Carlson Talking Points

I apologize for the late blog. The link wasn't opening for me until after class this morning.

The article that these quotes come from is a piece titled "Gayness, Multicultural Education, and Community" by Dennis Carlson. While reading this article, I found that I wasn't really shocked by much of the information provided. The discussion was mostly about how schools and education systems discriminate against the LGBT community, and how the topic of this community is only brought up in regards to the AIDS and HIV viruses. Some of the quotes that really helped me to understand the main points of the article were:

"Much as communist teachers were to be drummed out of the teaching corps because communism was "contagious." so gay teachers were to be fired because they too were understood as Contagious-and in the height of the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and early 1950s, homosexuality and communism were closely linked as threats to the "American way of life.""
I can't believe that homosexuality used to be, and disgustingly enough is still considered by some people to be a contagious disease that one human being can inflict upon another. It's like saying that a straight person can change a gay person's sexuality-it's just not a realistic possibility. It's not as if hanging out with an African American person will change my race, I don't see how sexuality is viewed any differently. It is a trait that you are born with, and it is not something that changes with time.

"These abuses get tolerated because gay teachers and students operate in an environment where they feel afraid to stand up for themselves, and because any discussion of gay people continues to be absent in the curriculum so that homophobia is not interrogated."
This quote really caught my attention because it reminded me of an English class I took in high school. The teacher was a lesbian, (which I only found out after I had graduated), but never once had us read any materials that regarded, were influenced by, or even included anything about the gay community. I wonder if this was because she didn't want to cause any controversy within the school, or if she just wasn't comfortable putting herself out there to be judged and scrutinized. Either way, I don't blame her because in white middle-class public schools, homosexuality is not an easy subject to bring up and have a civil discussion about.

"If, in popular culture. being straight meant being "normal:' that is, affirming (if not always practicing) bourgeois. traditional, repressive, monogamous, married sexuality, then being gay meant-by definition-the opposite."
This absolutely relates back to S.C.W.A.A.M.P because, unfortunately, the things that we as a culture value and accept as "normal" are the things that get taught in schools and are promoted in the media. I feel like we as a society have taken tremendous strides into becoming more open-minded and accepting, but I know that it will still be a long time before our prejudices and ignorance are things of the past.