ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Black queer male (BQM) teachers, may be more disruptive than others. It analyzes the narratives of five queer men who were among the participants. The chapter explores how these five queer men negotiated the closet, and it raises several issues that are crucial for understanding the terms and stakes of Black queer male (BQM) educators' participation in urban educational spaces. The strategies that BQM teachers employed to avoid and/or address such speech acts revealed the closet as the product of an ongoing battle of wills in the classrooms and hallways of Brewerton schools. Marked in the Western cultural imagination as perverts and sexual predators who pose a threat to childhood innocence, queer teachers have been the targets of recurring efforts in the United States to purge the teaching profession of queer interlopers.
