A Case for LGBTQ History in Schools
LGBTQ experiences stand as integral strands in the overall multicultural rainbow. Everyone has a right to information that clarifies and explains these histories.
As the new school year begins in our nation’s elementary, middle, and high schools, and in our colleges and universities, educators and school administrators have an excellent opportunity to resurrect the lives, the stories, the histories that have long been intentionally hidden from students, from us all, by socially dominant individuals and groups through the draconian processes of neglect, deletion, erasure, omission, banning, censorship, distortion, alteration, trivialization and other means.
Because of this, as is still often the case for many other minoritized communities, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and queer (LGBTQ) young people grow up in a society without an historical context in which to project their lives. They are weaned on the notion that they have no culture and no history. And the result has been vast and devastating. In the famous words of African American social activist Marcus Garvey: “A people without a history is like a tree without roots.”
