A new world

Have I mentioned that by day I'm a middle school teacher?

This afternoon, I sat in the back of the classroom while a guest speaker talked to my students about gender identity awareness -- part of the health curriculum we're teaching at our school for the next two weeks.  The speaker, Heather, was a young (28 -- when did I get so old?) lesbian woman with an open manner and an easy laugh, a relaxed self-confidence.  The kids listened to her intently, far better than they had for the previous speaker, who had tried to get them to think about healthy relationships.

Heather listed all the ways people identify -- gay, lesbian, bi, pan-sexual, transgender, asexual, bi-curious, heterosexual, queer, inter-sex.  She talked freely about the history of the word "homosexual" and about the ways laws have recently changed.  The kids listened.  No tittering.  No whispering.  When the relationship guy had asked them to think about dating, they rolled their eyes at each other and blushed bright red, but Heather's talk didn't seem to faze them at all.

I seemed to be the only person amazed by this.  In the middle school where I taught for seven years in Alaska, we weren't even allowed to talk about "alternative families" in our health curriculum - - much less the definition of "bi-curious".  In Iowa, where I grew up, I never heard the word "lesbian" until someone whispered it to me in the locker room when I was 16 or 17 -- told me that Carrie on the newspaper staff was lesbian and wasn't that gross?  I couldn't even understand what it meant.  Nobody talked about sexual orientation in any official way when I was growing up.  I never knew it was a real option, a real life.  In college, I knew two women who were together, but it was novel:  they were the token lesbians on our small campus at the time.

I'm not that old.  Thirty-six.  I was a middle schooler only 22 years ago, but the world has changed dramatically -- wonderfully.  When I looked around at all those adolescent faces listening to Heather this afternoon, I wanted to burst into tears that I never got this opportunity to learn about all the options and I wanted to shout something triumphant.  Yes, yes:  I teach middle school in Boulder, which is famously tolerant of sexual preferences.  But change has come.  I currently have three students who are out and proud, and everyone accepts them for who they are.  I wish Carrie the newspaper staff girl and I had grown up in this world, too.