Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

STUDENT: It’s so great to get to college and finally have a gay professor.

SEK: I bet it is. Ain’t culture shock grand?

STUDENT: Absolutely. So what was it like for you in college?

SEK: What do you mean?

STUDENT: When you first found out one of your professors was gay.

SEK: I don’t know that I ever did. Wait, what are we talking about now?

STUDENT: I read that thing you wrote yesterday. It made me proud to be in your class.

SEK: Wait, I’m your gay professor?

STUDENT: It’s awesome to finally have a teacher to relate to.

ALL THE OTHER STUDENTS: Scott’s gay?

SEK: How about we discuss Game of Thrones now?

Apr 30, 2013 3:44:46 PM | Teaching

3 Comments

Jonathan Dresner

I'm sure I have students who think I'm gay: I wear rainbow pins on a regular basis (well, I wear jackets, and the lapels are just sitting there.... Got a whole bunch in different configurations, too: flags, Jewish stars, bowling pins, lightning bolts, and a crossed flags with the stars-and-stripes) and don't talk much about personal things like family. It's a small town, though; odds are they've seen us about, if they get out of the student coccoon.

Posted by: Jonathan Dresner | Wednesday, 01 May 2013 at 12:08 AM

Gord Sellar

Ha, one of the few students to write about me in Korean (at least, of whom I know) blogged a couple of times about me. In one post, she took a moment between praising one thing and another to note that I am 99.999999999% certain to be gay. And since I'm not (not that there's anything wrong with being gay) I have no idea where she got that idea, except perhaps just my "open-minded" attitude towards GLBT issues when they came up in class?

Still haven't gotten around to commenting my amusement: I want to do it in Korean and catch the student off guard, but I'm not sure I want to do so badly enough to bother with registering for the portal site I'd have to join to do so...

Posted by: Gord Sellar | Wednesday, 01 May 2013 at 11:59 AM

Rich Puchalsky

There was a song that was sort of the inversion of this ... Weezer's "Pink Triangle". It was hilarious (to me, anyways), because the lead singer is singing about how he got a crush on this really cool girl from class, then sees that's she's wearing a pink triangle and it can never be. But in a later interview ... which I looked up because the whole thing seemed amusing ... he tells the interviewer that this really happened, and he talked to the girl a year later or something, and found out that she was actually heterosexual and was wearing the triangle to show support. So if he hadn't been a twit who couldn't talk to the objects of his desire and treat them like real people, he might have found that out and had an actual relationship with her.

Anyways, if some of your students think of you as their inspirational gay teacher... a lot of the inspirational "relationships" inside people's heads are not with real people who they ever talk to. And with that, and only barely related, here's a couple of stanzas of a poem which can be sung to Weezer's song's tune:

Pink Triangle

When I'm filled with what I've heard
I start looking around for words
Time to pay poetic rent
Maybe I'll read The New Sentence
But when I start to feel that pull
I'm just pulling off myself
My inspiration's left unsaid
Though she lives inside my head

My muse is a lesbian
Arrangements didn't go like they should
She and I are married in my mind
But poems in my mind are no good

At least we can still be friends
Though she'll sit down and pretend
Wishing she had Patti Smith
But muses don't choose who they're with
When we're feeling bad and down
Then we'll laugh and joke around
Sometimes she'll smile and touch my hand
It's all that she can really stand

My muse is a lesbian
My poetry is always third-rate
Every poem that I like is queer
Why can I only write them straight?

Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Thursday, 02 May 2013 at 02:13 PM

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Scott Eric Kaufman

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