Beginning to Fill the LGBT Gap in My Curriculum

Last Friday, I had another conversation with colleagues about what it means to “represent” kids in the curriculum. When I wrote about representation last time, I lamented the fact that the Latina girls were most silent during the unit on The House on Mango Street. But thinking further, I realized they weren’t silent at all. The culminating assignment during that unit was for the students to write their own collection of vignettes, all on different topics but all on the same theme. The best collection I read was by one of the Latina girls. Maybe she didn’t want to speak in class about the “Big 8” social identifiers, but she did speak with her pen, telling stories that were so beautiful because they were real and true and precise. They were her. In a wide, wide ocean of vignettes about camp and pets, A___’s were about the bus she took to Prep for Prep, and the piss-smelling tunnel she has to walk through. I still remember her vignettes, a year later. And this year, the best vignettes I’ve read so far are by another Latina girl, and once again, what makes them the best is how real and true and honest and specific they are. So the Latina girls are, in fact, speaking.

It didn’t take my going to the National Equality March for me to see that one of the gaps in my curriculum is the absence of LGBT characters—unless you count the ambiguous sexuality of Holden Caulfield. I’ll get to him in a minute. But the march did remind me that I could do more to make LGBT authors and characters, and issues of sexual orientation, more visible in my English class. I don’t expect that talking about sexual orientation will mean that all my LGBT students will suddenly feel comfortable coming out, but I do hope that all my students will begin to question heteronormative views and behave in ways that promote equality and inclusion. And that, just as some of the Latina girls found their own ways to speak through the vignette assignment, so will my LGBT students find ways to speak.

One way I can make my curriculum more inclusive is to use Holden as a way into discussions of identity. Interestingly, Holden Caulfield’s identifiers fall on the privileged side in 7 (or maybe 6) of the Big 8 social identifiers: he’s white, rich, male, able-bodied, Christian, and of unknown European stock. The one identifier that’s absolutely on the targeted side is his age—he’s only 17—and age is the very thing that obsesses Holden throughout the novel as he struggles to preserve the innocence he sees around him but at the same time tries to access the power and privileges of the adult world. As for Holden’s sexual orientation, he very well could be gay or bisexual, but he certainly doesn’t come out.

It seems to me that a perfect time to talk about how identity is constructed would be during the unit on The Catcher in the Rye. Last year, I made a chart with the Big 8 (race, socioeconomic class, gender, ability, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age) in rows and main characters (Esperanza from The House on Mango Street, Lennie from Of Mice and Men, Walter from A Raisin in the Sun, and Holden from The Catcher in the Rye) in columns. We named their identities and talked about how we “know” when it doesn’t say, like how we know Holden is white even though Salinger never actually says. This year, I want to dig a little deeper into our assumptions. Could Beneatha Younger be bisexual? Could Holden be a quarter Jewish? In short, when are we correct in our assumptions about identity and when are we wrong to assume in the first place? And how does that relate to privilege? And why does that matter in our readings of literature and our interactions with each other?

Beyond my classroom texts, I would like to use independent reading as a way to include more LGBT books. One of my colleagues puts on his syllabus a list of suggested independent reading that goes along, in genre or theme, with the class text. Immediately I thought, I must do this. What a great way to encourage independent reading and diversify the books my students are reading. So I’m thinking that starting with my next unit, I’ll give out suggested independent reading lists and that I’ll incorporate literature with LGBT characters. I realize that including these books on a list is a necessary but not sufficient step toward greater inclusion in my curriculum.

I went on Amazon and started looking through seventh-grade-appropriate literature with openly LGBT characters, and these are some books that are well-reviewed. I can’t speak personally to any of them yet. Maybe you can.

Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

E.M. Forster, Maurice: A Novel

Jim Grimsley, Dream Boy: A Novel

Keith Hale, Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada

Brent Hartinger, Geography Club

Steve Kluger, My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park

Bill Konigsberg, Out of the Pocket

P.E. Ryan, Saints of Augustine