niel could never be a little girl or even a masculine little girl, so [Cather] made him
more a feminine little boy’ – she directly challenged her students’ heteronormative reader
expectations and a ‘straight’ reading of the text.
Learning to pay attention to the silences and hidden meanings of this literary text
allowed students then to use deconstructive reading practices also in relation to the
everyday texts they encounter through the media. Today, media culture is one of the most
dominant forces in US society. Students appropriate representational resources from the
language and images of television, videos, movies, magazines, the Internet, popular music
and more (Comber 2001). Youths’ knowledge and appreciation of popular culture and the
media, therefore, is an important resource for building queered literacy lessons. A starting
point for students can be to recognise and analyse stereotypical representations of LGBTQ
people in film, on TV, on the Internet or in advertisements.
In the Gay and Lesbian Literature class the students began this work when they
watched the documentary The Celluloid Closet (Hefner et al. 2001), which traces the
history of representations of LGBTQ people in Hollywood films from the 1920s to the
1990s. Watching this film not only offered a historical frame for students to understand
how representations of LGBTQ characters in film developed over time but it also allowed
them to critically analyse how movies as cultural texts construct same-sex desires and
relationships and transgressive gender performances, and how these constructions function
to marginalise LGBTQ people. Students were surprised to discover the hidden queer
subtexts of many films and they started to realise how movies contribute to the oppression
of LGBTQ people by perpetuating negative stereotypes that either ridicule or demonise
 Sex Education 7
41

them (e.g. through the images of the campy caricature of the ‘sissy’, the ‘creepy misfit’
or the ‘twisted villain/predator’). During the post-viewing film discussion, students applied
such deconstructive readings to other movies, as the following analysis of the
representation of a gay character in the James Bond movie Skyfall illustrates:
Student 1: When I saw him I was like, wow it’s kind of impressive that they made a gay guy
have so much power and be so violent. I guess before in movies I saw only the sissy who
doesn’t have much control over others.
Student 2: I was gonna add on to that. He like shot someone straight in the head without
blinking. And he challenged James Bond being not masculine anymore. You’re weak, you’re
not masculine anymore. He was challenging his, thinking about it right now, he was
challenging his heterosexuality.
Students’ analyses of this movie scene demonstrate their developing understanding of
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representational politics in film that construct powerful characters in ways that are
sexualised and gendered. Their surprise that a gay man was depicted as having power and
being violent, which threatened the masculinity and heterosexuality of the straight
character, helped them realise how sexuality and gender are intersecting relations of
power.
Even more powerful than watching the film was the major assignment of this unit
which asked students to conduct a media awareness project called Gay Notions. The
purpose of this assignment was for students to increase their awareness and to critically
analyse images and ideas they encounter about LGBTQ people in their daily lives.
Students collected four observations, described and interpreted these in an essay, and
presented one example using a visual to the class. It was compelling to see students’
critical deconstruction of media texts, which allowed them to develop a more nuanced
understanding of media representations of LGBTQ people. Students identified negative
and troubling representations; for example, one of the characters in the children’s cartoon
PowerPuff Girls (‘Him’) is shown as ‘a cross-dressing devil thing and he’s a really bad
guy and he’s really gay’. They recognised many stereotypes attached to lesbian women in
the character of Ursula in the Disney movie The Little Mermaid, based on her appearance
(husky, deep voice; stereotypical lesbian haircut; purple clothing), life choices (living
alone, separate from any community) and her attempts to seduce Ariel (‘This whole scene
. . . she’s like trying to seduce Ariel . . . It seems like she’s clearly into her’). Students also
displayed a sophisticated understanding of the often ambiguous messages of media texts,
troubling seemingly positive representations. Students recognised the homonormative
approach of the Kindle5 commercial that features a gay male couple. Although students
saw the commercial as ‘proof that society in general is more accepting of gay rights and
gay equality’, they critiqued that this only happens in the context of ‘big companies like
Amazon and . . . Apple [ . . . ] now recognising gay people as a new consumer category’.
Moreover, students identified that commercials, such as the Kindle one, only represent a
specific part of the LGBTQ population: ‘white and married’ and ‘just like straight people’.
As one of the students said, ‘It’s family-oriented. It’s like, they’re married, they’re
wholesome.’
As these examples from the classroom show, the intertextual approach of reading a
literary text alongside media texts through a deconstructive lens as well as taking a
historical approach that showed students similarities and shifts in LGBTQ representations
in texts, allowed students to develop more critical and queerly informed reading practices.
However, engaging students with such alternative reading practices might also produce
moments of emotional discomfort and/or cognitive dissonance, but these moments can
become important catalysts for learning.
 842 K. Helmer

Entering into and engaging with moments of discomfort

In the following unit, Sara’s students were brought up close with the effects the oppressive
construction of same-sex desire can have on gay people. In Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s
Room, readers are confronted with the internal struggles of a gay man of the 1950s who
goes through feelings of shame, guilt, denial and avoidance in response to his same-sex
desires. Sara set the stage for this unit by introducing students to the notion of internalised
homophobia and by familiarising students with key terminology and concepts, such as
heterosexism and heteronormativity. Such preparatory work with students is necessary,
especially when a novel, like Giovanni’s Room, works with troubling language and images
to convey the struggles of its protagonist because it means having to engage student
readers with their own internalised prejudices. This may produce moments of discomfort
or even crisis as students encounter their own complicity with oppressive thinking.
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However, instead of shying away from such discomforting moments, teachers should
embrace them as catalysts for learning and provide opportunities for students to enter and
work through such discomfort or crisis (Kumashiro 2002).
In the Gay and Lesbian Literature class, one such moment of discomfort occurred
around the reading of a truly troubling scene in Giovanni’s Room in which the protagonist
David describes the drag queens in a bar that he visits as ‘les folles . . . screaming like
parrots’, an example of ‘utter grotesqueness’ which makes David ‘uneasy perhaps in the
same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people’s
stomachs’ (Baldwin 1956, 26– 27). During the class discussion of this scene, students
experienced considerable discomfort when they began to realise that David’s repulsion,
expressed through his crude depiction of the drag queens, is not so different from their own
reactions in response to gender transgressions. Students’ responses during the class
conversation were characterised by silences, hesitations, nervous laughter, and verbal
manoeuvring as the following excerpt shows:
Sara: How many of you think you have that reaction, sort of like these are good gay people and
these are bad gay people? . . . Do you have, maybe not that disgust, but do you think about gay
people being in categories of like socially acceptable based on how they act?
Rachel [shrugging her shoulder]: A little bit. Maybe.
Sara: Will you talk about it? [Rachel laughs but doesn’t say anything] Don’t be shy. Who
does? Come on. Who does? [silence] Anyone? [silence] Yes.
Denise: Well. I feel like in general drag queens are like really, I think people, yeah, either men
or women who cross-dress are a little less socially acceptable. People feel a little more
uncomfortable around them because it’s more extreme than like the gay best friend that
everyone wants to be with. But, yeah, I think it’s just more extreme.
Casey: Sometimes the difference for me is that I’m not disgusted or anything by it. But, if
someone is just gay, I’m, if they’re really out and flamboyant about it and like really dressed
differently, that’s what’s on my mind. You know what I mean. It’s not, I’m like, it’s fine,
another part of them, it’s not the main thing about the person for me. And it’s not really a bad
thing but it’s just like, I don’t know, not like a regular person who happens to be gay.
Here, students clearly distinguished between acceptable gay people who perform in
normative ways and the ‘less socially acceptable’ ones who transgress gender norms.
Students’ reactions (Rachel’s laugh and refusal to respond), their verbal manoeuvrings
(‘it’s not really a bad thing’, ‘I’m not disgusted or anything by it but . . . ’) and their choices
of words (’more extreme’, ‘not like a regular person who happens to be gay’) show
students’ discomfort as they wrestled with the tension between wanting to position
themselves as not homophobic and their dawning realisation that they held prejudicial
 Sex Education 9
43

ideas about gay people. Sara engaged with her students’ discomfort by offering them a
different kind of reading of gender-transgressive performances:
I think people tend to go into two categories when they are greeted with extreme flamboyance
and gender play. They’re either like this is so awesome. Wow, this is really pushing the norms
of gender. And other people are like, that is really uncomfortable. That is disgusting or
whatever. You know, that’s people’s reaction when they go to Provincetown. People are
either, this is such a party. I love it here. Or they’re like, this is not appropriate. Those lesbians
with their shaved heads riding motorcycles without a shirt on. No, this is not good. And other
people are like, you go, girls. What do you think?
While students did not respond directly to what the teacher said, Sara’s story invited
them to consider multiple responses to gender transgression. In a powerful move, by
flipping ‘disgust’ into how ‘gender play’ and ‘pushing the norms of gender’ are
‘awesome’, Sara offered an alternative reading. Naming cross-dressing as ‘gender play’,
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Sara provided a queer reading that emphasised the playful, performative aspects of non-
conforming gender behaviours and expressions. In so doing, Sara not only troubled her
students’ thinking but also offered an alternative which opened up the possibility for
unlearning harmful oppressive thinking.
Harmful discourses about norm-disruptive sexualities and genders can also be
challenged through literary counter-narratives. In the Gay and Lesbian Literature class,
students not only encountered texts that served as counter-narratives by providing positive
representations of same-sex desires, relationships and identities but they also produced
their own counter-narratives.

Producing counter-narratives through creative acts

It matters how teachers engage their students with queer texts so that students can enter into
critical conversations. One way to generate thought-provoking queer moments in the
classroom is by having students produce counter-narratives, for example, through creative
responses to literary texts. The creative act can be seen as a queer act within the restricted
space of schooling because it shakes up how students make meaning and allows new ways of
thinking to emerge. As such, a creative act is a ‘social, political, intellectual, aesthetic and
personal process’ (Rifà-Valls 2011, 3). Cartwright and Noone (2006) call creative learning
experiences ‘imaginative moments’ that create free spaces for ‘reconsideration/reformula-
tion/renaming’ (7). In the Gay and Lesbian Literature class, the final project for the unit on
Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room was to respond in a creative way to the novel. Creative projects
allowed students to ‘tell a whole other story’ (Sara) through art, performance and creative
writing that opened up spaces for reimagining same-sex love, desire and relationships.
Through students’ work queer moments of ‘reconsideration/reformulation/renaming’
surfaced as students presented projects through which they ‘moved beyond the self to
begin to see life from others’ eyes, to feel for those they only thought they knew’ (Barber-Just
2002, 31). While Giovanni’s Room can be ‘a painful read, as it depicts gay men as predatory,
self-centred, and overly sexualised’ (Barber-Just 2002, 111), the students in their projects
offered counter-narratives that spoke back to the negativity of the novel.
One of the most striking projects was a multi-layered two-sided flip book that visually
represented the multiple, intersecting psychological and emotional layers of the novel and
its main characters.6 In her flip-book, Lara provided a powerful counter-narrative by
offering a telling of same-sex love and desire that allows for positive self-actualisation
through self-acceptance, unlike in the novel where David, the protagonist, remains trapped
in a self that he cannot accept. Lara commented when presenting the flip-book, ‘he has the
key to . . . help himself . . . . The key to acceptance is willingness.’
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44 K. Helmer

Other students chose to put themselves into the place of one of the characters, allowing
them to develop perspective taking and empathy. These were risky choices as students
adopted lesbian- or gay-identified personas in their projects. For example, Brandon wrote a
poem in which he writes from Giovanni’s perspective: ‘Sitting on the edge of my bed, the
sheets still warm from David’s body. . . . I fixed the room for us, for him. I feel no shame
nor regret. I have found strength where he could not . . . ’ Another straight-identifying
male student, Justin, likewise slipped into the role of Giovanni as he played the guitar and
sang a love song, addressed to David, in front of the whole class: ‘ . . . Your image burned
in my mind. It hurts. I can’t see straight. Oh, you vanished too fast. You can’t run from
your past. David, I need you. Alone. Hopeless. Trying so hard to feel what I miss. I miss
you so. Come home soon. Why can’t it just be me and you. . . . ’ Both the poem and the
song present counter-narratives to dominant notions about male gay sexuality as deviant,
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abnormal, sick and hypersexual. The students’ narratives allow the listener to develop
empathy with this ‘gay’ man as they feel through the words his pain and hurt because he
has been left by the person he loves.
The students’ projects deeply humanised what it means to be gay and it demonstrated
their openness and willingness to reimagine same-sex sexuality, desire and relationships.
As a result, these students’ creative acts and performances profoundly queered the space
of this English classroom. Yet, such queer moments in a high school classroom can be
fleeting if students do not have opportunities to further trouble harmful commonsense
knowledge of sexuality and gender. Experiential learning activities that queer
understandings of sexuality and sexual identities can be powerful tools in further
disrupting the heteronormative spaces of schooling.

Engaging students in experiential learning activities

In the Gay and Lesbian Literature class, a learning activity created by bi-activist
and educator Robyn Ochs (Ochs and Murphy 2013) was very productive in queering
students’ understandings of sexuality. ‘Beyond Binaries: Seeing Sexual Diversity in the
Classroom’ is a lesson that provides participants with an opportunity to experience the
diversity and fluidity of sexuality both kinetically and visually as they move their positions
on a line in response to the answers on a questionnaire. The activity further complicates
‘commonsense’ understandings of descriptors like ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ which suggest a
straightforward way of labelling people’s sexual orientation by asking participants to
respond to questions around attractions, fantasies, sexual experiences and romantic/
emotional attractions. In the Gay and Lesbian Literature class, this activity became a
powerful queer moment of learning, especially because it was facilitated by one of the
students who had participated in one of Ochs’s workshops at a large LGBTQ youth
conference. Mara, the student, introduced the activity to her fellow students by challenging
binary understandings of sexuality as she familiarised them with various models for
measuring sexual orientation (Kinsey Scale, the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, Storms
scale). Then, she explained how identities are relational intersectional constructs, saying,
‘The truth is that identities are words. They take their meaning relative to other words . . . .
The truth is that every person is different, every person is unique, even within the same
identity, there’s a lot of variation.’ Finally, she pointed to the limitations of labels and
categories, emphasising, ‘All identities are correct. All self-identifications are normal
and healthy.’ After participants had completed the questionnaire, Mara collected, shuffled
and then re-distributed the anonymous sheets among the participants to ensure
confidentiality. In Sara’s class, there was a lot of movement in response to the questions.
 Sex Education 11
45

It was eye-opening for students to see how sexual diversity played out in their own
classroom and how the theoretical notion of a sexuality spectrum became visible through
this activity. This experiential learning activity created a powerful queer moment through
which commonsense notions about sexual identity and the illusion of the ‘straight’
classroom were productively disrupted.

Discussion and conclusion

This paper has illustrated with classroom vignettes that a queer-themed literature
curriculum not only intervenes disruptively into the heteronormative space of school
through its content – the queer-themed literature read with the students – but maybe even
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more importantly through pedagogical practices that open up spaces for queerly
reimagining sexuality and gender. Throughout the Gay and Lesbian Literature class,
students began to develop more complex understandings of norm-disruptive sexualities
and genders as they deconstructed subtexts in literary and media texts, entered into and
engaged with moments of discomfort, used creative acts to produce counter-narratives and
engaged in experiential learning activities. These observations suggest implications for
queer praxis, particularly for literacy teaching. I propose a critical multidimensional
approach that I term queer literacies which includes the following interconnecting six
dimensions or pedagogical moves:
. Dimension 1: recognising as legitimate bodies of knowledge and making the focus
of inquiry the stories, experiences, cultures, histories and politics of LGBTQI
people.
. Dimension 2: developing an understanding of the dynamics of oppression related to
normative systems of regulation of sexuality, gender and sex (i.e. homophobia,
heterosexism, heteronormativity, cissexism, genderism, transphobia).
. Dimension 3: troubling commonsense, partial and distorted understandings of
sexuality, sex and gender.
. Dimension 4: using the critical method of deconstruction for the literary and social
analysis of discourse and text.
. Dimension 5: engaging with and producing counter-narratives that open spaces for
new imaginings about sexuality, gender and sex.
. Dimension 6: creating spaces where students can enter and work through feelings of
discomfort and crisis.7
Within the high school educational context that is still overwhelmingly characterised
by silence or marginalisation related to positive representations of diverse sexualities
and genders, a course like Gay and Lesbian Literature can perform important disruptive
work, creating itself a counter-narrative to those who construct such work as impossible
within public school classrooms. Oftentimes high school students are positioned as too
immature and unable to think deeply and in complex ways about sexuality and gender.
The examples presented in this paper demonstrate that students are indeed able to
perform such complex intellectual and queer work. The teacher and her students’
engagement with this curriculum is an example of how queer praxis can be enacted in a
high school classroom. The proposed dimensions of queer literacies are meant to
provide teachers with a theoretical framework that can guide them in developing
curricula around LGBTQ-themed texts that work against homophobia and heterosexism
in schools.
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46 K. Helmer

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex.
2. Naming the class Gay and Lesbian Literature reflects institutional concerns for causing
controversy. The teacher is in the process of renaming the course LGBTQ Literature.
3. Sara decided to have her real name used in publications. The names of the students mentioned in
the article are pseudonyms to protect their identities.
4. The teacher designed the curriculum in 2000 and has not changed the focal literary texts, only the
supplementary texts, which is why the curriculum does not include twenty-first-century materials.
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v ¼ wY1UIES9wx8.
6. One side of the flip-book represented David and the other side Giovanni (the two main characters
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in Giovanni’s Room). Each page of the flip-book had different colours which when brought
together formed the colours of a rainbow.
7. For a more detailed discussion of the queer literacies framework see Helmer (2015).

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