Coming out

It's been a while since I posted anything here, and I thought this essay of mine might be appropriate and perhaps enjoyed. Life is good for the Craig family. Joshua will turn two this Halloween. As dads, we spend the vast majority of our time stepping on Legos and finding Cheerios in our bedsheets. Ahh... fatherhood.

All the best!

Todd Craig

My voice shook.

I couldn’t make eye contact.

I came out of the closet, and every cliché but very real fear percolated to the surface again: fear of judgment, fear of being talked about, fear of being real, fear of being the running joke in the halls of junior high school.
The time had arrived however, to tell 150 eighth grade English students that their teacher, Mr. Craig, was in fact, gay.

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The weeks preceding the announcement had been a flurry of life-changes for my family. My husband, AJ, and I had begun the adoption process about a year and a half before, and we had recently been picked by a birth mother after only being on the wait list for six months or so. Our original plan had been for AJ to stay home with the baby for those first few months, but with a baby arriving much more quickly than we had anticipated, it necessitated that I take a leave of absence from my teaching position.

Of course, one thing a baby’s arrival does make you do is take a step back and think about your life. Are you ready to be someone’s dad? What are you going to teach him? How will you encourage him? When will you go to Disneyland?

But when you’re a gay man about to become a dad, the questions run deeper. I knew that our son was going to be the kid in school with two dads. Was he going to be teased or made fun of? Was he going to be embarrassed of us? Christ, what would junior high be like for him? It’s bad enough when you have a regular mom and dad and want no one on earth to know that there’s anything different about you. I mean seriously, I had spent more than a decade working with junior high kids for whom the word “gay” is the most common way of saying stupid and the word “faggot” is still the most stinging insult between boys. Seriously, I thought, what’s that gonna be like for a kid with two dads?

But with all of those questions and doubts and huge life changes staring me in the face, the bottom line was simply: How can I make the world better for my son?

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It’s not that I hadn’t thought about telling my students that I was gay before. The idea always seemed like a sound one in theory. Like when students would come into my room on a Monday morning and say, “Hey, Mr. Craig. What’d you do this weekend?” I would dream of what the reaction would be if I said that my husband took me out to dinner, and we saw a movie afterwards.

But it seemed like just a dream. I could hear the arguments and the reasons against such a revelation: You’re there to teach English, not homosexuality. Johnny’s parents are upset and want him removed from your class. Your personal life should be just that, your personal life. Besides, which kid would want to be stuck in English class for a full year with the faggot teacher?

I had also become quite adept, as most closeted gays are, at dancing around the issue. There were no pictures on my desk. I avoided talking about my personal life, and if I was pressed into doing so, I always used “we” and other gender non-specific pronouns before quickly moving on to other topics. Students, by and large, didn’t care enough to press the issue. They didn’t ask, I didn’t tell.

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The unit I was teaching at the time was a favorite writing unit where we studied writing an argument. For a week and a half we studied various persuasive essays, culminating with The Letter From Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, despite being well over 6,000 words long, begs to be read aloud. It was originally written in response to a letter to the editor written by Birmingham’s religious leaders that called the targeted protests for racial equality by King and his supporters in America’s most racist community “unwise and untimely.” King, of course, had to respond and took his critics to task in a point-by-point argument that ranks among the most powerful ever written.

It’s one of those lessons that junior high kids sit still for. The words, over four decades old now, still ring with a truth that strikes the at the very heart of what every junior high kid wants. Belief in what’s right. Fairness and freedom. That in some way, if we will really reach out to one another that we can change the world for the better.
As I looked over those words written so perfectly by Dr. King in preparation for the next day’s lesson, I couldn’t help but put them in the context of my own life. The words begging, pleading, and ultimately demanding both justice and equality never rang so true for me as they did now, knowing that I was about to become someone’s dad. There in front of me lay my inspiration. As much as it was a call forty years ago for all of America to stand up against racism and for black Americans to identify their race with pride and dignity, it was a call for me to come out to my students as a gay man, to explain the reality of my family, and to try to change my little corner of the world.

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I was aware that my little corner of the world was in fact, Colorado Springs, Colorado, probably the most politically conservative, religiously Evangelical, and anti-gay city in the state if not the whole country. I moved here from the Denver/Boulder metroplex because my husband was from here, and I was really so in love, and he was really so hot that I would have left my job, sold my house, and moved to the gates of hell had he actually lived there.

In my first years of teaching in this strange new land, it was not unusual to notice students wearing their religious affiliation on the sleeves of the sweatshirts. I’d hear stories of weekend church retreats. Youth ministers would visit the school. I had students whose parents worked for Focus on the Family and Young Life Youth Ministries. A large number of the school population of both students and teachers attended New Life Church to listen to the ever-popular and powerful Pastor Ted Haggard take stance after stance against every gay issue that came along.
This wasn’t going to be easy.

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I taught the lesson as planned. I read a truncated version of King’s letter aloud. Kids reacted to the words, analyzed the argument with zeal, and wrote passionate responses to the lesson. With five minutes to go, the room fell completely silent except for the scratches of pencils on paper. I summoned up my courage as I summoned their attention back on me.

“Hey guys,” I said. “I need you all to look up here, put your pencils down, and just listen a minute. I have an announcement to make.”

I took a big gasp of air.

“I know that sometimes adults don’t always tell you the whole truth. Sometimes because they have something to hide, sometimes because they don’t trust you, sometimes because it’s just easier,” I said looking out at the fourteen year old faces. They were rapt in attention, sensing that something big was coming.

“So I’ve got two big announcements that I need to make, and I need to be completely honest with you about both because they’re going to impact you all at least somewhat.

“First of all, I’m gay. I have a beautiful husband, and we’ve been together for three years now. I know that some of you may believe or have parents who believe that being gay is wrong, and I want you to know that I respect your religious beliefs, and I’m not standing up here trying to brainwash any of you against your beliefs.”

The faces staring up at me reflected shock and surprise. The air began to compress around us, and any comfort level that had previously existed suddenly disappeared. The kids looked like they wanted to escape, to be anywhere else, and I was overwhelmed by the urge to continue talking if for no other reason than to fill the dead air space.

“Second, my husband and I were just picked to adopt a baby. Your teacher, me… I’m going to be a dad. The baby was born a few days ago, the birth mother picked us, and as a result, I’m going to have to take the next few months off to take care of a newborn boy… my son,” I said with a cracking voice.

And what happened next, to this day fills me with hope for the future. The kids began to get excited. They asked questions. Was I happy? What’s your husband’s name? Who’s our sub gonna be? When will you be back? Do you get to name the baby?

As the day went on, I gave the same speech five separate times as the bell ushered each class out and another class in. And each and every time afterwards, I was met with all sorts of questions and honest excitement both for who I was and the excitement for the baby I was about to adopt.

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I was sure there were going to be some pretty interesting dinner table conversations that night between my students and their parents. Just how interesting, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t until almost the end of the school day, that I learned my announcement had almost simultaneously been trumped by another gay announcement. Another teacher who was entirely oblivious to my announcement to the students, came up to a group of us teachers to tell us a news story had just broken about Pastor Ted Haggard, the powerful religious and political figure, being outted by a gay prostitute. I ran to my computer to check the story, and sure enough, there were already all sorts of internet postings about the popular anti-gay pastor caught up in a web of sex, drugs, lies, and infidelity.

On second thought, I bet those dinner table conversations were going to be extremely interesting.

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I can’t say that there wasn’t any negativity or fallout after the day had ended. A couple of kids were transferred out of my class. I had some further explaining and apologizing to do with my administrators for springing the story both on students and parents. But by and large, the amount of support from students, parents, and teachers overwhelmed me.

In the time since, I’ve come to revel in my role as the English teacher who happens to be gay. I don’t make it a point to talk about my personal life everyday, but I don’t dance around it any more either. My desk is proudly filled with photographs of my family. Kids asked what I did for my husband on Valentine’s Day. It’s not unusual for teenage girls to ask my advice on dating guys when it’s time for the big school dance.

There’s a measure of both relief and freedom that is the inherent result of the coming out process, but coming out to my students here in ultra-conservative Colorado Springs taught me that my students can be trusted to make things better and more equal for others in the future. The students in this next generation by and large don’t necessarily believe that people who are gay are the abominations some would like to make them out to be. Quite frankly, it’s just not that big of deal.

Ultimately, the biggest lesson I’ve learned is that if you give most people the benefit of the doubt, they rarely will disappoint you. And hopefully by the time my son gets to be a teenager, if we have all stood up and taken care of our little corners of the universe, then the world – even junior high school for God’s sake– will be a safe place to be gay.

copyright 2008