By Brian Riedel
I went to college at UNC-Chapel Hill in the early 1990s. To my recollection, only one of the professors I knew was ever “out” in the classroom—we’ll call him “Cecil.” He and a woman colleague co-taught “Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World,” and I confess, I enrolled mostly because it had “gender and sexuality” in the course title. I wasn’t alone, either. A clump of us queer kids sat in the front row of that auditorium, eager to learn whatever we could about lesbian graffiti in Rome or priapic youth on Greek urns.
I had hunches and hopes that other professors might also be part of my tribe. Looking back on that time and place though, I can understand why they might have avoided Cecil’s path. It was the end of the Bush years and AIDS was hollowing out gay communities. Queer folks were still reeling from the Bowers v. Hardwick decision upholding sodomy laws, a ruling that echoed sternly across the campus of Chapel Hill, the flagship of the state-funded university system. At the same time, the town itself was fairly liberal compared to other places I had lived in North Carolina. There was a long-standing Marxist-feminist bookstore a few blocks from campus, out lesbian and gay singers performing at local coffeehouses, and a solid community of civil rights and labor organizers. Senator Jesse Helms famously mocked the town’s politics through his blunt humor: “Why waste the money on a zoo in Asheboro? Just build a fence around Chapel Hill.”
Senator Helms might not have been surprised to know that I existed in a beautiful queer bubble during those years. I joined a literary and artistic fraternity that welcomed queer folks. The gay and lesbian student organization had an actual office in the student center. My ex-boyfriend from high school and his then girlfriend helped to run the office and regularly fended off student government attempts to cut their funding. My fraternity siblings and I did queer performance art in the center of campus. A busload of us drove up to march on Washington. In our classes, we were reading what would later become field-defining work from an English professor just one town over—The Epistemology of the Closet. I presented a final paper to one English class while wearing a purple evening gown and sneakers—I could not find a matching pair of pumps that fit my 11 1/2 wide feet.
And there was Cecil. Though we never became close, his presence was symbolic for me. I could feel the joy in his voice as he talked through slideshows of Greek pottery. Cecil showed me that an out gay man could make a living doing something he clearly loved, for which his sexuality was not a barrier but more of an asset, perhaps even a credential.
Nearly 30 years later, I teach gender and sexuality studies at Rice University, a private institution in Houston, Texas. My classes rarely include lesbian graffiti or priapic pottery. Instead, we talk about Obergefell v. Hodges and the shifting institution of marriage itself. We talk about the relationships between feminist movements and the riot at Compton’s. We talk about how obscenity laws in the United States constricted both homophile political organizing and access to information about abortion. We talk about bathroom bills, and how to organize for sustainable, intersectional social justice.
Clearly, I teach in a different time and place from Cecil’s. Students today also have different needs from those I had 30 years ago.
I think it still makes a difference to have an out professor, but being “out” is no simple conversation. So I ask my students to talk about “gaydar,” an exercise in which I use myself as the foil. I invite them to share the stories they make up about my sexual identity, and the evidence they use to make those stories. The conversation quickly gets deeper, chipping away at the presumptive linkage of interests, identity, and authority. Just because I teach about queer sexuality does not mean that I am queer. Just because I do embrace a queer social identity does not mean I have special authority to talk about queer life.
More importantly, my queer life is not the only possible version, and certainly not the “best” or the “right” way to be queer. So while it may make a difference to students that I am an “out professor,” that is no longer enough, if it ever was. Students deserve to meet as much of the raucous diversity of this queer world as they can. It is my joy now, not only to show up as all of who I am, but also to open the circle of the classroom to that brilliant array—whether through guest speakers, readings, movies, or oral history projects. My job is to connect students with others who might be like them, who might show them a path that fits them.
So thank you, Cecil. You may never have known, but you helped me forge a path that fits my queer feet, and I am doing my best to pay it forward.
