Pessimism is played out—the failure of past reforms doesn’t justify giving up on pragmatic gains for queer folk—it’s particularly important to forward positive political visions in educational spaces

I begin with this general sense of queer youth and the complicated relationship they have to queer adults to draw attention to the everyday complexities that go into being and becoming queer in the twenty-first century. It is, to put it simply, not a straightforward process or experience. I forgo specificity to think broadly about the diverse ways in which queer youth, in varied contexts and realities, are generally going about their day and becoming in relationship to the broader worlds they inhabit. They are, by means of being youth, going about their days thinking less about many of the issues queer scholars engage—including myself in the coming pages—and more about the possibilities and limitations that lie before them. They, with their youthful zest, see a world filled with potential and possibility. It is not a perfect world, as queer youth inching toward an explicit queer relation to the world are far from ignorant of the issues queerness raises in and for their lives. However, it is a world that they are increasingly sure they have a right to inhabit, engage, and transform. They are, unlike other generations, asserting themselves earlier in life and, as such, could benefit from queer opportunities that connect them with queer generations (a topic for the next chapter).

This is, for me, a hopeful image of queer youth and an image that I try to hold with me in my own daily engagements where conversations, by and large, focus on queer youth as victims. It is also the image that propels the purpose of this book—a book that as you will read builds upon decades of queer scholarship that has pushed and prodded the world to become kinder to queers (to put it quite simply). After decades of generating queer scholarship that honors (often perversely) queerness, emerging generations have expanded opportunities to come into presence. To be clear, while I hold this image of queer youth with me, this book is not about queer youth, but about the histories and futures of queer realities that were once youthful and a push for recognizing unseen queer potentials in the youth of the future. This may, for some, sound a bit wishy-washy. The lack of specificity might read unsure or unaware of the specific challenges and realities queer youth and adults face in the present. And this may be the case—I am not an expert in specific realities beyond my own and those within my vicinity. My refusal to specify here is a recognition that queerness—at its heart—is ever shifting and difficult to pin down. Any specific mention of a queer youth, for instance, one who became prom king (or queen) or one who recently committed suicide, would already begin to foreclose other queer possibilities and the complexities therein. For me, the move to specify also feels like a move to use a queer youth to make an argument. I sense queer youth—particularly queer youth who are victimized, bullied, or commit suicide—are taken up in the grind of the media and academy to become a “cause,” often simplified or reduced to a particular talking point. There is, to be sure, a political salience to this and one I myself will take up on several occasions. However, I begin with and honor the general because for me it is helpful in allowing readers to read in their own specifics, in their own contexts, given the diversity of experiences and intersectional realities of our lives. Additionally, I am a “generalist” in education, so I tend toward the general “big picture,” leaving specificity to those more suited to such work. For now, as readers, hopeful queers might see their optimism reflected back at them, but with a recognition that there is work to be done; while pessimistic queers might scoff at such optimism while secretly realizing the world can (and should) be different. Bored queers may simply remain bored, bored by the incessant academizing of queer experiences. But, back to the issues at hand—childhood, children, and queerness. When I was a child, Whitney Houston taught me that it was her belief “the children are our future.”1 It was an important lesson for me as a child, because I was allowed to imagine the future. I was the future and it was important to teach me well so that I, and other children, could lead the way in that, what seemed then, rather distant future. The future is, to be sure, a rather complicated concept. I am here in the future of my then-imagined childhood, although it is both more and less fabulous than I could have imagined. The future is always there, in the distance, and there are always more children for whom that future is. However, which children are allowed to be children and have a future is, as significant scholarship has shown, quite narrow (Greteman & Wojcikiewicz, 2014; Letts & Sears, 1999; Meiners, 2017; Pritchard, 2013; Weems, 1999). Children, particularly queer children, and the future have been something educational scholars and queer theorists have contemplated for some time. In this chapter, I assemble some of the ways in which queer children and the future have been contemplated to build upon such work in further elucidating what I am calling “queer thrival.” If children are our future—and in some sense, they always are—the ways in which we imagine or are allowed to imagine both “children” and the “future” greatly impact the ways in which those very concepts come to function in our daily work, particularly in education. In assembling previous work addressing children, the future, and queerness, I attend closely to such work that exposed—through their paranoia—the violence, the limits, and challenges faced by queerness in education. Such paranoia has been central in recognizing the challenges queer youth face, yet changes have happened that would do well to be engaged to not only push for the safety of queer youth, but their ability to thrive. We need, to harken back to the last chapter, heterogeneous reading practices that recognize the contributions of paranoid readings while opening space for contingently, reparative readings and their possibilities. Queerness and Challenges to Liberalism The challenge of children “growing up” is central to the work of schools where children are presumably taught well to lead the way when they become “grownups.” We know for sure, however, that many students are not taught well and are never able to lead the way due to any number of cultural, institutional, interpersonal, and disciplinary barriers (Collins, 2010). Students that are in such a marginalized position are, at the same time, more often than not, the students that push the limits, demanding recognition and access through various means—be that walk-outs, protests, or other forms of resistance. It is in fact, as we have seen since desegregation, children who lead the way into hostile environments so that the future has the possibility of being different. While there are demands to protect children and arguments made “for their own good,” I suspect history shows us that children, when faced with adversity, are able to survive and thrive, leading the way not there in some imagined future but in their present, as they demand they have a future. This is not meant to romanticize children or childhood, but to call attention to the material lives of children who we have historically seen push the limits of democratic liberalism. Cris Mayo (2006) recognized the need to push the limits of liberalism in education because, “liberalism has been suspiciously unwilling to extend its analysis of freedom to sexual freedom, its embrace of autonomy to queer critique, its sense of progression toward new possibilities to queer futurities” (p. 471). Liberalism, to put it bluntly, has been uninterested in queerness. In liberal discourses, as Mayo noted, There is a tension between discussing how people, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) people, might be recognized by law and given (or denied) certain legal rights on the basis of their identity and how queer people, not always fully recognizable as inhabiting particular identity categories, might also live their potentials. (p. 469) Liberalism requires recognizable identities by which to protect. Recent gains in LGBT rights illustrate this requirement as LGBT persons have gained rights and recognitions, be it to marriage, the military, or anti-discrimination. Yet, queer—as a political stance—is tasked with pushing against such recognitions and norms (Ford, 2007). LGBT people are a voting block more and more recognized through LGBT advocacy groups. Queer people, on the other hand, fall outside and beyond such recognitions to illustrate the persistence of exclusion and the possibility for alternatives. Or, as Puar (2007) illustrated, LGBT rights can be used as a cudgel against other queer forms of being.

Mayo focused part of her argument on the issue of gay marriage as a struggle for access to a particular liberal institution. While gay marriage may be, from certain queer vantage points, quite conservative, on an educational level, it is an issue that opened some possibilities for queer students in seeing a queer future. “The drawback,” Mayo (2006) noted, “ paralleling gay rights with marriage rights is that while kids may eventually decide to enter into unions, that is not the only form of gay (or, for that matter, heterosexual) life open to them” (p. 485). However, something is better than nothing, particularly because no “thing” can encapsulate all queer possibilities. The issue is that some things become sanctioned by the state and, in becoming so, present a double-edged sword—both providing approval for types of relationships while also imposing a penalty on those who refuse such approval. To be sure, any given time will see some battles waged as they gain traction (and funding) while others unable to break through. The task, particularly for education, is to grapple with broadening possibilities, both those limited in scope and those more radical. This, however, cannot be done without the insights and views of youth themselves. We need to provide youth more agency in decision making, not less, particularly if they are, themselves, “our future.” As Mayo noted, “access to queer possibilities and futures is not just a right crucial to queer adults, it is critical to queer youth, for their current flourishing as well as for their future participation in communities and as citizens” (p. 486).

Queer youth and adults cannot only access narratives of their marginalization. Such narratives inform them, more often than not, that there is no future. Yes, it is true that for most of education’s recent past, queer children have been denied access to representations and access to queer futures, but with the explosion of youth expression on social media and elsewhere, such denials look more and more outdated. Queer youth have faced innumerous forms of physical violence and emotional turmoil, as illustrated by, for instance, GLSEN’s School Climate Research, for close to 20 years. However, there is need to address such research and push beyond it, not to deny such realities but work to change them (Thorpe & Greteman, 2015). “Arguably ,” Mayo (2006) concluded:

queer communities are populated by paradigmatically modern citizens, and, as much as one may tire of citing dire statistics and want instead to point to innovations and resiliency among queer youth, it remains a fact that liberal theory and the liberal state need to provide more support for queer possibilities, through education and other institutions, and to recognize the particular challenge to traditional family forms, autonomy, and sexuality that queer youth bring. (p. 487)

The liberal state—whether one cites dire statistics or examples of resiliency—has work to do. The future for queerness has looked rather grim for some time, in part, because the liberal state has failed to attend to queer possibilities and institutional support. However, queerness has also survived into and against such threats and assaults. It has benefited from the liberal state’s slow movement while continuing its slow march demanding that queerness stays.

Kevin McDonough (2007), took up Mayo’s challenges to liberalism and explored the possibility of liberalism in addressing the challenges that queer youth raise for schools. “Can the common school ideal, and the liberal political principles that underwrite it,” McDonough (2007) asked, “coherently accommodate reasonable and legitimate forms of moral and cultural diversity, especially those forms that have historically been marginalized, discriminated against, or excluded” (p. 795)? The demands of queer people and queer communities have, for decades now, pushed up against the liberal political principles that ground American public education. And these demands have over those very decades seen some progress in achieving some forms of recognition and rights.

McDonough is, however, skeptical of an uncritical embrace of queer recognition for fear that such an embrace will get “distorted into forms that are both anti-liberal and against the best interests of queer children” (p. 797). This is a key skepticism, as he argued, given that

if identities are poorly understood then the danger may arise that schools will socialise children into pre-existing moulds based on educators’ distorted and inauthentic conception of what a queer identity should be, rather than leaving children free to choose and endorse their own conceptions of queerness through an examination of how queer people actually might live worthwhile lives. (p. 797)

One of the matters at hand, for McDonough, is not limiting the queerness of children to those that are imagined to potentially grow up to be queer adults. “It is precisely because we cannot pick out beforehand which children will be [queer],” he maintained, “that all children require exposure to alternative models of identity, including queer models, upon which to base their individual sexual identities” (p. 798). No one, as we remember from the introduction, is born queer. Rather, one must decide to become queer and such a decision requires lessons in such matters.

Queerness is then a matter that must be visible to all as a possible way of becoming in the world, recognizing that there are also other ways of becoming in the world, often that are yet known, to be created by new generations. The simple task, in all of this, may be that the rule of becoming is that we shouldn’t be mean to those who decide to live and join and create the diverse possible ways of being and becoming in the world. This was a lesson Kate Bornstein offered in her contribution to the “It Gets Better Campaign” started in 2010 after a spate of queer youth suicides. While there have been important critiques of this project (see Gilbert, 2014), Bornstein refused to tell youth “it gets better” because she is not sure it does. Rather, she offered youth advice to stay alive to find out if it would, the one rule being “don’t be mean.” Of course, such a simple task is not in fact that simple, as all kinds of institutional, structural, cultural, and interpersonal barriers emerge that impact the lives of those who become in ways rarely, if at all, recognized. Meanness seems to be more palatable and easier to engage in than kindness. After all, we do prefer Mean Girls, which ironically ends quite kindly.

McDonough’s argument developed a prima facie reason that queer children’s autonomy “depend[s] on actual engagement with queer options” (p. 800). It is necessary, in other words, that queer children gain access to queer options in order to imagine possible futures. To not have such access denies children opportunities to encounter a wide range of possibilities by which to develop and see their own futures. Quoting McDonough:

If the communities of which children are a part (here I do not just mean those children who turn out to be queer, but all children) fail to include expansive visions of queer possibilities, then the ability of queer children (i.e. those who turn out to be unable to live their lives as heterosexuals) to develop into independent practical reasoners will be constrained to the extent that they will be unable to link up their reasoning to realistic and expansive ‘imagined futures’ involving valuable and worthwhile queer roles, communities, and identities. (p. 801)

His argument that expansive possibilities are necessary, particularly for liberal education, connects us back to the subjectification function of education. Schools inevitably play a significant role in the ways students can imagine their futures. And for much of the history of American public education, what futures are open to students has been limited.

When it comes to providing students—queer and otherwise—actual engagement with queer roles, communities, and identities, however, a number of issues have emerged. For McDonough these included the reality that queer communities are often few and far between and located primarily in urban areas; that queer communities are often viewed disapprovingly by parents and society; and that queer children often come from families that are disapproving of queerness (p. 802). Such issues are, I sense, still present, but I want to suggest that there have been gains in accessibility to engaging queer roles, communities, and identities. It is, in fact, one of the purposes of this book to highlight such gains in order to further push for and cultivate ways in which schools could provide queer lessons for their students. It may be, in part, following Airton’s (2013) advice—more fully addressed shortly—to “leave ‘those kids’ alone” (p. 532).