A collection of 17 essays by professors and writers in the United States and abroad, this highly personal book explores what it means to be a homosexual instructor in an English department, with particular emphasis on faculty members who teach works by or about gay men and lesbians.
Some essays go into elementary and secondary education, but the main focus is on college.
The section includes an essay by Edward J. Ingebretsen, a priest who is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, a Roman Catholic institution, where he teaches a controversial course on lesbian and gay texts. But those others need to be brought to develop their own sensitivities as well, and sometimes transitional discomfort is a necessary part of transformational growth, as it is of healing. It cannot always be the woman, or the teacher, who gives, and the man or student who receives. That certain historical figures had something in common with contemporary homosexuals would be of little importance in a world where gay was considered as good as straight, where homosexuals had never been put in jails or insane asylums or fired from their jobs or disowned by their families merely because they were lesbian or gay. But such a world does not exist, she says.