ABSTRACT
In Gina’s academic ESL class, gay and lesbian themes arose in several interactions during a unit of work on ‘community.’ In the first of these interactions, a student seemed to be insinuating that a classmate was gay; in a subsequent discussion of online communities, the gay community was included as an example; and later, in answering a vocabulary question, the teacher used a lesbian example. In analyzing the teaching practices in terms of which aspects worked well and which did not, I take into account the perspectives of the teacher and five of her students-a woman from China, a woman from El Salvador, a man from Laos, and two women from Vietnam. It becomes clear that lesbian/gay subject matter can arise in unplanned ways through student innuendos and that teachers may need to follow up such instances by communicating quite explicitly about lesbian/gay meanings rather than presuming familiarity and shared understandings.
