Speaking the Unspeakable.......In forbidden places..........

Talking Points on Speaking the unspeakable in forbidden places: addressing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality in the primary school.

First I have to say to say that this really "blew me away." Once I got through the education-speak, I was able to decipher what was being done. I liked how they reintroduced the concept of Cinderella, with the story that I have never heard before of the "The Paper Bag Princess."

I feel that when difficult issues come up, the UK seems to find a way to take them on appropriately. In the new version of Cinderella, the kids are initially happy by the initial rejection of Prince Charming, by Cinderella, but did not understand why Cinderella would reject the wearing of beautiful dresses. I find that the kids may be reacting to Cinderella taking an antiestablishment line, when all of the kids have probably heard this story a hundred times. But none of the kids could understand why anyone would reject wearing nice clothes.

In the following exercise where the kids were asked, What advice would you give if you were the Paper Bag Princess to Cinderella? I found that the kids seemed to reject the concept of homosexuality and come up with "other reasons" why the Prince might not want to marry Cinderella. But came up with other reasons instead, like wanting to remain single, or avoid gold-diggers.

In the King and King, it seemed a similar reasoning. At the end of the story the Prince married another Prince, but all but 2 kids seemed to accept the outcome, but when the term lesbians was mentioned the kids seemed to laugh and say, Yuk? I liked the point at which hot-seated Cindy, by asking are you really Gay?

I do not know about others feelings, but mine are if you can not accept people from different sexual choices, than maybe you should not be a teacher. It must have been very hard for gays and lesbians during the sixties to express themselves. Coming out of the closet could not have been easy.

In the Central Falls High School we had two guys that were known to be gay. They were excused from some of the all guy activities. One guys name was Brian and he was huge, so no one picked on him. The other guy was Eddie and he was very feminine and unfortunately attracted bullies. Eddie was a straight A student and later on went on to become a doctor out-of-state. I think that the Bullying took its toll. Both of the Guys mentioned were one and two years ahead of me, but I would have not treated them any different then or now?

Our society has become both more and less tolerant. By more tolerant, I mean the courts have finally allowed people to marry the people that they love without fear of discrimination, or fear of reprisal. On the less tolerant side, we are still seeing some Gay Bashing of both men and women by people who must hate themselves if they can not accept people as they are, and not as they think that they should be.

I feel that our current Political and Societal feelings are more of general acceptance then ever before, not just based on legal decisions, but also based on people should be allowed to be protected when they chose to marry whatever partner they want and have the same legal protection under marriage as anyone else. We have openly gay and lesbian people holding public office and doing a damn fine job.

For myself, I had to explain to my 9 year old Grand daughter Ava, about people that were gay when I took her to the beach and two girls were kissing. I thought I did a pretty good job because her Mom called me later and thanked me for having to explain it to her.

This was an impressive study / experiment and only by continuing to do so will we be able to move further ahead as an enlightened society.