Interview: Teaching LGBTQ2S+ Lit

Ella Stern, a journalism student at Macalester College, interviews me about my standing Macalester literature course “LGBTQ2S+ Literature in America: Identities and Differences in U.S. Literature.” We discuss why I teach the class, what things we read, and my teaching methods.

Our conversation

Ella Stern: What made you decide to teach this class in the first place?

Rachel Gold: When I was a student at Macalester, I took a bunch of classes with Professor Linnea Stenson, who was out as a lesbian and taught a lot of great classes. I loved the idea that I could teach a class similar to the ones I’d loved when I was at Macalester.

Beyond that, I wanted to limit the class to just America; otherwise there’s an overwhelming amount of material. A narrower lens lets me go deeper into theory and intersectionality, because America is such a strange place. It lets me center a lot of different queer and trans stories within this one big container. 

Ella: What were some of the classes that Linnea taught that you loved?

Rachel: I don’t remember the names of the classes. I remember reading and talking about science fiction and thinking, “that was incredibly cool.” I remember one time when we were meeting outside and she brought a stack of romance novels and threw them at us and said, “This is also literature. Go read these.” We read Foucault and Derrida and Lacan and like all the queer theorists. It was revolutionary. I got a lot of feminism and a lot of queer theory, all in the context of English literature.

Ella: And it seems like your class similarly brings in not just literature, but theory, history, and other lenses. Can you talk a little bit about how you balance all those and bring them all together into your class?

Rachel: Especially with older queer American literature, you can’t read it without also understanding the history. Parts of it are not going to make sense in a rich and full way, unless you understand what was happening at the time. We read some history and I’m always looking for ways to make the history feel real. 

Last semester, one of the highlights of the class was a speed interviewing game I developed about the 1950s. Half the class were characters from the books trying to find each other, and the other half were agents of the government trying to arrest them. I wanted students to understand how scary it was to be out in the 50s when you could get arrested for any little queer thing. They said it was one of the best classes.

One of the beauties of queer and trans literature is that it also helps you learn queer theory. And you get to learn a lot about gender, especially as we read works from trans writers. If you’re still in that man-woman binary, trans literature is not going to make the kind of sense that it could when you step outside of that. So it is a great way to teach students ideas and then show the ideas happening in the literature.

Ella: How do you choose what books to have students read?

Rachel: Agonizingly, because there’s so much good stuff. I decreased the reading a little post-pandemic because I feel like everybody’s working memory is so full. Everyone’s brains are so occupied with worrying about the world right now that I’ve been focusing on less reading outside of class and more thinking: journaling-type thinking and being in the work rather than a slog through all these pages. 

As for the books I do pick, I’m trying to follow four threads: indigenous voices, Black voices, white voices, immigrant voices. I want representations of each of these, and I want them starting as early as I can get them and going as far forward as I can get them. 

I also try to vary hard and easy reading. Some of the hard reading is quite hard, including some very dense academic theoretical stuff and part of a novel from 1799, in which the language itself is hard to parse from a modern perspective. A lot of the work is emotionally hard. There’s a lot of violence. I want to pace that with things that are fantastical, lighthearted, resilient, so that students don’t get overwhelmed. 

I also try to put some of the harder stuff earlier in the class so that as everyone else’s classes get harder, mine gets easier. The class can still be challenging because we’re exploring identity and a lot of queer theory. But we go from reading historical literature to reading graphic novels and young adult novels. Parts of the task become easier at the same time that we deepen our thinking about it, because we’ve built this context in the first part of the class. 

Bearing all of that in mind, I then try to think about what works are going to resonate, allow me to teach the things I want to teach, keep creating this context, and represent all the voices that I want to represent. 

Ella: Do the books that you choose to include change from year to year? If so, how, and what informs that?

Rachel: They don’t change very much, partly because I’ve structured the history and the theory to really connect to the reading, so it would be difficult to swap out the reading. I swap or add one or two things a year, usually based on what the students are interested in learning about.

Ella: How long have you been teaching this class, and what other classes have you taught at Macalester? 

Rachel: So I taught the first session of this in spring 2020, half on Zoom. I taught it again in Fall 2020 because it was popular. Since then, I teach it every fall. The one I’m teaching this fall is my seventh in five years. I also teach Intro to Creative Writing and Young Adult Literature. I teach part-time because I also write books, so I’m usually teaching one to three classes a year instead of four or five.

Ella: What have been some of the students’ favorite or least favorite things about the class?

Rachel: Many students love the small groups. Small group discussion is a great way to get all the voices heard in the room. I’m very aware that people have different learning styles, and there are students who don’t want to speak in a large group but will speak in a small group.

Every student’s experience and every student’s understanding of the reading is important, so having them in small groups gets people’s voices heard and allows students to learn from each other.

The small groups then report to the bigger group. I’ve been bringing more challenges to the small group, such as having them not just discuss a question, but figure something out in the context of the reading or contrast one reading with another.

Students also like that I’ve been putting in more things that are trying to deconstruct and decolonize the classroom, because classrooms are a locus of a specific kind of power that I would like to disrupt. Last year, we went to the Idea Lab [Macalester’s free craft center in the library] and students made a timeline and posters about some of the historical periods we studied. We then put those up in the classroom, and I referred back to them as we moved through history to help students locate themselves on the timeline that we moved through. 

The 50s-inspired speed interviewing also went over really well, and I have plans to add a second game this year. Students like it when we do things that are playful—and serious—but that are more interactive than just sitting in chairs talking about things. 

Ella: Tell me about some of the guests that you’ve brought into class.

Rachel: Stephanie Burt almost always visits because she’s a good friend of mine. She’s a Harvard professor who used to teach at Macalester, an accomplished poet and poetry critic, and a trans woman. She’s always wonderful. Last year, we also had Kate Bornstein, which was completely awesome. I don’t know that I can pull that off every semester, but that was pretty extraordinary. In the past, we had Cristy C. Road, who is an author and artist, and we read part of her graphic novel. We had Junauda Petrus one year talking about The Stars and the Blackness Between Them. 

Ella: How do you bring your experience of having been a queer student at Macalester into this class?

Rachel: Don’t tell anyone, but I definitely remember how much reading I did not do. That influences how I assign readings and how I approach the fact that at any given point, someone will have not done the reading. I also think about what I still remember and the things that I didn’t get. For example, I teach the second half of Audre Lorde’s Zami. I remember reading it as a student and thinking, this is a really strange book. I didn’t get it.

Now that it’s on my syllabus and I read it every fall, my experience is: “Oh my God, this book is amazing. How did I not get this?” Audre Lorde was so open and expressive about her life as she was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s – I didn’t have enough context to connect to that. As a college student, I was still learning to fit in and she was so clearly herself. Plus I was distracted. College students have a ton of stuff going on. You’re taking three other classes. You’re having relationships, you’re having extracurriculars, you’re thinking about so many things. It’s really easy to miss nuances of specific pieces of literature. I was kind of a hot mess in the middle of my Macalester time. And knowing that, I know that students go through things. 

Ella: Do you have any anecdotes, student feedback, or student growth from the class that stands out?

Rachel: In the first few weeks of class, nobody has any reason to trust me unless they’ve had a class with me before. And nobody has any reason to understand where this class is going to go, and then I get to take them on a really deep journey. By the end of class, connections are formed, friendships are forming, people are trusting each other and me, and we’re talking about deep subjects. That’s an amazing journey to take people on.

This material is very emotional because everyone has identities. Even the straight students have breakthroughs about their identity.

They get to hold their identity with open hands, and it gives them more space to be a person. Everybody gets to do more of that. 

The learning in this class is experiential. I tell students, “I don’t need you to memorize a bunch of facts about all these books. This is not a trivia competition. I need you to get the experience of the books. And if the experience of the books changes you, then I’ve done my job.”

Books and articles read in class:

Below is a list of what we read in class. For some of the works, we don’t read the entire text. In some cases I’ve included a note about the parts we read. In other cases I’m secretly hoping you’ll read the whole book if it interests you.

“Roja” by Anne-Marie McLemore from the All Out anthology

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, introduction and chapter 1

Asegi Stories by Quo-Li Driskill, introduction and chapter 4

“Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Ormond’ and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic” by KM Comment

Ormond; or, The Secret Witness by Charles Brockden Brown

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

Odd Girl Out by Ann Bannon

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Spit & Passion by Cristy C. Road

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker, PhD, Jules Scheele (Illustrator)

Release by Patrick Ness

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Fantabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom

Various trans and non-binary poets (including Stephanie Burt and Tommy Pico)

The Stars and The Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus

The Fan Fiction Studies Reader, ch 4 “Pornography by Women for Women, with Love.”

The Sherlock fanfiction story “Subliminal.”

Are there LGBTQ2S+ books/media you love that aren’t on this list? I always like to discover new things. Please leave a comment with recommendations!