The Right’s War on Queerness Is Placing Teachers in Danger

Amid steadily increasing attacks from right-wing legislators and their constituents, LGBTQ+ teachers around the U.S. are living in fear — not just for their jobs, but for their safety and that of their families.

“I feel unsafe to return to the classroom,” said Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr., an openly gay teacher in Kentucky, in an interview with Education Week published Thursday. Carver was named Kentucky Teacher of the Year this spring, but is currently on sabbatical, and seriously considering whether a return is worth the potential risks to his mental and physical health.

“If I am, every few weeks, having to stop and undergo some sort of investigation over what’s happening in my class, I’m not going to be mentally able to do this work,” Carver explained. “And then what are my students seeing? A stressed-out, unhappy LGBTQ adult. I don’t think that’s what they need to see.”

Carver also recalled the recent case of fellow Kentucky educator Tyler Clay Morgan, a music teacher who was forced to resign after massive backlash from parents for writing “You Are Free to Be Yourself With Me” and drawing a rainbow flag on his whiteboard. School administrators faulted Morgan for engaging with students “beyond the music curriculum.”

“It creates an absolutely unsafe — unfathomably unsafe — working condition for someone whose only goal was to say to students, you matter,” said Carver, adding that he knows “five LGBTQ people who’ve been fired this year, all seemingly randomly.”

That lack of safety is being felt by teachers all over the country. A year after third grade teacher Tammy Tiber showed several videos about LGBTQ+ identities to her class at Thomas Jefferson Elementary in Glendale, CA, officials in her school district have involuntarily transferred Tiber to another school, citing safety concerns after the teacher received multiple death threats.

In one such voicemail obtained by the Los Angeles Times, an unidentified person tells Tiber she is “the Devil” and will “get what’s coming to you. [...] Somebody will be outside your house, I’m sure, a mob.”

The Florida Teen Activists Leading the Fight Against “Don’t Say Gay”

Queer student activists in the sunshine state are balancing walkouts and senate testimonies with algebra homework and play rehearsals. 

Last month, an Oregon man was sentenced to four years in prison for sending multiple death threats to an openly lesbian former community college professor. The letters contained images of mutilated bodies and detailed how the perpetrator had long fantasized about killing her. One letter was reportedly delivered to the professor’s former address and opened by another lesbian family.

Sadly, this is only an escalation of abusive behavior that has deep roots in how conservatives treat teachers in the U.S. According to Prof. Karen Graves, author of And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers, “teachers have been especially vulnerable to homophobic persecution” by both parents and administrators since the early years of the 20th century. “The fact that schoolteachers work with children opened the door to homophobic fears — unsubstantiated but persistent — that gay and lesbian teachers would ‘recruit’ students; this fear reinforced demands that teachers act in accordance with a narrow standard of normative behavior,” Graves wrote in 2015.

These fears have long manifested via campaigns to fire and ostracize gay teachers, but as all types of teacher abuse rise and Republican fearmongering over “groomers” threatening students in the classroom escalates, even teachers who are merely vocal allies are also targets for queerphobic violence and harrassment. And if administrators don’t take proactive measures to protect their staff, passionate educators will end up leaving the profession simply because they see no other choice — or closing themselves off to their LGBTQ+ students once more, denying them the safety and inspiration they need to thrive in school.

“I’m not going back,” said Carver. “Or at least, I can’t go back in the same way that I’ve ever gone back.”

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