The decriminalisation of homosexuality occurred in my home state in 1997. Four years prior to this I was 11 years old and lucky enough to have an incredibly open minded teacher who refused to allow questionable laws and a rigid Catholic school system to cast a shadow over our opportunities to learn about the real world. He read to us every single day and we churned through novels at a pace I've not been able to match in my own nine years of teaching students of the same age. He planned our entire year around an exploration of human diversity and each of the novels we read, allowed us to explore a different kind of experience through a very different type of character.
Sure, this is not revolutionary, but when you're exploring the idea of drug and alcohol abuse with 11/12 year olds in a Catholic school through a book like Came Back to Show You I Could Fly and discussing HIV/AIDS and homosexuality through a book like Two Weeks with the Queen, also in a Catholic school, in a state in which homosexuality is still a criminal offence, that's kind of a big deal.
While I still remember most of the books we read that year, it was Two Weeks with the Queen which had the greatest impact on me. While listening to that book being read, I finally had a word for a type of relationship which I hadn't seen in my own world before. The protagonist, Colin, was about my age and, through an odd set of circumstances, ended up befriending a gay man whose partner had AIDS and was dying. Seeing the world through Colin's eyes, trying to reconcile how his new friend, Ted, could be treated so harshly by some people when he was such a nice guy, was an eye opener for all of us.
If the book had included two lesbian characters rather than two gay men, I dare say most of my questions about myself would have virtually been answered. Having said that, going through the next 4 years, with the positive dialogue from that class in the back of my mind, gave me something to cling to. I didn't have all the answers, but I had the beginnings of the language I needed to be able to start unravelling a thousand different thoughts and experiences which hadn't seemed to add up.
I need to track down my Grade 6 teacher and thank him. Besides being the type of teacher I aspire to be, he is also the first adult I can recall who asked us what we thought, instead of telling us what we should think. Without adults who understand the importance of exposing young people to a range of characters, we risk having more young people who grow up without a language to understand themselves, their lives and their experiences. While Two Weeks with the Queen wasn't the exact reflection I needed, it was the closest I got to seeing any aspects of myself in any characters for many years.
My students live in a world which is entirely different to the one I was living in at 11. There are more characters on television, in movies, and in books now, who young LGBT people might be able to relate to, but it still takes the encouragement of the adults around them to maintain young peoples' access to these characters and to facilitate the conversations which are necessary to support their understandings of themselves and their questions about where they fit in the world.
