QUEER EDUCATION
I’m JC, London based Visual Artist, and this is my Personal Project Queer Education. When you grow up gay, it is often difficult to fit into other people’s definition of gayness. If you don’t behave in a certain way, or have relationships only with a certain gender, then you are not considered to be fully gay. This is also true within the queer community, where there is a pressure to label yourself to fit within one of the letters of the LGBTQI+ acronym. Sexuality is not a monolith, but rather a spectrum. Very few people fit 100% in any of the extremes.
A few years back, I started identifying as queer instead of just gay. It feels less restrictive and it doesn’t force me into any categories. When I met Mark, he told me that he felt the same way. For him, using the moniker bisexual is also vastly misunderstood. It implies that you are equally attracted to both males and females when, truthfully, sexuality is far more fluid. Some days, that attraction may be a 90/10 split, others a 70/30. In the same way that some days he feels more happy than sad, or more dominant than submissive. Sexuality is not immutable but rather a constantly evolving and shifting plane.
During our conversation, Mark mentioned that there seems to be a conceptualisation that anybody who identifies as bisexual is actually just yet to come to terms with the fact that they are gay. Even if he no longer struggles with having to admit his attraction to both genders, he regularly finds himself mislabelled as gay. People sometimes assume that, because he is married to a man, this gender attraction is exclusive and erases anything else about his sexuality.
Mark is a teacher, and as an educator he has faced his fair share of homophobia. The mention of any queer issue in front of the students makes some parents and institutions very uncomfortable. He believes that something incredibly sobering about being an educator is realising that homophobic attitudes start in childhood. Some parents claim that children are too young to understand what being gay, or trans, or bisexual is. Yet, they are perfectly happy to expose their children to heterosexual sexuality since birth: girls will meet their prince charming, boys will break a lot of girls’ hearts.
As an educator, Mark has been challenged for educating children on not using the word gay as an insult. He has been asked why he thinks that a necessary teaching point and whether he thinks it is an appropriate conversation to be having. For him, the answer is always yes. Education is the chief way to tackle homophobia.
When both Mark and I were growing up, promoting the homosexual lifestyle was illegal in the UK. Even after Section 28 was repealed, there was a great amount of discomfort in discussing homosexuality and thus perpetuating the idea that to be queer is taboo and shameful. Almost 20 years later, we still live in a very homophobic world. And for this reason, both of us use the term queer, not only as an indicator that we are not straight, but also as a political statement.
For Mark, there is a responsibility as an educator to represent a marginalised community giving a personhood to any people who the students may have heard bigotry towards, showing them that these feelings are natural and normal. For me, it is a way to send a message to queer people around the world who still live in fear of prosecution or death telling them that we got their back. That not a day goes by that we don't do everything within our power to combat homophobia and make this world a safer space for the current and the future queer generations to come.