At this point, we're all just theorizing, but it's also possible that
self-silencing was only masked as tolerance, because it was a way of
getting themselves off the hook from actually having to use words out
loud in a discussion of gay/lesbian identity. I only came up with that
because I was recently talking with a friend who's a fundraiser for a
local festival of South Asian culture, run by an organization that's very
queer positive and queer active. They recently hired a young student
temp who quit after a few weeks. My friend Zainab says, "there were
words he couldn't even bring himself to say." I remember being that
young and that bashful. I know nothing about teaching methods, but if
you're teaching material that has content that might make your students
shy, maybe it would be helpful to get them used to using the words that
describe that content. I remember a Grade 13 (sixth form by the u.k.
system, I think) English teacher finally giving up and railing at us in
disgust, "They had SEX, people, SEX! They didn't 'make love,' they
didn't do, 'you know,' they had sex!"
-nalo
"He walked so far/On stilts of songs, of masqueraded story, that the
stars/Were near."
-Kamau Brathwaite, "Jou'vert"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:18 PDT