talking dog

Hidden Histories: towards an LGBT history curriculum for California Schools

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I was over on Talking Dog this afternoon and reading about how California teachers are having to come up with curriculum fast for a new law that requires them to teach LGBT history in schools.  I don’t think teachers have to overhaul everything—but I do think a quick version might be able to make things better for January.

So I devised Hidden Histories. 

Hidden Histories is based on the premise that lots of histories have been hidden over time—and that gay history, while the most completely submerged, is just one of many.  The curriculum asks that you start off the new year with a framework, but that you don’t have to change any of your curriculum.  The framework, and subsequently turning your students into little detectives, will bridge the interim for you.

The hardest thing facing California teachers, in regards to this law, is that most people, including myself, have never heard gay history.  So requiring teachers to teach it will be difficult unless you teach them gay history first—and provide them some ideas, lesson plans, curriculum. And giving them only till January to comply is hard… I think you should rather that the schools devise a Teacher training day in the spring, to come up with curriculum.

Anyway, over there at the other blog, I gave my ideas–and hopefully people will feel free to use them.

Best reason for this teaching LGBT stuff in classrooms:

“Within the typical secondary school curriculum, homosexuals do not exist. They are ‘nonpersons’ in the finest Stalinist sense. They have fought no battles, held no offices, explored nowhere, written no literature, built nothing, invented nothing and solved no equations. The lesson to the heterosexual student is abundantly clear: homosexuals do nothing of consequence. To the homosexual student, the message has even greater power: no one who has ever felt as you do has done anything worth mentioning.” -Gerald Unks, editor, The Gay Teen, p. 5.

 

Talking Dog gives Gay Christian Resources: my other project

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via Flickr and the Creative Commons licenseTalking Dog is one of my other blogs, hopefully a good resource for gay Christians.  There are a lot of good gay christian websites out there, and so I decided merely to become a portal so that you could find resources.  Mostly I wanted to provide all the information that anyone might need to investigate the whole issue for themselves.  Debates swirl about and people need to know the truth.  It was websites like the one I created that helped me when I needed information.  I needed resources.  I couldn’t ask anyone out loud about them, and I didn’t know a gay Christian.

Many of you might recognize the Talking Dog in my title–it comes from “Believing in the Dog” which was the short story that I entered into PSAC’s Anti-Homophobia Week’s contest over two years ago.  In the story, I had a man go out into the woods in January at night to kill himself–just sit out under a tree and freeze.  There was a talking dog in there–and as the author, I knew I couldn’t save the man’s life without making the black lab into a talking dog.  That I had to bend reality into fantasy to save the character.  I had wished that there were more talking dogs in the world–or that we would become the talking dogs in someone’s life.  The story won the contest, and Darrell Hookey, always encouraging me forward, helped me (i.e. pulled me off the floor crying) when it came time to print my name beside it in What’s Up Yukon.

It’s my way of giving back to the community what it gave me.  Maybe there’s someone else out there who’s questioning their faith and their sexuality.  Who knows?   They might just need a Talking Dog.

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For more on the blog, I have this page.