Tending toward friendship: LGBTQ sexualities in US schools

Abstract

In 2014, Beyond Bullying, a research project examining LGBTQ sexualities and lives at school, installed private storytelling booths in three US high schools. Students, teachers, and staff were invited to use the booths to share stories about LGBTQ sexualities—their stories often invoked the pleasures and disappointments of being and having a friend. This article analyzes narratives of friendship as told in the Beyond Bullying storytelling booths. Drawing on Foucault’s (1996) interview, ‘Friendship as a way of life,’ we explore participants’ stories of friendship as heralding ‘new relational modes’ that chart a liminal space between family and sexuality. These relational modes of friendship disrupt the familiar trope of the ‘ally’ in anti-bullying programs and complicate what empirical research on LGBTQ youth calls, ‘peer social support.’ Theorizing friendship allows LGBTQ sexuality in schools to reside in an ethics of discomfort, which accommodates complex social relations and varied forms of desire, intimacy, and yearning.

Keywords

Friendship LGBTQ sexualities schools sexual storytelling youth

‘Friendship,’ Joan Scott suggests, ‘is an ineffable relationship that lies between family and sexuality’ (2011: 430). Scott comes to this description in an article dedicated to the work of her academic colleague and friend, Judith Butler, who has had much to say about sexuality and kinship but little theoretical interest in friendship. Part of Butler’s reluctance, Scott intimates, rests in friendship’s proximity to and estrangement from both sexual desire and family. Friendship lies in between, and, perhaps because of this liminality, friendship is at once an ordinary, everyday relation and an intimacy too great for words. Friendship not only pushes relationality beyond family as a site of ancestry, genealogy, and blood-ties, but also suggests that home, domesticity, and heterosexual, reproductive sexuality are not enough. Friendship exceeds narrow notions of who and what constitutes family as well as conflations of desire with sex, offering a terrain on which people can expand intimacies into a kinship based on chosen entangled relations (Weston, 2013).

In this excess, friendship has queer ambitions, resisting fixed and domesticating notions of kinship grounded in the logics of blood-ties and legal connections. In his evocative interview, ‘Friendship as a way of life,’ Michel Foucault describes friendship as a ‘new relational mode’ incited by gay sexuality. Foucault (1996) insists that gayness—what we term ‘queerness’—be conceptualized as a relation, a ‘way of life,’ rather than an identity or achievement. New relational modes gesture toward unexpected and novel configurations—friendships, alliances, intimacies, all broadly conceived—in which identities and selves bump up against others outside the familiar and sanctioned intimacies of kinship. Friendship as queerness rests on a desire for ties and intimacies beyond what conventional family offers and what erotic love promises.

The breadth of this desire came into view during analysis of a multi-media storytelling and research project conducted in three US high schools. The project, titled Beyond Bullying, asked students and teachers to step inside a large private booth and share stories about LGBTQ sexualities. The aim was twofold. First, Beyond Bullying aimed to interrupt the easy collapse of talk about LGBTQ sexualities into discourses of pathology and risk. School-based instruction routinely begins with an understanding of sexuality as a concrete, stable attribute of identity, located, most recognizably, inside the bodies of LGBTQ teens: sexuality is an object we possess, a difference we discover, articulate, manage, and accept (Gilbert, 2014). Working from this premise, the goals of much anti-bullying education become inculcating feelings of acceptance toward LGBTQ teens among their peers, bolstering LGBTQ teens’ sense of self-worth, and creating a climate within the school in which individual differences are not only valued, but also the source of friendship. Though laudable, such goals rely on static conceptions of sexuality as a set of identities that students and teachers claim for themselves: identities that become sites of social, emotional, and academic dangers. Obscured are the many ways LGBTQ sexualities circulate through the school as ‘new relational modes,’ naming possibilities that tantalize and threaten, inspire and undo friendships, and test the bonds of family.

Cast as a set of possibilities, sexuality becomes less a description of a sexual orientation than an invocation, a fantasy, a performance, and a social regulation—networks of relations rather than an attribute of the self (Butler, 1990; Fields et al., 2014; Foucault, 1980; Talburt and Rasmussen, 2010). Education scholar Cris Mayo invokes ‘queer’ to describe this movement of sexuality across bodies and networks:

Queer is a relational term: it introduces effects, misrecognition, tentative acknowledgements, and disruptions into any educational endeavor. Whether embedded in unstable meanings, critical conversations, particular bodies and acts, or just a reminder that all that seems stable will bend, queerness is especially useful for thinking about the challenges of educational relationships. (Mayo, 2014: 91)¹

Understanding queerness and sexuality as productive of meanings, relations, and possibilities, Beyond Bullying asks, how can stories of queer relationality be told in school? In what ways might a study of LGBTQ sexualities—as products and productive—call attention to the challenges and pleasures of queer relationality? How might queer relationality provoke new formulations of friendship in schools?

Beyond Bullying had a second aim: to consider what might be required for schools to reimagine their relationship to queerness. Students’ lives expand—for better and for worse—as schools become a primary site of their social and emotional lives and they enter relationships with people outside their families and neighborhoods. In schools and through friendships, young people claim gendered, sexual, and racialized identities, interests, and selves; challenge and reproduce social inequalities; and imagine how to belong to the communities they make and remake with their peers. In the midst of such exploration, the everyday indifference or hostility that LGBTQ youth must navigate in schools constitutes a special offense. Routinely, teachers, administrators, and students fail to recognize LGBTQ youth as valued and enfranchised members of their school communities (Beigel, 2010; Frohard-Dourlent, 2016; Gilbert, 2014). This failure is magnified for queer and trans students, particularly students of color ‘who must contend with the intersections of racial, gender, sexual, and socio-economic domination’ (Brockenbrough, 2013: 434; see also Cruz, 2011; McCready, 2010). These problems extend beyond the USA: in schools around the world, LGBTQ youth contend with violence, harassment, and neglect (Bhana, 2012; Jones and Hillier, 2012; Msibi, 2012; Pizmony-Levy et al., 2008). Beyond Bullying assembled an archive of stories and imagined how educators and researchers could listen differently—past the usual accounts of coming out, vulnerability, and hardship to reach the relational possibilities of queerness. In those listenings, friends and friendship emerged at the nexus of sexualities, identities, and belonging.

Narratives of friends and friendship do not dislodge or replace the usual stories of vulnerability and risk called forward by the invitation to speak of LGBTQ sexuality. Indeed, friends and friendship routinely enter the conversation about sexuality and youth through risk, suggesting that bullying is currently a primary starting point for any talk about queerness. Beyond Bullying elicited numerous stories of young people losing friends after coming out as lesbian, gay, or bisexual and other stories of young people securing friendships that support their LGBTQ identities. The empirical literature affirms the importance of ‘peer social support’ in school and justifies concerns about homophobic and transphobic bullying (Kosciw et al., 2013; see also Difulvio, 2011; Fetner and Elafros, 2015; Williams et al., 2005). Gay–straight alliances (GSAs) offer a pool of potential friends for queer and allied youth, though formally, GSAs and other educational campaigns call young people to move from the passive ‘bystander’ category to the more robust ‘ally’ hetero identification (GLSEN, 2015). Allies recognize the profound discrimination LGBTQ youth face at school and commit to ‘demonstrable action supporting members of a group with which they do not identify’ (GLSEN, 2015: 2). Allies—unwavering in their support for LGBTQ issues in schools—are not necessarily friends. Friends reside in the liminal and affective space between sexuality and family; friends may sometimes be allies, but their affections are charged by the promise and volatility of relationality.

Friendship’s promise extends well beyond a solution to the threat of bullying. Sociological, queer, and feminist scholarship locates in adult friendship the seeds of social survival and change in a context of patriarchal, normative constraints—constraints like those shaping conventional experiences of schooling, youth, and sexuality. Judith Taylor, building on Adrienne Rich’s (1980) notion of a ‘lesbian continuum’, asserts that friendships are no less than ‘sustaining relationships women have with one another’ (Taylor, 2013: 93). Friendships similarly hold ‘a significance and power’ that sustains individual gay men and ‘contribute[s] to a political or civic friendship and to the emergence of social movements, gay identities, gay communities, and gay neighborhoods’ (Nardi, 1999: 4). Such transformative potential extends to relationships across differences, including racialized difference, to create relationships in which friends can ‘engage in open critical dialogue with one another … debate and discuss without fear of emotional collapse, [and] hear and know one another in the differences and complexities of our experience’ (hooks, 2014: 110). Having claimed such importance for friendships among adults, how might scholars and educators accord friendship the same significance in the lives of youth?

In the following pages, we explore friendship as a relational mode that lies beyond the constrained discourse of school climates, bullying interventions, and student vulnerabilities. We pursue a ‘thick’ theory of friendship, one that foregrounds queer relationality and relies on Sara McClelland and Michelle Fine’s notion of ‘thick desire’ in the lives of young people (2013). For Fine and McClelland, desire is multi-faceted, a product and process of intimate social negotiations, built-up in ‘economic, historic, political, and psychological landscapes’ (McClelland and Fine, 2013: 12). Thick desire recognizes friendship as a range of intimate, intellectual, political, and social possibilities spanning multiple landscapes that builds on Foucault’s understanding of queerness as relational, desirous, and disruptive. A theory of thick friendship, then, considers these chosen, intimate relationships among peers to be young people’s greatest defense against the impulse common among adults, educators, and researchers to imagine and craft interventions into young people’s lives, all the while obscuring the relational complexity of the sexualities young people pursue.

The storytelling booths

Beyond Bullying is a school-based storytelling research project funded by the US-based Ford Foundation from 2014 to 2015. A team of four lead researchers worked with schools in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York to secure Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval and establish a local school partnership in each region. School names and all participants’ names are anonymized in compliance with IRB approvals by each school district as well as our home universities. After establishing local research and school-based collaborations, the team worked closely with the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) to install a storytelling booth, a wooden box 8ft × 5ft × 7.5ft, in each school for two weeks, and began inviting students, teachers, staff, and community members to enter and tell a story about LGBTQ sexualities. Our pitch to would-be storytellers was open-ended: stories could be about themselves, their families, their friends, or a cultural or political event; stories did not even need to be true. For two weeks, the booths became fixtures in the schools, decorated by students with construction paper, banners, and rainbow boas. Our methodology included conducting a ‘flash ethnography,’ an intensive, immersive participant observation effort that explored the implications of Beyond Bullying for the schools. Teams of two researchers wrote fieldnotes recording student, teacher, and staff interaction with the booth and the project during the two-week installation. At the same time, we interviewed approximately 25 students, teachers, and staff members in each school to learn more about the school climate, the conversations under way about LGBTQ sexualities, and the impact of Beyond Bullying on those conversations.

While the team exercised minimal control over the outside of the booth, we ensured practices inside the booth met technical and ethical requirements. Before storytellers entered the booth, we secured informed consent or assent to record and or share their stories; youth in two cities also required parental consent to participate. Each storyteller completed a brief demographic survey before entering the booth. When they stepped inside, participants encountered either a high-quality digital camera on a tripod; or, in New York City, where we were not allowed to video record participants, a microphone. A small carpet covered the floor and foam covered the walls; storytellers might be able to hear murmurings beyond the booth, especially during lunch periods and between classes, but no one outside could hear what they said inside. A piece of black fabric hung behind the chair to provide a consistent backdrop for the video recordings. Lights behind the camera took up the remaining available space. Once storytellers were seated, a member of the research team clipped a microphone to their shirt and adjusted the camera angle. During this preparatory work, storytellers wrote their names on a movie slate. Some storytellers wondered how they looked on camera, and, upon request, the researcher would turn the camera’s screen so the storyteller could see for a moment. Then the researcher would return the screen to its original, obscured position, leave the booth, and shut the door. Storytellers held the slate in front of them, called out ‘Action!’ and began telling a story. When they had finished, they unclipped the mic, knocked on the door, and waited briefly for a researcher to let them out.

Many students and teachers returned to tell multiple stories or to offer new tellings of an evolving story. At the project’s outset, we hoped to collect 50 stories per school site for a total of 150 stories; instead we collected over 450. Stories run from a few seconds to over 30 minutes long. They include goofing around, pleas for justice, memories of middle school, tales of friends and family, commentary on political and cultural issues, and personal narratives of desire and its obstacles. The stories document not only the landscapes of LGBTQ sexualities in education but also the rhythms of the school day. While the familiar cast of anti-bullying characters make appearances—the lonely gay teen and the closeted teacher, for instance—the stories also herald new relational modes that complicate the narrative about LGBTQ sexualities in schools.

We collected many stories of friendship during our time in schools; some hewed closely to their experience of being or having an ally and others wrestled with friendships’ ineffability. Young people recounted supporting LGBTQ friends through experiences they did not quite understand themselves or described losing friends after coming out; teachers expressed a need for feelings of friendship and solidarity in the school. At Central High School in Minneapolis, teachers explained the failure of the GSA as an effect of two rival groups of friends refusing to be in the same club. One working-class white boy who made a point of letting us know that he does not support same-sex marriage was nevertheless welcomed into a group of queer youth of color because of his willingness to be associated with the project. And, at an after-school event we hosted, a Somali American girl laid her head on her Asian American friend’s lap while the friend lovingly caressed the fabric of her hijab between her fingers. These vignettes describe friendships sought, made, and lost amongst the intimacies of school life and chart the textured and tentative emotional landscapes of LGBTQ sexualities in schools. Storytellers understood that their friendships and their ideas about friendship were affected by sexuality: when we asked participants to tell us stories about LGBTQ sexualities, we received stories about secrets, furtive meetings, feeling supported, and being betrayed. LGBTQ sexualities emerged in the stories not only as identities one might claim, support or reject, but also as a set of possible relations to oneself, others and the wider world. These narratives of ‘thick friendship’ lie alongside discourses of bullying, drawing sometimes on the rhetoric of safety and risk, but also pushing back against the relations imagined in concerns about bullying.

Beyond bullying, toward friendship

In April 2014, just weeks before Beyond Bullying began work at a Minneapolis high school, Governor Mark Dayton signed Minnesota Safe and Supportive Schools legislation. His signature brought to a close five years of progressive political efforts to help the state move ‘from having the weakest anti-bullying law in the country to the strongest’ (OutFront Minnesota, 2014). The legislation defines bullying as repeated, patterned, ‘intimidating, threatening, abusive, or harming conduct’ that is marked by power imbalances and that interferes with students’ experiences of schooling and education (Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes, 2015). The legislation mandates prevention efforts, clear reporting policies, and safe school promotion efforts. Students and staff from Central High School traveled to St. Paul, the state capitol, to lobby in support of the Safe and Supportive Schools legislation. A coordinator of Minneapolis schools’ LGBTQ programming considered the legislation an important boost for efforts to support LGBTQ students, staff, and families at Central and across Minneapolis Public Schools.

In some ways, then, Beyond Bullying landed at Central High School at an odd moment. Just as the state turned Minnesota schools’ attention to anti-gay bullying, we invited Central teachers and administrators to think with us about the conversations happening within and around Beyond Bullying. We asked: What other stories were teachers, staff, and students telling one another about LGBTQ gender and sexuality? What might educators, students, and researchers learn if we listened carefully for those stories and relaxed the focus on bullying? Central High staff were generally receptive to our framing; for example, the principal explained in a blog post that he considered Beyond Bullying central to his aim of thinking about LGBT identity beyond concerns about violence and harassment. Nevertheless, the discourse of bullying filled many imaginations. District staff insisted we meet with the school system’s anti-bullying programming coordinator. Teachers entered the booth to tell stories of having been bullied as young people. Students called out as they approached and passed the booth: ‘Help, help, this guy’s bullying me!’ or ‘Oooh, ooh, she’s a bully!’

In addition, inside the storytelling booth, many students deployed the rhetoric of anti-bullying campaigns to make sense of experiences of harassment and loneliness. Faith, a 15-year-old African American first-year student at Central High School, returned to the booth three times during our two-week stay. Each time, Faith told a different version of the same story: people should not bully others, it is not OK to bully someone for being LGBTQ, and everyone should be accepted at school. Faith’s stories are remarkable for their intermingling of strong feeling and bland language. Faith’s stories represent what came to be familiar tropes about bullying: it exists as a matter of everyday life in schools, it is not acceptable, and it significantly harms certain students who are vulnerable to the behaviors. Her words, like many others’, echo the messages offered in anti-bullying education; the no-bullying message is familiar, the content makes sense, and the anti-bullying message offered is predictable.

Faith opens her third story by revisiting the theme of her two earlier tellings:

Hi, my name is Faith, and I want to talk about bullying. I don’t like bullying, especially bullying people that are, you know, gay, lesbian, bisexual, that choose different things. I don’t think it’s OK to mess with people like that.

In this final visit to the booth, Faith takes a new risk. After beginning with the now familiar refrain ‘I don’t like bullying,’ Faith reveals that the stakes of this issue are personal—she has been bullied at school because of her lesbian sexuality:

I’ve been bullied before. People, they just constantly picked on me about me being who I am, which is lesbian. And they picked on me for a while. But I know how others feel about getting bullied. And bullying is not something that should happen anymore because people take it seriously. And people don’t deserve to get treated like that because they choose to be who they want to be. They’re not affecting you.

Faith described herself as ‘lesbian’ in the brief demographic survey she completed before her first visit to the storytelling booth, so this story is not the first time she is claiming the identity to a Beyond Bullying audience and perhaps beyond. However, the statement in her third story is the first time she utters the identity inside the booth. As she asserts her sexual identity, Faith’s narrated stance against bullying becomes newly animated by her admission: she has herself been bullied, she is lesbian, and she understands the feelings of LGBTQ people because she shares that experience.

However, soon after claiming a lesbian experience for herself in the survey and now inside the booth, Faith slips back into an abstracted, third-person, distant, and distancing narration of LGBTQ sexuality and anti-LGBTQ sentiment. ‘Who I am, which is lesbian’ gives way to talk of ‘people’ and ‘they.’ Rather than argue that she deserves to be protected from bullying, that she should not have to put up with abuse, Faith invokes others. And, as Faith steps away from a thickened claim to an intimate knowledge of LGBTQ sexuality, her claim to dignity, safety, and community at school thins. The language of anti-bullying education—the resource Faith has at hand—is less semantically awkward than her attempts to describe her sexuality. However, when Faith retreats into the familiar refrain that ‘people don’t deserve to get treated like that,’ she does not seem able to say more about her hope that adults and peers would protect her from harm, her desire for friends, the importance of sexuality to her sense of self and community, or the relationships that might emerge in the absence of bullying.

Faith closes her story with a rendering of the possibilities and prohibitions she negotiates as a young queer woman.

I feel like no matter if everybody or anybody is gay, or bi, I think everybody should get treated the same. As long as they don’t come at you in that way, then you should be able to accept them and be their friend. Or not even be their friend—just, you know, accept them and, you know, still know them and call them as who they are.

Listening to Faith through a theory of thick desire and friendship, we hear her not only appealing to a familiar trope of social equality and acceptance but also yearning for recognition—to be known and called who she is. When she invokes friendship, Faith suspects she might be asking too much. Though she can imagine a sexually diverse community characterized by equity and in which ‘everybody should get treated the same,’ she also imagines a condition to membership in this community: predatory LGBTQ desire must be kept in check. Indeed, same-sex desire undermines any claim to fair treatment: ‘As long as they don’t come at you in that way,’ she states, ‘you should be able to accept them and be their friend.’ Having briefly imagined friendship as the relationship that would emerge in this community marked by equity and an absence of dangerous desires, Faith backs away: people need ‘not even be [LGBTQ people’s] friend—just, you know, accept them.’ Her yearning is replaced with acquiescence, but, even, in this resignation, Faith also acknowledges that friendship skirts closely to sexual desire. How to tell the difference between someone who is just your friend and someone who might ‘come at you in that way’? Can someone ‘come at you in that way’ and still be a friend? Can friendship be thick enough to make room for desire?

Tending toward friendship

Against Faith’s tentative invocation of the friend, we read Foucault’s question from ‘Friendship as a way of life’: ‘What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?’ (1996: 308). Homosexuality, here, is a resource for reimagining the world; it is a relation, not a possession. Foucault adds:

The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but, rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships … [W]e have to work at becoming homosexuals and not be obstinate in recognizing that we are. The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship. (1996: 308)

The development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is not one of acceptance, respect, or tolerance. Instead gayness propels us toward friendship, a set of ‘affective and relational virtualities’ that offers a ‘slantwise view’—that is, a disruptive, generative, and what we might now call a queer view—of the social fabric (Foucault, 1996: 311).

The friendship toward which queerness tends is an ambivalent relation. These friends are not the unwavering and sturdy allies of educational campaigns nor the idealized ‘best friends forever’ of televised adolescence. Instead, as Tom Roach explains, Foucault’s theory of friendship rests on ‘an ethics of discomfort’:

[It is] a different form of friendship: one that begins and remains in a mutual discomfort and allows for individual and collaborative experimentation, one that nurtures singular and collective potentiality, and one in which the role of sexuality is neither that of truth-teller nor the fulcrum that ultimately divides the friend from lover. (Roach, 2012: 53)

This formulation is restless: friendship is on the move, opening up new vantages, refusing easy distinctions between friends and lovers, young and old, individual and collective. Like gayness, friendship is always in the making, always gesturing toward potentialities.

Even difficult or failed friendships—those marked by betrayal and disappointment—can nurture new possibilities for the self. In another story from Central, charged friendships among boys who try on, claim, and reject gay identities provide an opportunity to explore new intimate possibilities. Skyler, a 15-year-old white boy in his first year of high school, opens his story with a description of Chadwick, a friend who once offered an example of a boy proud of and comfortable with his gay sexuality:

My friend, Chadwick, or, well, my old friend, Chadwick, I guess … Last year, he told me that he was gay. And I don’t know, and now—I was really cool with that, like, ‘Oh, yeah, wow, you’re so confident, that you’ve, like, done that, I guess, that you’re comfortable being gay,’ I guess.

Skyler reports that since beginning high school Chadwick has changed:

This year he’s here at Central, but he’s saying things like ‘faggot’ and, I don’t know, I guess he, like, said like ‘faggy.’ Like, I don’t know. And I just found out yesterday, like, like some kid asked him, like—he doesn’t actually go here. It wasn’t really offensive … This other gay kid asked Chadwick, like, ‘Do you have any, have you had any other boyfriends?’ Chadwick said, ‘No. But I’m not gay.’

According to Skyler, Chadwick uses anti-gay slurs, denies his sexual history, and refuses to meet the curiosities and inquiries of gay boys in the spirit of a generous friendship. Skyler imagines Chadwick’s retreat is a response to an intolerance they encountered when they left middle school and began high school:

So I think he’s trying just to, like, ignore the fact that he’s gay. I don’t know. Something wrong with it. And I don’t know. Cause here at Central, I guess, like, being gay isn’t that, like—I don’t know. I guess, like, people don’t accept that you’re gay, most kids here? I don’t know … cause everyone’s like ‘faggot’ and ‘oh, that’s so gay.’

Through Chadwick, Skyler witnesses the difficulty of sustaining a gay identity at Central High School. However, in his friendships with other ‘gay kids,’ Skyler holds on to another set of possibilities: a refusal to participate in anti-gay sentiment and disavow gayness, and, given the time, a willingness to explore and articulate one’s own sexual desires and identities:

I just have a really strong opinion about the word ‘gay,’ I guess, cause I have friends who are gay. My friend, Brennan, he goes to [another high school]. He’s totally fine about his sexual preference. And Chadwick, I don’t know. So. I guess—. It’s—[long nine-second pause]. Yeah. I don’t know. But and also, I’ve been questioning, like, my sexuality a bit. Maybe I’m bisexual. But— [six-second pause]. All right, bye.

Against his relationships with Brennan (the friend who models confidence in gayness) and Chadwick (the ‘old friend’ who retreated into disavowal), Skyler notices the outlines of his social, interpersonal, and sexual desires. He wants his peers to stop using homophobic slurs. He wants to allow that a question about previous gay relationships might not be an insult. He wants to belong to a broad network of gay-affirming friends. And he might be bisexual.

Following an impossibly long nine-second pause, Skyler traces the effect these friendships have had on his own sense of self. Set against his friends’ movements in and out of a confident gayness: Skyler has ‘been questioning … [his] sexuality.’ Friendship turns sexuality into a question, and not because Skyler has (or does not have) a crush on Chadwick or Brennan. Instead, both Chadwick’s betrayal and Brennan’s modeling of utter confidence invite Skyler’s tentative question about himself. Friendships—queer and thickened—can disrupt the self, encouraging young people to question their sexualities, approach their sexualities as questions, or find in their sexualities compelling questions. Skyler’s questioning stance keeps open multiple possibilities for the self. His tentative question about his sexuality is not a confession of identity: ‘Maybe I’m bisexual’ need not mean, ‘I have discovered the truth about my sexuality, and I am bisexual.’ Instead, the question captures the incitement of ‘a multiplicity of relationships’ and resists the requirement that everyone declare ‘the truth of one’s sex.’

‘Becoming homosexuals’

Beyond Bullying participants routinely used the booth’s invitation to experiment with other modes of relating to oneself and others in the school. In her first visit to the booth, Emma Tyler-Maines, a white English teacher at Central High School, shared a conventional tale of coming out: in her first years as a teacher, Emma kept her sexuality private. Meeting an older, out colleague challenged her to reveal her sexuality to students and she has since adopted a new practice of talking openly with her colleagues and students about her same-sex partnership.

In her second visit to the booth, Emma received the project’s invitation as a provocation to revisit what Foucault describes as the work of becoming homosexual. Emma begins with her encounter with Beyond Bullying’s brief demographic survey. One page of this survey, completed on a tablet before storytellers enter the booth, features three open-ended statements about race, sexuality, and gender— including ‘I would describe my sexuality as _______________.’ As Emma explains in her second story, the blank posed a challenge:

So, the other day I took your survey and you asked what I identify as. And I turned to one of the students here, a student that I never had in class, but that I know. I said, ‘I’m [laughing] twenty-seven years old, and I don’t know what to write for what I consider my sexuality.’

For Emma, the relation between sexuality and language is tenuous. No word or category feels adequate to the task of describing her sexuality. She elaborates:

We don’t get a lot of surveys where [laughing] they ask your sexuality so, having to type it in, having not just to pick a bubble to fill in was really scary. And I think sometimes people feel multiple choice is so limiting, but there was something about being closed in and limited and only having a choice that somebody else gave me was more how I functioned.

The challenge for Emma lies not in a paucity of possible responses but rather in the responsibility of choosing, from innumerable possibilities, a meaningful description of one’s own sexuality. The Beyond Bullying team collected open-ended demographic responses to survey items for sexuality, race/ethnicity, and gender because we wanted to ease the definitional constraints of a multiple-choice question, but that easing presented Emma with a new problem. If the research team was unwilling to assume responsibility for naming the sexual possibilities with which she might identify, Emma and other storytellers would have to imagine the possible identity categories and then choose from among all of them a description that aptly describes their own sexualities. Such an open-ended offering left Emma speechless to respond to the survey question, but also provoked self-reflection about who she is, what she feels, and how she belongs.

Emma’s reluctance to define her sexuality reflects a reluctance Foucault anticipated and celebrated in his interview with the caution, ‘The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex’ (Foucault, 1996: 308). And, indeed, as Emma recounts her discomfort at meeting the survey’s blank line, she echoes Foucault’s call for ‘homosexuals’ to use their sexualities to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships. Like Skyler, Emma goes on to tell a story about friendships that have opened up new possibilities for her sense of self. Outside the booth, she explains, a student (someone who had not been in her classes) acts as a witness to her struggle with the survey question. In high school, she continues, having boyfriends protected her from even the thought of gayness. Once in college, she met gay friends, was the object of a woman’s crush, and through that experience, found herself attracted to another woman:

… And then I get to college and I meet some friends who are gay, and one of them decided that I liked her more than I did. And that kept me in the closet longer than I would have liked because I was too concerned with making sure that she knew the basis of our friendship was not anything more. But as soon as I met my now-wife, I knew that that was it.

The circulation of desire through this network of relationships constitutes Emma’s sexuality, though not in a straightforward way. Desire calls friends into sexual relationships with one another, becomes something to disavow, and heralds new selves. Friendships have the capacity to make the world larger—the unwelcome crush introduces Emma to the possibility of loving other women, for example. Friendships also help to limit possibilities and keep the world small or, at least, manageable.

Emma has leaned heavily on others—friends, lovers, and (it turns out) survey writers—to help author her sexuality. The project’s open-ended survey question pushed her to recognize the limitations of this strategy.

That freeing idea of, like, ‘This is a blank box and put in it what fits for you,’ I realized how reliant I am on labels, especially the ones dealing with my sexuality. I’m just really quick to check boxes. But I never really label myself with my own words. I think that’s slowly changing. I think that the kids here at school, the kids I work with, and my principal and my colleagues have given me courage. Each of them has given me strength. And this project coming to our community has strengthened the bonds between people in the building and between our community in this issue. And so I’m really looking forward to what other spots, boxes that won’t have to be checked, that can be filled in instead.

Emma describes a community of possibility in which students and teachers commune over the difficulty and responsibility of naming themselves to one another. Rather than an established list of categories, a daunting sense of possibilities characterizes the task of describing one’s sexuality; Emma imagines that the work of ‘becoming homosexual’ requires, as well, a community that is always becoming, one that welcomes thickened possibilities.

Resisting the program, and other concluding thoughts

The stories Faith, Skyler, and Emma tell suggest educators, researchers, and policymakers cannot program friendship—or ‘peer social support’ or ‘allies’—as a prophylactic against the violence, harassment, and loneliness that sometimes gather around LGBTQ sexualities in school. Though it is a common theme in many of the other 450 stories told, friendship does not consolidate into a single relationship or meaning; it is a complex source of desire, demand, and affective possibility. A thick theory of friendship recognizes that these relationships help constitute the terrain of LGBTQ sexualities in school, not only offering sites of refuge and pointing to new possibilities for the self, but also bringing the possibility of disappointment and betrayal. Like the gay friend who thought Emma liked her more than she did, or Chadwick whose defensive homophobia renders him an ‘old friend’ to Skyler, or Faith’s invocation of the LGBTQ student who ‘comes at you in that way,’ the hope for new modes of relationality cannot promise an easy, obstinate truth about LGBTQ sexualities. In each of these stories, queer desire emerges from relationships, interactions, and attachments even as it also threatens to undo the bonds of social connection and community.

As we noted in the early pages of this article, bullying is currently a primary starting point for conversations about friendship in LGBTQ sexualities. The question is: how can it not also become an end point? Early queer commitments to sexuality as relational and disruptive are often sacrificed to an investment in the sturdiness of categories like LGBTQ youth, ‘ally,’ and, perhaps even, ‘adult’ (Airton, 2013; Fields et al., 2014; Talburt and Rasmussen, 2010). To refuse such sturdiness is to follow Foucault into an ‘ethics of discomfort’ that invites attention instead to how anti-bullying programs and policies construct the LGBTQ teen who requires the interventions of educators and allies. Discourses of bullying do not simply address the reality of school life for LGBTQ youth; these discourses construct LGBTQ youth as vulnerable and at-risk of social, emotional, and academic harm (Gilbert, 2014; Payne and Smith, 2013; Talburt, 2004; Waidzunas, 2012).

The researcher studying LGBTQ sexualities in schools runs a similar risk of casting people into their roles as stock characters—lonely gay teen; closeted teacher; confused student. This tendency haunts this analysis: Are we to help Faith move from her convoluted grammar to a straightforward utterance, ‘I am a lesbian’? Are we to encourage Skyler to clarify any remaining confusion about his sexual identity so he might declare, ‘I am bisexual’? Do we read Emma’s discomfort with naming herself a lesbian as a sign of internalized homophobia? Should education promote the proud adoption of a consolidated, coherent identity, made legitimate, in part, by recognition from a school’s students, teachers, and families? Such questions point to the limits of prevailing conceptualizations of LGBTQ sexualities in schools. A focus on friendship holds open spaces in schools for the incoherence of sexuality—its misdirections, ineffability, and tendency toward both ambivalence and intimacy as it ranges across landscapes of teaching, learning, social relations, disappointment, and promise.

At the end of his interview on friendship, Foucault recognizes the difficulty of living with the uncertainty of ‘becoming.’ However, rather than offer a neat resolution to the difficulty, Foucault counsels his interviewer to sit with uncertainty:

Something well-considered and voluntary … ought to make possible a homosexual culture, that is to say, the instruments for polymorphic, varied, and individually modulated relationships. But the idea of a program of proposals is dangerous. As soon as a program is presented, it becomes a law, and there’s a prohibition against inventing … The program must be wide open. (1996: 139)

This is a bold caution to educators and adults—people with a habit of turning every good idea into a ‘program of proposals.’ Beyond Bullying is implicated here: our project went in search of alternative narratives of LGBTQ sexualities in schools with the hope that schools could welcome versions of LGBTQ sexualities that strayed beyond risk and pathology. And yet, our storytelling booth required the research team and partnering schools to relinquish the impulse to program away hate. The invitation to share a story remained open-ended. These stories we heard were more ambivalent and more ambiguous than an anti-bullying campaign or our research project could anticipate. Stepping away from combating hate, we heard stories of difficult friendships, conflicted sexualities, and faint claims to safety that pockmark the intimate, intellectual, political, and social landscape of schooling. This is the terrain of thick friendships.

We are not advocating a new intervention, but a new way of allowing sexualities and friendship to constitute and travel through the landscapes of schooling and youth. We take Foucault’s provocation seriously and ask, can ‘the development of the problem of homosexuality [in schools] tend towards friendship’ (1996: 308)? The verb ‘tend’ provides some guidance. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, 2017), to tend means to move towards something, to be pulled in a direction; to offer care; and to be pulled taut and tight. To tend toward friendship then involves a movement that is also caring and attentive. The OED also notes an obscure meaning from the French, ‘To turn one’s ear, give auditory attention, listen, hearken.’ Here we find a provocative description of teaching and learning, of research and education themselves—a description that calls educators and researchers to listen with the assumption that friendships are thick with possibility. We hear the suggestion that to tend to that thickness is to find paths through it while still cultivating its dense possibilities.

A careful listen to Beyond Bullying stories suggests that thick friendship disrupts routine narratives of LGBTQ youth and bullying in schools. When room for LGBTQ lives in schools is made only through discourses of pathology, injury, and risk, friendship becomes either an imperiled or simple solution. The complex contours of intimacies seem not only out of reach, but also beyond the bounds of these social relationships. What we may need, even more than the important interventions and campaigns designed to eliminate violence and harassment against students, is an interest in exploring this landscape with young people, guided by experimentation and new, thickened modes of relationality. Listening to teachers’ and students’ accounts of sexuality and schooling, we hear a call for another orientation toward the questions of sexuality and a willingness to reside in an ethics of discomfort—an ethics that allows educators and students to address the queer and thick possibilities that come with forging friendships and intimacy.

Footnotes

Funding

This work was supported by The Ford Foundation Sexuality and Reproductive Health and Rights Program.

Note

Jen Gilbert is Associate Professor of Education at York University, Toronto. Her research considers the intersection of LGBTQ sexuality and gender with teaching and learning. She is author of Sexuality in School: The Limits of Education (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2015 Outstanding Book of the Year from the American Educational Research Association, Division B (Curriculum).

Jessica Fields is Professor of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University. Fields is the author of Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality (Rutgers University Press, 2008), which received the 2009 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Race, Class, and Gender Section. She is currently writing a book on the emotional terrain of qualitative research.

Laura Mamo, (PhD, Sociology, University of California San Francisco) is Professor of Health Education and Associate Director of the Health Equity Institute at San Francisco State University. Her research explores the intersections of gender and sexuality with health, health discourse, and health inequalities. She is the author of Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2007) and co-editor of Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. (Duke University Press, 2010).

Nancy Lesko is Maxine Greene Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research concerns curriculum theory and history, gender issues in education, and youth studies. Her many publications include Act your Age: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (2nd edn, Routledge, 2012) and she is editor, with Susan Talburt, of Keywords in Youth Studies (Routledge, 2011).

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