Anita Bryant’s triumph over homosexuality in Miami reminded me of schoolteachers. There was a lot of discussion in that dispute about teachers and whether their sexual proclivities do or do not influence children and, if they do, whether homosexual teachers can divert the young from the heterosexual path.
People who took Miss Bryant’s view that they may talked about teachers as “role models.” Lacking fluency in the sociological tongue, a language almost as difficult as Basque, I am unclear what a “role model” is, but those who used the term seemed to be saying that teachers are people children tend to emulate. In any event, many Miamians must have thought their children would become homosexual if subjected to homosexual teachers.
That prompted me to ponder teachers I haven’t seen, and scarcely thought about, for decades, and for the first time I reflected on how their sex lives had affected my own. My first thought was that it was curious, perhaps perverse, that I have not turned out to be a spinster.
Nowadays, I know, spinsters have been eliminated from society by the lexicographers of the feminist movement, but there were still quite a few forty years ago, and most of them seemed to gravitate to school-teaching. Until eighth grade, I did not realize that males were permitted to teach school, and my impression was that married females were almost as unwelcome in the trade.
If the teacher was a “role model,” parents were obviously unaware of it, for most of them surely did not want their children to grow up to be spinsters. Yet, despite almost constant tutelage by spinsters, I never felt the smallest temptation to indulge in spinsterism. When a group of us classmates sneaked off to somebody’s cellar to play, we didn’t play “spinster.” We played “doctor,” despite the fact that in those days you never found a medical man teaching elementary school.
Looking back, it seems we were always at least dimly aware of the sexuality of teachers, or in most cases, the absence of it. Even at an age foolishly thought to be innocent, one made certain assumptions about most of those teachers, and one of the firmest was that they had no sex life whatever. The idea of a teacher in the coils of rapture was as inconceivable as the idea of Herbert Hoover in Bermuda shorts. Yet very, very few of us, I suspect, were seduced by these “role models” into the juiceless life of celibacy.
At age eleven, I and the other males in my class were stirred by the spectacle of a teacher who, though unmarried, was definitely not a spinster. Definitely not. She wore no girdle in the battle against ignorance. I—and, I am sure, fifteen other men my age—still remember her voluptuous chalk movements at the blackboard as she struggled to help us grasp the distinction between a sentence’s subject (one chalk line underneath) and its predicate (two lines underneath). Until then I had never seen a teacher fight ignorance without her armor on.
Was she a “role model”? Perhaps. To this day I enjoy lecturing helpless children on the finer points of English grammar, which is almost as difficult as Basque grammar and may, therefore, suggest that that teacher led me down the path to sadism.
High school—it was an all-male establishment—exposed me to masculinity at the blackboard. The teachers wore three-piece suits and smelled of forbidden cigarettes which they were allowed to puff unseen between classes in private hideaways. One assumed them to be married and, therefore, beyond sex. Being for the most part dull, they made marriage seem dull and sexless, yet I already knew that I would someday marry, and knew with equal certainty that even though married I would not turn my back on sex. Sex was what the football captain was up to and, though not yet ready for operations at that rarefied level, I was confident that once I was, I would not wither away as teachers did.
I had at least two homosexual teachers in that school. They didn’t tell us they were, but we all knew it. I learned to jeer about them when they were out of earshot and to laugh about “queers,” but I learned it from my “role models” in the schoolyard, and not from them.
One of them was largely responsible for encouraging a classmate to pursue a form of art at which he is now one of the world’s best practitioners, besides being a family man. The other woke me to the amazing fact that in life there was also wit. The teacher I most wanted to emulate, however, was single, drank wine and had been gassed in World War I. Of his three admirable traits, there was only one I wanted to copy, and sure enough, to this day I love the sound of a popping cork.