Queer Studies For the Straight Black Male
A college class that made me a better person
I grew up in a tough neighborhood in Houston, and even by the standards of a poor inner city neighborhood, I had a particularly tough and poor childhood. And from that, I somehow found myself a college student a lot of years after the point when people stopped referring to you as a college kid.
During my first couple of years, I’d taken three literature classes with Professor Choudhuri, a short smiling Indian American woman with a challenging, but genuinely engaging style of teaching. Before the Spring semester of my senior year, I looked for her in the class catalogue as I was preparing to register for my classes. Professor Choudhuri didn’t have any African American Literature or Russian Literature classes, my top choices, that worked with my schedule, but she was teaching a class called “Queer Studies,” that would focus on the work of LGBTQ writers.
Honestly, I would not have taken the class except I so enjoyed Professor Choudhuri that I probably would have taken any class she was teaching.
The class ended up being comprised of mostly women and about an even split between LGBTQ students and straight women, with about four…
