Think about teaching at a college or university where diverse cultures and life experiences are as plentiful as the variety of cars on a big city highway at rush hour.
Imagine also a campus where most students, whose parents come from literally all over the world, are usually comfortable and willing to announce publicly that they know someone who is LGBT. Many will even volunteer that connection is to a relative, close friend or confidant.
In that same classroom, when you openly discuss sensitive issues of race and ethnicity in the media, some students from Christian, Islamic and Jewish cultures will also volunteer their discomfort with homosexuality. Some will even dare to condemn it as sinful, all while knowing that some people in the class are LGBT.
You might think that an African-American who grew up in a proud and progressive south side Chicago community which did not willingly embrace sexual orientation discussions would be reluctant to lead a San Francisco Bay Area college class as it navigated the bumpy waters of truth-telling about advertising, journalism and public relations’ self-imposed limitations, bias and stereotyping of the LGBT community. But this soon-to–be-54-year-old former CNN and Newsweek broadcast correspondent finds this college teaching experience the most liberating and enjoyable educational experience of a lifetime.
So much so that in the spring semester of 2007, I actually felt comfortable for the first time in my adult life to publicly proclaim being gay in a course. Today’s it is called “Diversity and Lifestyles in Media,” a far cry from “Minorities and the Media,” which is what San Jose State University called it before I arrived in 1990. That course limited its focus to what the media still does in America today. It framed the discussion exclusively as a study of blacks and whites, leaving out the influence of women in our society and treating some cultures like Latinos and Asians as minor or insignificant. In Northern California, that worked until the 1960s and 1970s, when the Golden Gate of San Francisco began to lure many more ethnic, religious and disabled cultures to the City by the Bay and nearby communities.
In addition to people of ethnic descent from Mexican, Native American, Chinese, Japanese and other “Gold Rush Era” cultures, former boat people survivors from Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia joined Russians, Arabs and Indians. Today, a stroll across the downtown San Jose campus of California’s oldest institution of higher education will easily showcase and rival anything you could possibly see in the halls of the United Nations in New York. LGBT life experiences also proudly came to these western shores during the immigration explosion of the last century.
The parents of my current students were part of that wave, and many of my SJSU co-eds are now the first in their families to attend college or to pursue a four-year degree. Like everywhere else in America, they bring to the classroom the values and the traditions of their parents, friends, community leaders and religious leaders. But unlike many of them, today’s SJSU students are relatively eager to openly explore the unspoken truths and fallacies about people who are discriminated against for a variety of reasons, including those of us who embrace love, affection and commitment differently from the majority of people in our society.
To help walk college students through what that means, guest speakers from all sides of the equation come to “Diversity and Lifestyles in the Media,” including a local TV news anchorman who is gay and the university counseling director who is a lesbian. In the 1990s, when a famous soldier made headlines when he tested the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and was kicked out of the service, he spoke in my class and described the death threats he received and the condemnation of family and friends who said he disgraced his uniform. Yet he insisted being honest was the only way he could truly live in America.
We have also had guest ministers from two different Christian, and traditionally strict, denominations talk about how Christ would have openly stood up for LGBT human rights and unconditional love for everyone. One is the pastor of a diverse local Catholic church that triggered a public relations buzz when the front page of its weekly bulletin included a mission statement that explicitly welcomed LGBT people.
Recently, a graduate student from a former Soviet Union satellite nation who is Muslim also shared many insights about his religious culture and made Islam sound more noble, “real” and practical than any media message ever attempts. When asked about Muslim views of LGBT people, he was critical and abruptly dismissive, calling it wrong. He went on to say that there are many LGBT people in his country and, despite religious views, they are accepted. I thanked him for his candor publicly, saying it is always better to hear a truth you may have to face someday than to have someone sugarcoat or pander just to make you feel more comfortable.
That is how San Jose State and many other institutions of higher education in California include and address the LGBT community. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly, from the push for same-sex marriage in our state, to horrifying news coverage of physical attacks on LGBT people in the Castro by some ethnic cultures who disapprove. By putting a human face on our candid look at the LGBT community, students see and share revelations about how it feels to be scrutinized in news stories. Golden State students elect to take courses like this which offer a balanced “reality check” education before they move on to their professional careers.
All we ever ask is that they remain open to new people and life experiences. Teaching students how to engage in respectful dialog and to experience meaningful sharing gives them skills and tools that will make a positive difference in workplaces across the world. Not every faculty person in my school wants to take up this challenge. It demands that you stay current and practice what you preach naturally and honestly.
At the end of my spring 2007 class, I felt so proud of the growth and courage of my 70 students that I felt compelled to say on our last day, “Remember that it wasn’t just a former CNN guy who taught you this. It was a black, middle-age, balding professor who just happens to be gay and who learned along with you how not to be afraid to face the truth as a way of providing the best possible public service for society.”
After a moment of dead silence, a student from Pakistan, who earlier professed to be a racist and a homophobe, began to applaud. Within seconds, the entire class was standing and applauding with him, including me.
