A Teacher Blogs

...was about an hour ago . I  wasn't doing anything particularly queer at the time -- unless you count deadheading marigolds while wearing a shirt with a rainbow coloured heart that reads  Kill it with Kindness  across the front. Oh, and I had on that Egale Human Rights Trust rainbow wristband. And the shirt. And, of course, I was gardening. I used to hear that word all the time -- daily in fact -- a little over forty years ago in an all-boys Catholic middle school. That word and "queer," "fairy," and "gay boy," pretty much everyday for two years. It was mostly because I stood out: soft spoken, polite to teachers, Protestant (in name only), good at drama and music, and bad at sports.  The last one was a killer: Not only was I bad at hockey and football in a school that was as passionate about sports as it was about Catholicism; I had the temerity not to particularly care.  That's right. A red-blooded Ca...

Twenty years ago, while attending a conference on equity for post-secondary educators, I happened to meet an Anishnaabe woman who had been a survivor of Canada's residential school system. Along with her siblings and friends, she had been taken from family and community and placed in a government funded school operated by the Catholic Church. (The United and Anglican Churches of Canada also operated such schools.) The purpose of the system was to Canadianize her -- to remove all vestiges of her aboriginal heritage. During our conversation, she described beatings, verbal abuse and sexual assault.  What stands out vividly in my recollection of our conversation was a rule of the school's dining hall requiring students to retrieve and eat any scraps deemed edible by the staff from a slop bucket they scraped their plates into.  We were eating dinner later when she teasingly admonished me to clean my plate. Then she had to push her own plate away. The memory of the slop bucket ...

Let's Bring Back Eiynah to Facebook. I've written before about Eiynah -- feminist, illustrator, LGBTQ ally, and author of the blog Nice Mangos , which discusses sexuality in a Pakistani context. I first discovered Eiynah -- by way of her now-celebrated children's book My Chacha is Gay  -- a little over a year ago. My Chacha is Gay has been published in many languages, and is read by children, parents, teachers and chachas (Urdu for paternal uncle) the world over. Eiynah also penned  An Open Letter To Ben Affleck , which drew worldwide attention. She maintains an active presence on Twitter as  @nicemangos  and, until recently, Facebook. The name Eiynah is a pseudonym the artist and writer uses to protect herself and her family in case anyone should attempt to make good on the many threats she has received advocating for LGBTQ equality, sex-positivity, women's rights, as well as proclaiming herself an ex-Muslim. From her May 29th, 2015 entry,...