By Jay Stracke
Beads of sweat slide down the skin of weary travelers as the terminal’s oppressive heat overwhelms the expansive silver hall. A tall, slender man sits at the gate—in one hand, a ticket to China; in the other, a phone he has forced to sleep.
Just moments before it entered its slumber, the phone was used to deliver a critical text message—revealing the man’s truth. The young man, face flushed from the persistent heat, sentenced any impending response to wait within a digital purgatory.
A small thought scuttles through the young man’s mind: if the truth isn’t well-received, then perhaps a return ticket back to the States, back to his home in the South, wouldn’t be needed. He’d start anew in a foreign land.
The young man continues to wait patiently, as he grips his ticket in hand. His name stares back at him: Bill Becker.
For queer people, navigating the path toward embracing and communicating our truths can be like wading through the darkness refracted from a lifeless phone screen. It takes courage. For Becker, that courage came during his high school years. As silence permeated his childhood bedroom, he lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the words spoke themselves into existence. The words “I’m gay” escaped from his lips, floated upward, and wrapped themselves in the spinning ceiling fan blades above.
It was through the kindness, compassion, and support of not only his friends and family, but of his teachers that helped Becker to speak those words outside of his bedroom walls. “Two of my English teachers made an effort to be vocally supportive in class, to casually discuss the topic as it arose, and to be appropriately punitive when someone would belittle or mock the queer community in some way,” Becker recalls. “I was given so much warmth and love from my teachers growing up, that I had to pour it back into the next generation. How can I look at any child and not just accept them as they are and work from there?”
Becker, now a mathematics educator himself, strives to create lessons that not only teach math, but that also inspire, enable, and allow children to exist authentically and to live compassionately. “I write word problems that include queer representation,” he explains. “I make it clear on day one that no kind of bullying is accepted, and when it happens, it receives the appropriate consequence. I hold students accountable for how they speak and always circle back to have a conversation about why whatever they said could be hurtful or disrespectful to a community as a whole.”
“I have the privilege of being openly gay with my students,” Becker continues. “I say privilege because, in the state of Texas, it is still legal to fire someone based solely on their sexuality.”
Becker first decided to exercise this privilege during his school’s Pride Week. “I made a decision to be intentionally out,” he says. “I hung a full-size Pride flag in the back of my room and, on National Coming Out Day, I wore it as a cape.”
Later that same school year, after showing his class The Imitation Game, a movie illustrating the story of Alan Turing and the injustices he endured as a gay man in the 1950s, Becker decided it was time to share his full story with his students. “I decided that I needed to tell my coming out story then because it was important to me that we balanced the narratives for queer people in that moment,” he says. “I didn’t want them to walk out of my class thinking that the only queer story outcome was what happened to Turing.”
As the movie ended, the room faded to dark as the projector’s light dwindled away. As Becker spoke his story to his students, beads of sweat formed and slid down his skin, just as they had in that airport terminal so long ago. After he finished, a silence spread across the classroom. Breaking through the stillness was the applause of a single student, which quickly grew to an overwhelming ovation from all. “I realized in that moment how much the world has changed,” Becker says. “I knew that if there was a child in that room who is part of the queer community, that they received an unimaginable moment of support. There was so much love in that classroom in that moment. I went on to tell that story to the rest of my classes that day—never again to applause but always to warmth and understanding.”
Caped in every color of the rainbow, as well as in the love of those surrounding him, Bill Becker proves that not all heroes wear capes. Some wear flags.
