I have been able to make connections between my sexuality, pedagogy, art, and other life activities. It is this information I would like to work through with you and share. Histories of Invisibility Historically gays and lesbians have been written out of art texts and omitted in classroom discussions. This omission renders gay and lesbian artists and issues invisible. Health texts locate the topic of homosexuality near headings such as sexual deviance, sexual dysfunction, pornography, bestiality, necrophilia, sexual abuse, prostitution, rape, exhibitionism, pedophilia, voyeurism, transvestism or incest.
Sexual diversity is defined as pathological and deviant.
As a result, difference quickly gives way to bias, bias foments discrimination, discrimination begets violence, and violence maims and kills. As it is becoming increasingly apparent, heterosexuality is the privileged norm in American culture and is represented as natural and ordinary. The fields of art and art education both deny and perpetuate the biases of heterosexuality. The idealization of the heterosexual in society and art perpetuates specific values and norms and permits an ideological dominance by groups which actively discriminate against those with less power. For example, art historians, art educators, and art critics have represented themselves as conducting sexually undifferentiated, politically and economically disinterested , and objective studies in art.