Queer colleagues

After my last post and comment, I got to thinking about working in schools with other queer staff, and I remembered something that happened about five years ago.

I started at this new school, got to know the staff etc.  Remember, I'm pretty readable as queer and I was out to whomever it came up with. There was one out dyke on staff, but she was pretty quiet and we didn't have a lot to do with each other, simply due to the nature of our different subjects etc.  After about six months I find out two of the female staff I worked with have been together for a few year.

Huh?

I had clocked one of them (A), but the other (B) I had no idea about.  Not only that, a lot of staff knew about it - they'd gotten together while they'd worked at the school and now lived together.  Sometimes they socialised with other  staff as a couple.  Awesome, right?

Not so.  They were in this limbo land of being out, but not really.  Like I said, a lot of people knew they were together, but they pretended really hard they weren't.  (Just to clarify, none of use were out to students, so when  I say out, I mean to other staff).  Eventually, I got to know them a little better.  This meant I started lending them copies of The L Word, because they had never heard of it (?!).  In this transactional/ gossipy exchange about now mutual friends (the cast) I noticed something strange.

Dyke A was embarrassed to be seen talking to me.  I had clocked her from the start, she was kinda out, but she was awkward about being seen talking me with me - a more visible dyke.  I thought perhaps she didn't like me, but she was fine when there was no one else round.  Nope, it was being associated with a higher level of dyke-ness.  And when we spoke about The L Word, we weren't screaming about it or anything.  Just a nice chat at the water cooler.

Suffice to say, the traffic in L Word stopped (they had caught up to my supply anyway) and conversation with A slowed.  Apart from a bizarre conversation with B about what Shane was doing by the pool in an episode, we had less and less to do with each other until they left the school (together.  To work at another school.  Together). It was kind of disappointing.  But what was really sad to me was them.  They were out, but not.  They were so scared and weird about it.  I'm by no means advocating being in or out of the closet here.  But they were both so uncomfortable the whole time, other people ended up feeling uncomfortable when they were near them.