Willie Edward Taylor Carver, Jr. — a French and English teacher at Montgomery County High School in Mount Sterling, Kentucky who has taught for 12 years and won the state’s teacher of the year award in 2022 — has said that homophobia and threats have made him decide to give up teaching altogether.
Carver wrote that former President Donald Trump has emboldened people who think that “that America is heteronormative and that queerness is bad.” These people are now fighting LGBTQ educators like him. Similarly, numerous Republican lawmakers have sought to ban any LGBTQ content from classrooms and have referred to queer educators and allies as pedophilic “groomers.” This has made queer teachers’ lives much harder, Carver said.
Related: Teachers are already getting fired, resigning & speaking out against Don’t Say Gay movement
Carver noted that anti-LGBTQ attitudes compelled Kentucky music teacher Tyler Clay Morgan to resign.
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Last year, Morgan’s students decorated his classroom door with Pride flags to express support of LGBTQ students. When Morgan began receiving “horrific death threats” from parents upset about his talk of LGBTQ acceptance, Carver said, Morgan’s school administrators responded by telling parents that Morgan’s actions were “unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
“[This] creates an absolutely unsafe – unfathomably unsafe – working condition for someone whose only goal was to say to students, you matter,” Carver wrote. “I feel unsafe to return to the classroom.”
“I’m increasingly thinking, why am I in the classroom? Because I think it will change things. I think it will be a force for good,” he continued. “But what is the effect if I am, every few weeks, having to stop and undergo some sort of investigation over what’s happening in my class? I’m not going to be mentally able to do this work. And then what are my students seeing? A stressed-out, unhappy LGBTQ adult. I don’t think that’s what they need to see.”
Carver also said that many LGBTQ students have admitted to him that they’re considering suicide. He worries that these students will harm themselves and have no places to seek support if teachers like him keep leaving the profession.
“We are, in very real terms, telling these students there is no place for you here [in school], where we’re forcing you to be eight hours a day, 200 days a year – you may not exist,” he wrote. “People can call it hyperbolic. But if at any point in the day, you have to stop and ask yourself, ‘Am I allowed to talk about this part of myself?’ you do not exist.”
Carver will leave teaching to start an administrative job at the University of Kentucky.
I'm a proud gay man, I am the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year, and I'm afraid to return to the classroom.
I want kids to see me and feel hope, but I am tired. I've been doing this for a long time, and things are getting worse.
This is painful and I am sorry.
— Willie (@WillieETCarver) April 22, 2022
Earlier this year, Carver told a U.S. House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties hearing that his school district’s administrators have instructed teachers to cover “nothing racial.” Administrators worry that parents will object to “critical race theory,” content educating students about the history of institutionalized racism, he said.
The subcommittee met to investigate the silencing and stigmatizing effects that classroom content bans have on teachers.
Teachers are told to accommodate parents’ regular demands that teachers assign alternative work for students whenever class materials cover Black or LGBTQ content, Carver said. A single parental complaint can also get books removed from the school.
Students also use anti-LGBTQ and racist slurs without facing punishment, he added.
“I’ve always faced discrimination as a gay teacher and I’ve weathered the storm because my presence saves lives,” Carver told the subcommittee. “Hatred is politically protected now… but I will not ethically erase Black or queer voices.”
Carver recently won 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year and met President Joe Biden, but the school didn’t mention his achievement in an email to parents. In fact, schools are terminating gay teachers with perfect records, Carver said.
“I was born to teach and I’m good at it. I’ve always faced discrimination as a gay teacher and I’ve weathered the storm because my presence saves lives…. [Now,] I am made invisible,” Carver said. “Few LGBTQ teachers will survive this current storm, politicizing our existence has darkened schools. I’m tired. I’ve fought for so long for kids to feel human, to be safe, to have hope. I don’t know how much longer I can do it.”
“Strong public schools are an issue of national security and moral urgency, and political attacks are exacerbating teacher shortages, harming our democracy, and, above all, hurting our children,” he told the committee. “We’re not asking for special treatment. We’re asking for fundamental human decency, dignity, freedom from fear and the same opportunity to thrive as everyone else.”
