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A former teacher examined current laws that prohibit teachers from addressing LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom.
Ironically, growing up as a gay teenager in Weaver, Alabama, in the 1970s, I feel safe in saying that I got a more progressive education than most LGBTQ+ students throughout the state receive today. My teachers were allowed to talk about LGBTQ+ issues (though few did); teachers in Alabama today are forbidden from discussing these issues because Alabama and four other states have what are known as "no promo homo" laws (Brammer); these laws prohibit or limit discussions on LGBTQ+ topics in school. Besides these states, others have only recently overturned similar decrees, and there remain local municipalities that have such statutes in place even without state-level legislation. An example of how these laws work is Alabama's requirement that teachers instruct students that "homosexual conduct" is unacceptable; the effect is to silence LGBTQ+ topics throughout schools' curricula (Brammer). In forbidding these discussions, school systems neglect many students' needs and deny their existence. Not only are LGBTQ+ students deprived access to self-affirming information, but LGBTQ+ parents, guardians, relatives, and friends are excluded from conversations. Additionally, students without apparent connections to the LGBTQ+ community cannot benefit from these discussions, either.
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks discusses the need for transformational conversations. Decrying the compartmentalization of knowledge that is disembodied from the self, hooks states, "this support reinforces the dualistic separation of public and private, encouraging teachers and students to see no connection between life practices, habits of being, and the roles of professors" (16). It is only through showing the ways that formal "school" knowledge contributes to students' personal lives and choices that students become interested and engaged. It is likely that with LGBTQ+ issues becoming so much a part of popular culture,...