A case for more LGBT+ texts in our classroom libraries

Take a moment and think about these facts:

1. 34% of LGBT students are bullied on school property; 28% are bullied electronically.  In addition, LGBT students are 140% more likely than their heterosexual peers to not go to school because of safety concerns (Youth Risk Behavior  conducted by the CDC).
2.  The rate of suicide is four times higher for LGBT youth than it is for heterosexual youth, and 40% of transgender adults reported attempting suicide, 92% of which did so before they were 25 years old (the Trevor Project).
3.  92% of LGBT teens say they hear negative messages about being LGBT in their community,  and the top sources of that negativity are school, their peers, and the Internet (Growing up LGBT in America from Human Rights Commission).

LGBT, gender nonconforming, and gender fluid children in our schools face a dire reality every day, not just from their peers, but from the culture at large.  Look at what has been done to LGBT+ rights just in the last six months: at least 100 anti LGBT bills have been introduced in 29 states of which five have passed (USA Today); in February, protections were rolled back that allowed people to use the restroom that matched their gender identity, and, most recently, transgender people have been banned from the military (CNN).

In times like these, schools must step up and become a safe harbor for all of our students, especially for those who are under particular threat of physical or emotional harm.  As English teachers, one way we can provide a safe refuge is  through the books we offer and highlight in our classroom libraries.

Plenty of LGBT texts are available, both YA and adult titles.  A quick google search generates lists of recommended reading for LGBT youth, including Best LGBT titles for teens (goodreads) and ALA Rainbow List.

The question is whether we have the courage to buy, display, talk about, and encourage reading these books.  It's a worthy question to consider, especially when the five most challenged books on the American Library Association's 2016 Top Ten Challenged Books were on that list because of the LGBT themes, characters, and sexually explicit content.

To get a flavor of what is out there, I read four books that have LGBT characters as their narrators and LGBT issues as their primary plot conflicts.  Those books were as follows:

• Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg.  In this book, the narrator is an openly gay teenager.  His parents are so supportive that they even hijack the cause a bit (the mom, for example, is the president of the local PFLAG organization), and his school community is open and receptive.  However, the narrator is tired of being primarily known as "the gay kid."  He just wants a chance to be himself without the label.  In order to do this, he switches schools where he sets about acting "straight."  Needless to say, this doesn't work out as planned, and ultimately the characters learn that being gay is just one part of being his authentic self.
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz.  This title shows a character struggling to understand his own sexuality and identity.  The path for Aristotle is not an easy one.  Claiming his identity includes discovering secrets about his family, understanding his Mexican-American culture, exploring boundaries, and considering his future.  For Aristotle, being gay comes as a slow, almost reluctant, realization about himself, one of many he has to come to in order to grow up.  
• History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera.  The primary issue for the gay protagonist is the fact that his ex-boyfriend recently died in a drowning accident.  As the story unwinds in real time and in the past, the reader sees the protagonist confront mental health issues (including OCD and anxiety) and become entangled in essentially a gay love triangle.
• Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard.  This book came the closest to being about transgender youth.  The main character is gender nonconforming and lesbian, an important and definitely underrepresented point of view in classroom libraries. Other titles that may be more reflective of the transgender experience include the following:  I Am Jazz by Jazz Jennings, She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan, Luna by Julie Ann Peters, and If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo (all of which are currently on hold for me at the library, so expect to hear more on this topic at a later date).

We may take some heat for having LGBT titles in our libraries, but we must defend these titles as having equal rights to space on our shelves.  We are obligated to provide these texts as a mirror for our LGBT+ students, one in which they can see their actual lives and experiences reflected back at them, one in which they can see that their struggles, while unique, are shared and validated.

No! Don't make that book into a movie yet!

Scrolling through my twitter feed this morning, I saw a casting call for Seven and Khalil for the film adaptation of The Hate U Give.

Ugh.

Not even a year in print, this story will be viewed by the vast majority of my students before they've created voices for the characters, visualized the scenes, flipped back to re-read a section, or anticipated what would happen in the next chapter. What's more, many will watch it superficially--kinda understanding the plot but focused only on certain pieces, missing the complexity of characters, Thomas's nuanced plot, and Starr's compelling narration of current racial tension in our nation. "I already watched it," they'll tell me.  "I know what happens, so I don't need to read it."

This rush to put YA lit on the screen frustrates me; it's as though we're robbing future potential readers of experiencing the story come alive from their book. One of my favorite reads this spring was a student-recommended Everything, Everything. I ordered two copies for my library, then learned its movie had just been released--big plot twist 4/5 of the way through, no longer a surprise for future readers.

I know it's not a new thing: Twilight by Stephanie Meyer was published in 2005 with the movie following in 2008; Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games was released in 2008, with the film version in 20011. Lots of kids, teens, and adults were turned on to reading the series from watching the first movie. I didn't start reading Harry Potter to my boys until Alex had already seen the first two movies. What's more, I probably never would have read (or seen) anything from the Twilight saga in book or on screen if I hadn't looked up from grading vocab quizzes while subbing for a Spanish V class as the Cullens raced back to hide Bella after the bad vamps caught them playing baseball. (All but five of the Spanish students were on a field trip, and I suspect the movie was supposed to be playing in Spanish with subtitles.) The clip piqued my interest enough to ask my student aide about it; she lent me her copy of the book. And so it went.

So why am I all bent out of shape about print-to-film now?

Reason number one, hands down, is the classroom library. Still only available in hardcover, #1 on the YA Fiction Best Seller list, The Hate U Give was a costly title to add. Plus, at 440 pages, kids will need some stamina to push through to finish. I suspect a few more who do pick up the book after they've seen the movie will skim through some of the latter half of the book--I'd argue the half that requires the most attentive reading to glean all the insights that Thomas provides about the history of the racial conflicts in our society. There's a conversation between Starr, her brother, and her boyfriend as the novel approaches the climax--rioting in her neighborhood--a "white people are like this"/"black folks do this" conversation among teens (Starr and her brother are black; boyfriend is white)--and white boyfriend asks a question that makes the other two stop. It's an off-limits, offensive, 'racist' question to them. On the surface. Then Starr considers the conversation they'd been having, and how in the context of that conversation, boyfriend's question was pretty logical from his vantage point; so she answers the question, following up with an explanation of how what he'd asked would be construed by her and brother as offensive. My suspicion is that the movie version will amp up that riot, and that while conversation might include the dialogue, close-ups of Starr's expression and her changing tone of voice can't replace the author's paragraphs of narration conveying Starr's thinking.



Having a classroom library with gripping, relevant, high-interest texts is key to its success. In her awesome recent post, Anne cautions against confusing pop fiction with meaty literature in our haste to entertain the children, arguing that the 'classics' still belong in our English curriculum and we ought not be so hasty in casting off a title because someone said it's difficult of boring. As we've discussed often, almost all of the best current YA lit includes allusions to those classics; those connections are lost if kids have never been exposed to them.

The Hate U Give is an excellent example of a mentor text that can spark discussions and facilitate writing instruction. As meaty literature goes, it's got a lot of protein. (A lot of f-bombs, too.) It's one of those books a kid graduates to, challenges themselves with. [Check it out: plural pronoun for 'kid'. I'm unlearning/relearning. Growth. Woot.] I believe we're taking something away from that achievement by showing them what happens before we let them experience it in their mind's eye themselves. Sure, this movie will generate many of the same discussion points as the novel, but when I hark back to Louise Rosenblatt's Reader, Text, Response, I see so many passages in THUG where readers will bring their own experiences to bear as they create their own meanings. What powerful conversations could stem from them! The viewer of the film version will have a more reactionary response--meaningful still, yes. But I'd argue, probably less so.

But Gretchen, you say, To Kill A Mockingbird was made into a movie in 1962, just two years after it was published. We still have kids read that. Yeah, you got me there. The difference for me, I guess, is my desire for students to lose themselves in their independent books--following their characters and turning pages past their bedtime to see what happens next. While it is a part of what we do in teaching required texts, building their reading minds is a chief purpose of independent reading. I'm a little deflated that, for some of my kids, their experience with these characters and this story will be framed by a director's take of the words on the page rather than their own.

Who knows? Maybe I will love this movie. Maybe it will lend itself to an awesome book chat discussion and draw in more readers. I'll hope for that.

We need to read about race; we don't need to read Jodi Picoult

Lit circle books.  That delightful middle ground between teacher selected and student choice text.  The space where we tell students:  We've picked these books, but we picked them because we think you'll like them and because they might be easier for you to read.  We also implicitly say: We picked these titles because we think there is something in them worth reading and thinking about.

A little circle book is still a teacher selected text.  As such, we as teachers have a responsibility to pick texts that are well written and which inspire connections, analysis, and discussion.

Which is why we cannot pick pop fiction, even when it is sold as "the most important novel [the author] has ever written" and an attempt to "expand our cultural conversation about race and prejudice" (from The Washington Post, posted on jodipicoult.com).  That leads us to Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult, my most recent audiobook and a book recommended as a lit circle choice for senior students.  The book is about racism in America today, a topic we absolutely should be exploring -- just not with this book.

Small Great Things flattens out this complex, uncomfortable topic into a straight line narrative with stereotyped characters, preachy dialogue, and an unrealistic, ridiculous conclusion.  So many other recent books -- Just Mercy, The Hate U Give, American Boys, The New Jim Crow, Americanah, X, and Between the World and Me -- handle the topic of American racism in all of its messy complexity in more mature, thoughtful, and unique ways than Small Great Things does.  Any of those texts would make an excellent lit circle choice and would elicit the kind of reading we want and need students to do.

Of course we could also infuse classics like Beloved, The Color Purple, Native Son, and Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass into our lit circle repertoire.  Too often, however, these books are dismissed because teachers assume students find them "boring" or "hard" or "not engaging," so we don't even try them with students.  I wonder, though, if we shouldn't be using these texts more often. Are "kids these days" really not willing to read these books, or are we assuming the worst, shrinking our expectations, and shortchanging students in the process?

No doubt the books listed above can be a struggle to read and the ideas in them are hard to tackle, but I would propose that is exactly the kind of book we should be handing to kids with the teacher stamp of approval.  We need to say explicitly:  Read this, kiddo.  It's good for you, like broccoli and going to bed early, and you will be a better person for it.  The challenge and frustrations are worth it in the end.  Handing students challenging text says to them:  We know you can handle this.  We have actual high expectations, and, together, we are going to meet those expectations.

Kids might pick up Small Great Things as a choice book, and that's awesome.  We cannot, however, hand it to them, even as a lit circle choice, as an endorsement of quality literature.  Let kids choose pop fiction on their own.  It's our responsibility as ELA educators to use the precious little time we have with teacher selected books, including lit circle choices, to put quality, challenging texts in their hands.

We get to pick some of the texts students read, so we must choose carefully.

Text-rich Environments

After two years of reading research about text-rich environments and classroom libraries, I still do not think I fully grasped the importance of having text surrounding you day after day.  Then, I had Aiden; there is now a book for him in every single room in our house.  He runs to any book, grabs it, and will sit down to "read".  Because of his options, he does not need to look far to find a good book.

However, I witnessed another example of this today.  My newly-retired mother-in-law came over to watch Aiden today while I popped in to school for a quick meeting in the afternoon.  Unfortunately/fortunately, my mother-in-law came right as Aiden was ready to go down for his nap, so she had two-hours with nothing to do.  She found the book I was currently reading, American Street, on my kitchen counter, so she picked it up and started reading.  Over 100 pages later, she found herself hooked.  When I came home, the first thing she asked was if she could borrow the book when I was finished.  Yes.  Always yes.  I did not have to talk about the book to get her interested.  She simply saw the book, picked it up, and started reading.  Now, I completely understand that this is not the normal behavior of a high school student, especially if they had free wifi available.  However, I also know that this would not have happened if the book was not just lying out for my mother-in-law to see.  How do we create more of these situations in every day life and within our classrooms?  How do we set up these opportunities for others who may be looking for something to just take up some time?  We need to have books ready at any time because who knows when that moment will happen where someone finally has time to pick up a book.  We need to be ready.

I have also decided that I am the worst book critic EVER because I love every single book, and American Street by Ibi Zoboi is no different.  I really enjoyed this book and the main character who is an immigrant from Haiti.  The story starts with the main character, Fabiola, and her mother coming to the United States to live with her Aunt and three cousins.  At customs, her mother gets stopped, and Fabiola gets sent on to stay with her relatives.  The plot develops as Fabiola needs to learn how to live in Detroit, Michigan while wondering what will happen to her mother.  The conflicts in this novel bring up some tough issues that deal with abusive relationships (boyfriend/girlfriend), drugs, gang violence, deportation, and the conflicts that develop in different types of relationships that Fabiola has.  The end of the book is realistic in that it's not just some happy-ending and everything is fixed.  I left this book feeling sad for the characters that still had to keep on living even after all of the tragedy.  I would be careful in recommending this book to high school students, and I would definitely want to know the student well before suggesting this one.  On the other hand, I love that it is a quick read with short chapters which I always think is appealing for high school students.

Next up is Choice Words by Peter Johnston.  This is a "school" book, and I'm already desperately wanting to read another YA book.  I may have to head to library to start finding some other YA titles that I have been wanting to read or at least books to scatter around my house to encourage others who visit to pick a book to read. 😀

The first disappointment of summer

I'll be honest -- I picked One of Us Is Lying by Karen M. McManus because of the cover and the inside flap teaser. Try to read this from the inside flap and NOT be intrigued:  "On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention. . . The Brain . . . the Beauty . . . the Criminal . . . The Athlete . . . and Simon, the Outcast . . . Before the end of detention, Simon's dead."   How?  Who?  What happened?

The Brain, Beauty, Criminal, and Athlete provide alternating first-person perspectives of the events before, during, and after the deadly detention.  Possible answers to the who/what/when/where/why questions are tossed out in nearly every chapter.  Maybe the Criminal and his new-found love, the Brain, colluded to do it!  Maybe the Beauty did it out of revenge!  Oh, could it possibly be the "perfect" Athlete who's carrying a secret only Simon knew?  Could be any -- or none -- of those.  Disappointingly, the storyline and characters proved to be cliche and underdeveloped. I moved quickly through the book because I lost interest, and I hated the end.

This book is less Breakfast Club with murder and more 13 Reasons Why with only five reasons or Nineteen Minutes without the guns.  I'll be curious to share this with kiddos this fall and get their perspective.  Adult me didn't really dig it, but I'm not the audience for this book.

And, totally, unrelated, I am STILL working my way through American Gods on my Kindle.  I will persevere, and I WILL FINISH THIS BOOK!  

Memoirs: Peeking Into Other People's Windows

I will admit to being a bit of a voyeur.  I walk at dusk and sneak peeks into houses with blinds open and lights on.  Nothing creepy is going on; I just want to see how they decorated the living room.  Memoirs are like those lit up houses; these are writers who have purposefully left their lights on and blinds up so I can peek into their lives.

Some of the best books I've ever read or listened to have been memoirs:  Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty to name a few.

This past week I devoured two outstanding new memoirs:  Hunger by Roxane Gay and You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie.  In addition, I listened to We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby, an often hilarious counter stretch to all of the grim reality of the other two stories.

I read Hunger in a day.  Gay says in chapter 2 that she will share "the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of [herself]" (5), and she does.  While exposing and analyzing her own past and present trauma, she also speaks to any woman (or person, really) who has felt that they are not meeting expectations, are not fitting into spaces, are not welcome to a full place in the world.  I could've written the chapter where she talks about starting "each day with the best of intentions for living a better, healthier life" and then when the day is done facing "myself and all the ways I have failed.  Most days I haven't exercised.  I haven't made any of the good choices I intended to make when the day began" (159).  Gay's writing is poetic and brutally true.  Hunger addresses the hunger that "is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul" (193), and it is a book I am going to revisit many times to mine for wisdom.

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie is a quilt of words.

 Alexie's mother, the woman he is trying to understand in this text, made quilts, and Alexie purposefully designed the 78 essays and 78 poems of this book to come together in the same beautiful, personal, but also random way that quilts do.  The past and the present, the urban and the reservation parts of Alexie's life, the grief and celebration of all his family has lived through, the mania and depression of the bipolar disorder he and his mother suffer from, the modern and native culture, the love and hate  -- these are the quilt squares he sews together to make his art. As he explores his own life, he comes to strikingly simple and beautiful truths:  "Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than it hurts a little to breathe, but we're okay" (241) he observes as he talks to his sister who's living through a wicked forest fire on the reservation.  As he ponders his mortality, he writes:  "I will eventually look at a blank piece of paper/Or blank computer screen and realize that I've run out/Of words.  I will smile, shed a tear, walk outside,/Sit on my porch, and misidentify the local birds" (379). He recognizes that his mother, like all of our mothers, "will always haunt [us]" (199).  His words and style and honesty are beautiful and resonant.

To lighten up a bit, I picked up We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby as an audiobook.  She is so profane and so crude, but so hilarious!  If you can find it, look up the story where Irby describes her hellcat named Helen Keller.  I looked like a complete loon as I walked down the street laughing so hard I was crying as I listened to her recite Helen's escapades.

I'm so grateful that people like Gay, Alexie, and Irby open up their blinds and let us all peek in to their houses.  Through the glimpses I get into their living rooms, I can better see how I -- none of us -- are alone in our own spaces.

(Re) Discovering Ourselves

     Lately, I have found myself remembering different parts of my former selves. Not necessarily with a longing for times gone by, but with a sense of nostalgia. Like that feeling when you wake from a dream and can't quite sift through what was real and what was the dream. That moment when you hear a certain song, and it triggers the memories and the wave of emotion that is attached to those memories, unexpected and raw.
     I've always been someone who gets too involved in 'other worlds'. When I watch movies, I have a hard time separating myself from the fact that it isn't 'really' real. This is probably why I find it impossible to watch horror films. 
     I'm always reminded of Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried. He explores the idea of truth, of fiction vs. fact. He talks about how often the "story-truths" are more true than "happening-truths." I find the same to be true with really great literature and movies. I find myself drawn into the worlds like I'm a part of them, a part of the characters' lives. This year, I found myself a sobbing puddle at the end of The Book Thief. The emotion of it stayed with me for days. If I'm honest, it still haunts me a bit from time to time. I suppose good literature really should never stop haunting.
     I had the fine experience of heading to the library alone yesterday, a bit of a lost art for me. As much as I can spend endless amounts of time perusing children's literature with my kids, and I really can, I am a lover of children's books, there is something about the endless possibilities of walking into a library and choosing books...for myself.
     This is where the my former selves come in. I have been rediscovering my need for nature and the outdoors, of escaping the busy-ness of life and remembering to be mindful. To take a damn minute. To breathe. 
     I was drawn to non-fiction, hungry for some peace and quiet on the page. I need to feed my soul, and my soul needs a break from the escapism of fiction. Though, Mr. O'Brien might tell me that fiction is the real non-fiction...or something like that. These books are a way for me to feel that old familiar feeling of the things I care about most...but have left for a while. I chose a book about wandering and listening, about the environment and helping to create urban green space, hoping to channel some remnants of Thoreau and Whitman, Kerouac and maybe London. I also chose a few wild cards. I never know what I really want, so I get more than I need. I am also a chronic over-packer...I think the two ideas are closely linked, for better or for worse.
     The shelves of the library are full of words and ideas screaming to be discovered. I, of course, ended up with more books than I could comfortably carry. What hit me, though, was the weight of the books I'd left on the shelf. It was almost painful to walk away from the books I knew I might like as much or even more than what I'd chosen. What if I'd chosen "incorrectly?" What if there was something on that fiction shelf that would speak to me more? I had to talk myself down...it WAS ok to walk away. There is always a tomorrow, or a next week, or a week after that. There is summer. There is ice water with lemon and lime and cucumber. There is sun and warmth. There is a garden growing in my back yard. There are the voices of small children riding circles on their bicycles. And there is an infinite amount of minutes to read or re-read, to discover and re-discover the selves I have been and the selves I am to become. 

What I ended up carrying out of the library: 

     

 

What I have on my immediate "To-Read Next" List but left on the shelf: