Why I'm with Teach For America

Geographically, I come from a space between the crude reality of homelessness and dreaming. Among my earliest memories is the move from my birthplace of Cincinnati to Dallas, TX. There was the shifting from project to project until home held little meaning beyond the walk between one site of eviction and the next. Rigging furnaces for winter heat, the kind of shame that carries the stench of poverty on your clothes, and mom’s tightening countenance before pulling out food stamps in front of judgmental eyes, marked my early childhood. I knew the world wasn’t fair.

In my first year of school in Little Rock, Arkansas, I went to 3 or 4 different kindergartens. I was afraid to make friends, if unafraid to fight. I stuttered. I fought as much as I stuttered: soft heart, hard knuckles. I was great at boxing, but enjoyed reading books more. My dad praised the former and said the latter was for “sissies”. Born Timothy, my mother, not college-educated but smart, knew that getting me to buy the sticks-and-stones lie would buy enough time to build resilience for its failure. Don’t sweat the mocking: Tim and M, then Tim’m. It was okay. I learned that words did hurt: the “n” word, the “f” word. One I heard in elementary school in the “gifted and talented” classes from white kids, distanced from peers who looked like me. The adjective “smart” said alongside the “n” word, didn’t soften its sting. The “f” word I heard at home from a touch and go dad whose hypermasculine militarism and religiosity defined the order of things. Geographically I come from a place at the intersection of survival and unsafe spaces. Home was as volatile as the houses in which we lived.

My community was defined by intense poverty. I made the newspaper as a kid: front page of Arkansas Gazette or Democrat for my dad’s fuss about the dilapidated home in which we lived. Thinking back, he probably wouldn’t have made the rent anyway. For all their learning-as-they-go parenting, my folks did value their kids getting a good education. My mother always checked our homework and would threaten to call the school or teacher if we reported not having any. These simple gestures, years later, made a difference in my own value for education. A mama’s boy, I never wanted to disappoint her. I come from a community of black boys where if you were smart, you’d better hide your report card, or get jumped. White people were smart. Black boys were cool. It wasn’t cool to be smart. I mitigated the aftermath of smarts by developing a stout athleticism and cosmopolitan cool. When I graduated salutatorian from High School or got into Ivys or West Point, it was a bit of a surprise for some of my peers. My friends who had fewer options available to them were especially proud of me. They made me promise to write books and talk about them. I have.

I came out to myself in college, and with uncertainty about what I could do professionally that wouldn’t force me to go back in the closet. I was a strong gay Black Student Alliance president, praised for my leadership, but pretty much banned from black frats. It was the first time in my life I’d faced crude rejection from black men and made to feel less than a man for my attraction to men. I avoided the suicidal ideation I experienced as a high school teen by connecting to whoever would accept me as is: some where white, some were women, some were even straight men who dared to challenge the norms by being my friends and allies. I learned there that there are safe spaces in the world. They happen when you are brave enough to share the real ugly stuff, and open yourself to the beautiful people who gravitate to it.

I come to this work with 25 years of activism in LGBTQ communities, and about 15 years of teaching.  I taught as an OUT black gay man, without any template for how to navigate naysayers and haters, because I was gifted at teaching. There was nothing I wanted to do more. I also believe that life on the margin of the margins centered my empathy, my compassion, my drive for making life better to those I taught. Of the hundreds of youth and young adults I have taught, they all knew they were loved. That understanding enabled my efficacy and made them eager to never disappoint. I suppose I got that honest. Love is such an amazing motivator for excellence.

I believe that we rob society of some of its best, most courageous and brilliant teachers when we suggest that LGBTQ educators are fine, just as long as they don’t talk about it and just do their job. I’m most challenged by this norm because of what we are teaching our kids in the process: that dignity is a privilege for some, and shame, the default especially for those at the intersection of poverty and queer identities. We do our students a disservice if we perpetuate the notion that not having a strong and positive sense of identity has no bearing on the kind of future one can have. I’d like to think that educators cultivate, not just healthy minds, but healthy spirits. I joined this movement because I almost didn’t make it. Mouth full and choking on aspirin at 16: a lame overdose that was not as strong as my body’s rejection. I didn’t really want to die. I wanted to be accepted for something I could not change, after fasts and prayers, self-badgering, and compulsory experiments with heterosexuality.

I joined this movement because I almost didn’t teach: feeling that being exposed as a “gay” teacher would land me in jail or vilified. Unfortunately, even in 2014, many who feel called to teach worry about the same thing. I joined this movement because there’s someone who will have a positive impact on lots of kids’ lives and who deserves an opportunity to make it too. I’m happy that Teach For America sees value in having an Initiative that truly says all our low-income students deserve better. Yes, even the “gay” ones.