by Ed Boland
I contemplated making a public coming-out statement, but I didn’t want to generate more attention and enmity with a dramatic announcement in my first few months. There were already enough distractions. Advice from my coworkers—both straight and gay—was again wildly contradictory, ranging from “Are you crazy?” to “Why put blood in the water?” to “Own it publicly and the issue will disappear!” to “I dunno.” Sam, who was nearly tossed out of Yale for his militant AIDS activism, encouraged me to bite the bullet and come out. Unsure of what to do and lacking my usual confidence, I decided to say nothing.
Stories of Kameron in exodus filtered back to Union Street. In the Bronx, without backup in non-Blood territory, he was repeatedly jumped. He started to carry weapons. When it was almost time for him to come back, a group of us made an unsuccessful appeal to the union to try to block his return. The only advice they could offer the ninth-grade teachers was the ludicrous idea of contacting our local police precinct and registering a complaint against him. This was the best the union could offer? We’d be laughed out of the precinct.
When he came back months later, he was even angrier, but he managed to curb his worst behavior for a short time because he knew he had used up his chances.
Two weeks after his return, as Kameron was bounding up the stairs to class one morning, a hammer fell out of his pocket and directly into the path of Trey, the bearded sophomore English teacher. A hammer was contraband in its own right, but this one also concealed a double switchblade. It was the last straw. Kameron was gone for good.
At dismissal that day, I overheard Fat Clovis’s pithy take on the situation: “Oh. They getting real tough around here now. Three hundred strikes, you out.” He was trying to be outlandish, but his count probably wasn’t far off.
Chapter 4
Nowhere Over the Rainbow
KAMERON WASN’T THE only surprise I encountered on day one. During the final period of my first day, I was working my way through the attendance list. To avoid the sins of my student-teaching “mentor,” Mr. Cooper, who mangled every ethnic name he ever came across, I went to great pains to pronounce everyone’s name correctly, consulting veteran teachers and even scribbling phonetic approximations in the margins of the roster. Given that the kids hailed from everywhere from Yemen to Haiti to Malaysia, it was no easy feat. Nigerian names are particularly notorious among teachers. Kamiolakamioluwalamibe, anyone? (In case you are wondering, as I did, it means “We appeal to God for help” in Yoruba. Indeed.)
I was close to the end of the list with no obvious gaffes, so I was surprised to hear so much laughter after a name as simple as “Leon Washington.”
In response, a timid, prim “Here” was delivered into the ether.
More snickering. I looked up.
My eyes followed a set of long, tapered fingers past a bent wrist, down a thin caramel arm to the face of a pretty, doe-eyed boy. Unlike any other kid in class, he wore a natty polo shirt with a popped collar. Not a hint of wannabe gangster on him. I tried to suspend my snap judgments, but two things flashed in my head: First, Gay with a capital G. And then, jeez, what a burden for a kid like that to have to walk around with such a macho NFL-esque name like Leon Washington.
I clearly wasn’t the only one who thought this way.
“Is that your name for real, baby? You sure don’t look like no Leon Washington,” sneered Chantay. That got a laugh.
“Dead ass, Dead ass,” said someone in a new-to-me slang term of affirmation.
“Hey, pipe down,” I reprimanded, borrowing an old naval expression I’d heard from my father growing up.
Another wave of laughter. Little did I know that “pipe down” was now a street expression for sex, akin to “laying pipe.” Oops. So many new words to learn.
I cruised through two more names without incident and then came to the last one:
“Mariah Wilks?”
“Mariah!” someone said in a mocking, pop-vocal way, trying to jump an octave or two.
Of course, I couldn’t help but think of the pop star. With such an aspirational name, I was on the lookout for a glam girl and scanned the aisles for some mother’s ultimate fan tribute. But, as far as I could tell, just about everyone was accounted for, except for a boy in a red hoodie at the back of the room with his head on the desk, who had slipped in at the very last minute. Slowly, he picked up his head.
I took a quick look and followed my instincts honed from summers spent with butch lesbians on the beaches and in the bars of Fire Island.
“Are you Mariah?” I asked. Even at fifteen paces, it was clear to me that Mariah was a girl who wasn’t very much interested in looking like a girl. To confirm my hunch, I scanned for an Adam’s apple but didn’t see one. As familiar as I was with gender bending in all its glorious forms, I was still pretty surprised to see it on such bold display here in ninth grade at Union Street. This wasn’t a queer-friendly college campus like Oberlin or Reed where binary gender choices were regarded as passé.
“Yup,” she responded in a low growl.
More from Chantay. “Wow. Mister, you the first new teacher ever to figure out she’s a girl!” Unlike Leon, no one laughed at Mariah. Many of the kids had been with her at Union Street for middle school, and I guessed that they all knew better than to mock her.
Mariah looked pouty and mean, like a cranky baby who had just woken up from a nap. She was square-shaped, dark-skinned, and had poorly kept cornrows, which revealed a scalp shiny from perspiration. Despite the stifling heat in the room, she wore several layers under her hoodie. With a cocky swagger, she arched over the backrest of her desk and spread her legs farther apart than any boy.
In the early days of the semester, I watched Leon and Mariah both closely, on the lookout in case either of them was bullied. I wanted to make sure it didn’t happen on my watch. Of course, I didn’t really know the true sexual orientations of these children and it wasn’t my business, but I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a factor either. Given the affinity, I thought I might identify with them more, or at least want to advocate for them if they needed it.
At first I saw little to concern me. Despite my initial gay hazing by Kameron, I got the sense this generation was more tolerant. They had grown up on a steady diet of gay-friendly media with Ellen, Rosie, Will & Grace, and The L Word. And even if they were young, gay issues had been swirling everywhere around them in the zeitgeist: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; same-sex marriage; and the bittersweet visibility that came with the AIDS epidemic. I thought back to Javan, the militantly queer kid in Mr. Cooper’s class at Eugene Debs. If anything, he was the bully who terrorized the straight boys with withering comments, not the other way around.
Aside from the occasional ribbing, Mariah appeared tolerated by all, admired by many, and feared by most. Leon also seemed to be fine. He hung around with a small but tight super-girlie-girl posse; they walked the halls together, ate at the same lunch table in the cafeteria, and all seemed to giggle in unison. I had to stifle a laugh one day when I overheard him describing a sweater as “not really magenta, I’d have to say…more fuchsia” to his buddy Talia. Even more surprising, he inflected it with suburban-girl upspeak and a touch of raspy “vocal fry.” Where had this kid from the South Bronx picked that up?
Both Leon and Mariah were playing to type in the extreme, which ran smack up against my post-gay-liberation hopes for the world. I harbored ludicrous stereotype-reversing fantasies that would cause the entire class to rethink their assumptions: Maybe Leon would turn out to be a sensational running back or Mariah would suddenly rock a pretty floral skirt in class. I wanted to throw out my lesson on Indian geography and give a high school–appropriate rendition of “Free to Be…You and Me.” One where I would sing about my gay friends who had played in the NFL, rose through the ranks of the Marines, or laid bricks for a living. About the lesbians I had known who had never so much as touched a softball bat or looked under the hood of a car.
After about a month, however, it became clear tha
t my early interpretation of the social scene as generally tolerant was wrong. In retrospect, I can see that the first few weeks of ninth grade are just a period of unspoken détente, a time for human data collection. Underneath the quiet surface, the social hierarchy was being formed: Cliques were crystallizing, pecking orders established, and judgments made. Kids pegged one another as smart or naughty, ugly or “fly,” outrageous or “BORIN!” Their determinations were based on a complex algorithm that factored in your ethnicity, weight, borough, sneaker choice, level of bling, your churchiness, your potty mouth, the depth of your cleavage, and the arc of your ass. And your social history from middle school, if known, was another factor. (Despite being the putative class beauty, Milagros would never, ever rise to be queen bee because she had inexplicably wet her pants in seventh grade.)
The results of this grand formula seemed final and strangely unanimous. What strange creatures we are that we do this almost instinctively. I suppose it helps us feel more secure about our place in the world.
In the final analysis, though, Mariah emerged near the top of the heap. The girls were indifferent to Mariah and the guys liked her. She could hang. With them she shared an obsession with sports, a gravitational pull toward thug life, and an unspoken but palpable interest in the ladies.
As much as she was a star in the social firmament, Mariah was a nightmare in the classroom, treating me and the other teachers with contempt from the beginning. She was wildly disruptive and didn’t do a lick of work. She had two settings: rage and mischief, with little in between. One afternoon I tried to keep her after class for nailing some boy’s head dead-on with an eraser from halfway across the room. I got in her face about it and she bellowed back at me. She flipped over a desk and an easel and ran out the door.
What made it all worse was that Mariah was what I would call “crypto-smart”: She would show you on the sly that she was capable of absorbing any idea, doing any assignment, but then she made it clear that, out of spite, she would do nothing academic. One October afternoon, after no one offered to answer a tough question I posed about the Silk Road, I turned to write on the board. Out of nowhere Mariah interjected, “It was an exchange of goods, but also of ideas.”
I spun around, stunned.
“You liked that, didn’t you?” she said, toying with me. And then it was back to havoc-making. In the course of seven seconds, I went from a surge of hope to flat-out disenchantment. Welcome to teaching in ninth grade.
Meanwhile, the campaign against Leon, who had ended up near the bottom of the social order, was escalating. At first it was just the occasional snarky comment about his voice, walk, or clothes. That was followed by ugly notes addressed to “the cocksucker” and graffiti (“Leon = fag face”). Then I heard he was getting shoved in the hallway, openly mocked in gym.
At the same time, I was getting the adult version of the same treatment. Not for a second did I expect my students to welcome a gay teacher with open arms, especially not a white rookie. After all, many of the “good” kids were the children of fire-breathing evangelicals, and many of the “bad” ones had been born during the height of the AIDS epidemic to homophobic parents. But I was armed with two decades of activism, therapy, and identity politics. In my day, I had been called everything from a sodomite to a turd burglar. What could some high school freshmen say that I hadn’t heard before? Sticks and stones…
It turns out, they could say, “Mr. Boland is a faggot.” They could say it a dozen times in a week, in lots of ways, in different languages and dialects. They could say it stone-cold to my face or frothing as they were being hauled out of my classroom screaming. The first, the fifth, the fifteenth lash didn’t really penetrate. But over the next few months, the hate slowly seeped into my bedrock and did some damage. To my surprise, it stuck and it hurt.
I knew it was getting to me one Friday afternoon in November, after a particularly tough week, when I was riding my bike home from school. I had gone out for a few beers with my coworkers in an East Village hipster bar with a cheap happy hour. I was pedaling along, feeling a little drunk but mostly numb. I knew the anger was somewhere in me, but I couldn’t place it, couldn’t vent it, couldn’t puke it out like bad fish. I pulled up behind a city bus going up First Avenue. I was so close to it, I could see the engine rattling behind a metal grille. It threw heat, spit exhaust, and roared suddenly as the bus accelerated. I pedaled frantically behind and started screaming at the engine like a maniac for two whole blocks. I shrieked louder than the roar of the bus, and people on the sidewalk turned wide-eyed to see what was the matter. I pulled off onto a dark side street in between two cars. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and willed my frantic breaths back to normal.
If it was bad for me, it was worse for Leon. A week after my bus breakdown, things came to a head and he was beat down in the lunchroom by three boys. They skipped the usual formality of creating some pretext for the violence (typically something like “That faggot was checking out my ass”), and they just beat him. Word had it that he didn’t fight back at all, which only further stained his reputation. Jesús, the ringleader, was hauled off to Mei’s office by the school security guards. Mei offered to let Leon go home, but he stayed in school for the rest of the day. He arrived at my class not long afterward. His eyes were puffy from crying, and he looked so scared. My heart went out to the kid. His girlfriends comforted him, while I overheard the boys snarling, “What a little bitch, he didn’t even fight back” or “Man up, Leon.” As I reprimanded them, Leon sank farther into his seat in embarrassment.
Leon’s mother was called to the school the next day. I remembered from parent-teacher conferences that she was a put-together woman with a ready smile. Because he wasn’t my advisee, I wasn’t at the meeting, but I heard through the grapevine that through her tears she said, “Not again. This happened all throughout middle school. I thought this school would be different. Can’t you do something?”
Without mentioning Leon by name, Mei made an announcement to the entire grade the following day about universal respect and nonviolence. She cited the Golden Rule and finished by saying, “It is as important to me that we create a tolerant school community as an academic one.” It was heartfelt and moving to adults. The kids, having heard many such talks over the years, shifted in their seats, bored and bothered. They were mentally tuned to a different channel altogether.
What made Leon’s situation feel so hopeless was that much of it took place outside of school and our classrooms. The harassment happened during his commute, in his neighborhood, and on the Internet. Worse, I don’t think he reported half of what was really happening to him. And in what became a depressing pattern during the year, increased adult attention and concern only seemed to make the bullies more furtive and determined, so it was no wonder he seemed to trust his teachers as little as his tormentors. But among all of the teachers, he was most eager to distance himself from me. I was kryptonite to him, radiating gay guilt by association. He wouldn’t make eye contact and barely spoke to me. And so I kept my distance.
I found some small comfort when the English teacher, Porter, told me that in the daily journal he required his students to keep, Leon was opening up. He wrote about how happy it made him to indulge his sweet tooth, his indignation that his mother had to stand in a puddle of piss in the elevator of their project with her grocery cart, and his dream of an adult life where he was a rich and respected pediatrician. I was shocked that some of the most unlikely kids would fill notebook after notebook about what they weren’t willing to say out loud, committing their innermost thoughts to paper and risking discovery. The period was as much therapy as English class. I was just glad Leon was communicating somehow.
In early November, the social worker Sita put Mariah’s name at the top of the agenda for the ninth-grade-team “kid talk,” a structured protocol every three weeks where teachers, advisers, administrators, and the social worker would discuss one child’s progress—or the lack thereof—in great depth and brainsto
rm strategies for how to address problems. It was exactly the kind of thoughtful and innovative practice that a small reform-minded school could do and exactly why I was attracted to Union Street. This would never have happened at a big anonymous place like Eugene Debs. There, teachers would fill out some kind of disciplinary report and it would go into a Bermuda triangle of paperwork, rarely to be answered. There, the kids were lucky if the teachers knew much more than their names.
Around the circle we went with our observations:
“She’s missed days and days of school. But when she’s here she’s failing and fighting,” said Bridget, the ninth-grade science teacher.
“The girls in her advisory group tell me she’s being recruited for a gang. Makes sense. I’d want her in my gang,” the math teacher, Dorothy, said wryly.
Gretchen, our vice principal, said, “There are serious signs of neglect here. It’s obvious she doesn’t know anything about feminine hygiene. Have you gotten close to her? She positively reeks. And she’s wrapped up in that same stinky red hoodie every day. We need to do a serious intervention and get the mother in here right away.”
Sita nodded, adding, “I certainly don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but it’s a potential sign of abuse when kids swaddle themselves up in layers like that, especially when the weather is still warm. It’s like they are putting on armor. I’ve seen it before.”
“She’s in my first-period class and she smells like pot a lot,” said Porter, the English teacher.
“Well, her nickname is Wavy,” I told him, proud of having learned the day before that it meant a stoner.
We had invited Tasneen, Mariah’s eighth-grade reading teacher, to the meeting to give us some background. Tasneen was a former lawyer and midlevel diplomat at the UN who had also turned to teaching in midlife. She said, in her beautiful Persian accent, “I’m afraid to say we had the exact same discussion last year and took a lot of the steps you’re discussing. It was to little effect. We don’t know much about her home life because I don’t think there is much of one. We certainly got no help from the mother last year.”
