Month: September 2024

By Matthew Panozzo

September 23, 2024

When I was a middle school English teacher, I always wondered what my character looked like from my students’ perspectives. If they were to write a story, would I fade into the background, be mentioned on only one page, or show up often as a recurring character? Would I be like Mr. Foley in Stamper’s (2022) Small Town Pride, believing in students until they took a stand beyond my comfort zone? Or would I be like the theater teacher in Van Otterloo’s (2023) The Beautiful Something Else, encouraging my students to find their voice and themselves through the arts? 

I’m sure I was a little of both, but it is uniquely challenging to be a queer educator. As I describe in my dissertation, it’s like being caught between closets, continuously coming out, going in, and navigating norms of each student, family, and community (Panozzo, 2020). In spite of the tricky balance, that’s also why I loved teaching. I was introduced to people from all different backgrounds. Payne and Smith (2011) remind us that we can’t control who is in our classrooms. Our students and their families have identities, values, and beliefs that are different from our own. Everyone’s identities, values, and beliefs have social, historical, cultural, political, economic, and religious roots. Thus, teaching becomes an act of empathy, an act of understanding, and an act of community building. I am grateful for the number of students who taught me lessons about myself, others, and the world simply by being present in my classroom and engaging in discussions about books. 

Moving into higher education, I do miss the magic of my middle school classroom. However, I now have the wonderful opportunity to prepare teachers to cultivate the same wonder, awe, and curiosity in their classes and curricula. I also get to work with researchers across the country to expand my own worldview. Books take a central focus in both aspects of my new job.

When I was approached by rural education scholars Rachelle Kuehl and Karen Eppley to join their research team in studying middle grade fiction to examine how queer youth in rural locations are portrayed, I was ecstatic! As my husband says, I have a doctorate in gay books, and this was one perspective I hadn’t yet intentionally explored. 

Having lived in Houston, Texas most of my life, I only engaged with rural spaces during weekend trips or summer camps. When I was first asked to join the research team, I was struggling with what the concept of rural truly entailed and whether I was an appropriate figure to study it. It took Johnson and colleagues’ (2016) description that “‘rural’ is not entirely unlike ‘queer’ itself” (p. 8) for me to realize my own assumptions about rurality. While I understood the fact that queerness is different for every individual, I still held the assumption that “rural” was more or less a monolith. I had joined this group with the subconscious view of rural as anything not urban, with singular views, economic situations, and political leanings, when in fact rural occupies various characteristics, which at times can be contradictory. For example, I think about Spencer, Indiana’s town square. The CommUnity Center—which hosts an annual Pride festival and regular meetings for rural LGBTQ+individuals—is surrounded by the courthouse, the county’s Republican Party office, Veterans of Foreign War museum, and two churches. It is powerful to see an LGBTQ+ organization situated alongside establishments that have historically suppressed queer individuals, and yet now they’re actively engaged in the community. I began to look for similar challenges to my preconceived rural monolith in all texts, trying to understand the numerous perspectives in hopes of changing the rural-urban binary in my head into a spectrum. I took notes from Weston (1995) and attempted to study “the rural through the urban” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

Being a part of this research team hasn’t only taught me about rural identities. It has expanded my understanding of the queer experience. Concepts like metronormativity, or the notion that queer rural people have to leave their rural homes to find acceptance in large metropolitan areas, challenged the constructs I had taken as universal truth. As Weston (1995) asserted, did I have to get to a big city for acceptance? 

That seems to be the reality for rural LGBTQ+ youth. As my librarian friend put it, media makes it seem like you either “get out or get comfortable.” My fear is that neither of these options are healthy. Getting out implies severing ties and roots to a community, whether that’s family, friends, or a place. And getting comfortable could have many implications. Sure, there’s the hopeful side of finding belonging within a rural community, but it could also mean putting up with homophobia or other threats to our humanity. There had to be more possibilities…

One book from our study helped me see beyond getting out and getting comfortable. Small Town Pride (Stamper, 2022) showcases that acceptance and community can be cultivated anywhere. The young protagonist, Jake, doesn’t want to escape to a big city. He wants to stay in his hometown, where his dad grew up. He imagines a queer rural life through the help of a farm-based virtual reality video game, but that vision is threatened when people in his town take sides over his family’s right to display a pride flag in their yard. With the help of his friends and parents, Jake sets out to create a more inclusive community, where he and other LGBTQ+ individuals can make a home. Instead of getting out or getting comfortable with his circumstances, Jake’s story taught me that communities everywhere, including rural spaces, can promote inclusivity and belonging through dialogue and action. Jake deserves to maintain his ties and connection to the land. He deserves to continue his family’s legacy in this space, even though his future family would look different than the families living there now. 

On the flip side, sometimes getting out is forced upon us, like we see in Aunt Mags’s childhood in The Beautiful Something Else (Van Otterloo, 2023). When Mags came out as trans, she was kicked out of her home, forced to sever ties with her parents and her sister; ironically, she returned as proprietor to the family’s homeplace after her parents’ deaths. Sparrow, our young protagonist, only learns of their Aunt Mags’s existence after their mother is in an accident. With Mags as the only living relative, Sparrow must now live in a home their mother refused to ever discuss because there were too many painful memories tied to the land, the walls, the rooms. When Sparrow arrives at this forbidden home, they learn that Aunt Mags worked through the exclusion and pain and created a beautiful community for LGBTQ+ and disabled individuals in this rural space. The Rainbow House was reclaimed as a place of belonging and acceptance, but it took a lot of self-work on Aunt Mags’s part. That wisdom is shared with Sparrow—and with Van Otterloo’s young readers. We might be forced out, we might choose to leave, but neither of those circumstances have to prevent us from making safe spaces for ourselves and others. Rural spaces do not have to be known as being harmful for LGBTQ+ youth; rather, like the fictional Rainbow House, they can be spaces where LGBTQ+ individuals thrive. And these spaces don’t have to be imagined.  

While I was hesitant to explore queer and rural intersections at first, I realized quite quickly this was exactly the conversation with which I needed to engage, both for my own understanding of self but also for supporting the full spectrum of queer youth. Additionally, I have learned to be mindful and aware of rural identities. Although I teach at a metropolitan university, some of my students come from rural backgrounds and may eventually teach in rural schools. I do not control where my students come from or where they will go, and I need to prepare them to create inclusive spaces that celebrate LGBTQ+ and rural identities.

At the Virginia Tech Center for Rural Education’s annual Rural Education Summit in October*, my team and I will be presenting our work while also engaging in dialogue with other researchers and scholars on rural and queer identities and experiences. Please join us.

References

• Johnson, C. R., Gilley, B. J., & Gray, M. L. (2016). Introduction. In M. L. Gray, B. J. Gilley, & C. R. Johnson (Eds.), Queering the countryside: New frontiers in rural queer studies. (pp. 1-20). NYU Press.
• Panozzo, M. (2020) Caught between closets: A social fiction using arts-based research to explore the orientations and perspectives of queer K-12 educators in the digital age [unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Sam Houston State University.
• Payne, E. C., & Smith, M. (2011). The reduction of stigma in schools: A new professional development model for empowering educators to support LGBTQ students. Journal of LGBT Youth, 8(2), 174-200. https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2011.563183
• Stamper, P. (2022). Small town pride. HarperCollins.
• Van Otterloo, A. (2023). The beautiful something else. Scholastic.
• Weston, K. (1995). Get thee to a big city: Sexual imaginary and the great gay migration. GLQ 2, 253–277.

Matthew Panozzo, Ed.D., is an Assistant Professor of Literacy at the University of Memphis. He has over 15 years of experience working with children and young adults in schools, camps, and youth centers. He’s a teacher, researcher, and thought-partner whose focus is exploring all types of stories, the connections they foster, and the communities that are built around them.

*The Rural Education Summit originally planned for October 10–11, 2024, was postponed due to the damage caused in our area by Hurricane Helene. We have rescheduled for March 26, 2025. Please plan to join Dr. Panozzo and colleagues then! To stay updated on the rescheduled Summit and other Center for Rural Education news, please subscribe to our newsletter.

We want to hear from rural people like YOU about what it is like to live and work in your rural place. Please consider writing for us! Possible topics include:

• Rural possibilities: What unique opportunities does your rural environment provide?
• Rural innovations: What new and effective practices are you using that other rural residents should know about?
• Rural challenges: What changes would you like to see in your rural community, and how might they be brought about?
• Rural teaching: If you’re a rural educator, what is it like to teach your specific rural students (English learners, gifted-identified, etc.) about your specific subject (STEM, American history, foreign language, etc.).
• Rural news: What topics in the headlines (e.g., climate change, education debates, health care) matter to your rural community?
• Rural memories: How did growing up in a rural place affect your life trajectory? What rural stories do you long to tell?

Blog posts should be between 800 and 1,000 words (approximately). We will work with you to finalize your draft! Please be sure to include your rural location and a few details to help the reader situate it in a larger context.

Email CRE Blog Editor Rachelle Kuehl at rkuehl@vt.edu for more information or to submit a blog post!

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