"If you're coming out, what are you coming into?": Queer Educators Theorize about Teaching, Living, and Learning in the South

This study, using a narrative research methodology, focuses on how gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer educators in the South negotiate the complex intersections between their identities and their teaching. The central dilemmas on which this study focuses are the problematic situations of addressing sexuality and difference in classrooms at the K-12, college, and university levels; negotiating the complexity and controversial nature of the different ways of being "out" as an LGBTQ educator, especially in the South; and examining how various aspects of educators' lives influence the development of their pedagogies and relationships with students and fellow school workers. This researcher found that identities are dynamic and complex and cannot be reduced to stages in monolithic processes or be easily defined by socially constructed categories. The nine educators (K-12, college, and university)--who shared their life stories and who live and teach in the South--problematize their own identities; strive to make-sense of how their identities inform their teaching, living, and learning; and often provide counter narratives to dominant and master narratives perpetuated by tradition, popular culture, and the literature about LGBTQ educators. The goal of this study is not to come to definitive conclusions about what it is like to be a queer educator in the South at the beginning of the 21st century but to broaden socio-historically situated understandings of the intersections of identities and how these identities within a Southern regional context influence, or not influence, teaching and learning for equity and social justice.