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A common assumption is that if we do not know about a person, there is nothing to know, and this often exposes us to quite the surprise when we find our approach to a person is totally the wrong one. 

Had we only known.

Recently, actually longer ago than recently, after reacting to the erasure of the Newport log entry of February 11, 1895 and calling it for what it was in light of the multiple assurances in writing that the mistake made had been impossible to make, which would imply some deliberate action to do so, after receiving a letter from the attorney for the New Bedford Whaling Museum based on the assumption that such a letter would silence speech, and refusing to rename an “erasure” an omission just so that the offenders could claim they had rectified the situation to their comfort but not of those erased, I was asked by the attorney, a person I actually do highly respect, to give him a few days to consider the matter and get back to me.

To a neophyte a week would be agreeable, but to the experienced, such a request also meant the possibility for buying enough time to have the issue slowly disappear.

I am in the experienced group.

Although I had proposed the addition of “Sexual Orientation” in school district policies regarding students and also that the existence and needs of Gay students be covered in teacher staff development meetings just as was done regarding other minority groups in March of 1997, there was no real action taken in the months that followed in spite of multiple hard copy letters, unannounced appearances in central administrators’ offices, and speaking to the School Board at public meetings. 

In the summer of 1997 I spoke to the School Board during that part of its public meetings at which community members were given three minutes each for comments, and presented copies of studies and reports to show the need for the workshops I had requested. These reports had been presented to the Deputy Superintendent when, a few weeks before my going before the Board a second time, he finally had agreed to a meeting after the president of the local American Federation of Teachers pointed out that this was not a political issue but a student one. At this meeting the deputy superintendent had admitted that what he had thought of as a political issue that he did not want to get involved with, was actually a student issue that he should be concerned about. 

After the second presentation of new information to the school board, again pleading my case for in-services, the minutes of that meeting contained this reference to my three minutes “….spoke of concerns of students with minority sexual preferences who are at risk”. Although the word “preference” annoyed me, at least the Board secretary understood we were talking about students who could be at risk.   

According to what the Union President and the Assistant Superintendent had agreed to, the union and the administration were to choose three members each in addition to myself and the reluctant chair, the Director of Curriculum, chosen by the Deputy Superintendent. There was some animosity between theses two administrators, and such a chairmanship of a committee to discuss Gay students could have caused obvious discomfort for the assigned chair as he displayed somewhat flamboyant mannerisms, that, in spite of two marriages, made his sexual orientation the subject of speculation among many teachers.

That fall, the Diversity in Education Committee was convened, but instead of staying with the make up as agreed to by the Union President and the Deputy Superintendent, the chair unilaterally and without any notification of his intent to do so chose seven people for the administrative side, while the union assigned three people according to the agreement. The administrative appointees, as it would turn out later, were neither open minded nor willing to even discuss the stated inclusion of Gay students in district diversity policies and programs.

 At the Diversity in Education Committee’s first meeting, only the three union members and half the the administrator appointed members, along with the chair and myself, were present and the meeting began with a general treatment of diversity as explained in an Oprah Winfrey video that emphasized ethnic and racial concerns presented as legitimate topics to be considered when rewriting the district’s diversity policies. After listening to the chair’s introductory explanation of our purpose as a committee, watching the Oprah video, committee members introducing ourselves to each other, and the chair, speaking for fifteen minutes after this, making only one reference to Gay people as “those who have made alternative life-style choices”, I asked about the inclusion of Gay students in any policy to be formulated and/or updated. The chair loudly condemned the intrusion of the “Gay Agenda” and stated in strong terms that he would not let the committee become a “Gay Issue”. 

This first meeting, because of the sudden “Gay assault” along with its being the initial one poorly attended, was short.

The chair had made it clear in his closing rant that all other groups were “concerns” while Gay students were an “issue”, so there was no assurance that Gay students’ existence and needs would be a topic to be seriously considered in future meetings that he would chair. I was afraid we would discuss race, religion, and the other groups already clearly addressed in policies, while Gay students would be swept aside or their needs dismissed as of no real concern. My fears were borne out in the two subsequent meetings.

At the second Diversity in Education Committee meeting the chair introduced a guest speaker from the National Conference of Christians and Jews who, after her introduction to the committee, was asked to chair the meeting as the actual chair excused himself to see to some other “important” business, leaving the room not to return. The discussion was again very general until one of the people who had not been at the first meeting, and one chosen by administration, pulled out a packet of reports and studies similar to the one I had given the School Board and which I had sent to all members of the committee when it was first formed so they could be prepared with information about the existence and needs of Gay students and not able to claim being blindsided when the topic came up. She demanded an explanation for the packet and in accusatory terms and tones stated that if this was all about Gay things she wanted no part of the committee.

My attempts to explain the packet as information to aid in the committee’s considerations and discussions were interrupted constantly by this member’s recitation of the buzzwords and clichés concerning Gay people that to a thinking person would have been evidence of the importance of the information in the packets and the need for serious discussion with an open mind. If her attitude transferred to her treatment of Gay students, or kept her from dealing with Gay topics and students in a proper manner, it was evidence of a need to address the very topic to which she objected.

The results of the studies and research conducted on the national and international level in the United States and Canada, along with studies and reports from other states and school districts were discounted by another first-time attendee and administratively appointed committee member who pointed out that these did not agree with what she had read in “The Weekly Reader”, that little weekly magazine where elementary students read about current events. Because of this, she found the studies I had supplied to be rather suspect, especially those parts dealing with minority Gay Youth, who to her thinking did not really exist, Gay being a “white man’s thing”.

Another teacher, and the most vocal member of the administratively appointed committee members, prefaced her comments with the statement that she tolerated no prejudice or bigotry in her classroom before launching into a string of stereotype-based judgments and cliché-based pronouncements about Gay people which ended when I pointed out that I was Gay and had no idea where she got her erroneous information about people like me, especially as she had admitted she personally knew no Gay people. Rather than stop completely, after I had explained that these kids were an invisible minority in our schools, she stated in what she thought was open mindedness, “They should stay that way.” She did not want to know that there were any Gay students in her class. She saw no reason to have to know.

After the three new attendees asked a series of rapid-fire questions of the guest chair who was obviously not ready for this and giving her no time to answer them, the meeting ended with the acting Chair for the day advising me that, although what I sought was important, I had to have the maturity to accept compromise for now. That proposed compromise consisted in getting nothing but staying with the status quo.

The third of these meetings was where the committee imploded, an event that I felt was entirely orchestrated and gave the chair the desired excuse to end it all. The committee was top-heavy with administratively chosen members all from the elementary grades who from the beginning showed their minds were closed

Being the only committee member who had attended the two previous meetings, it was no surprise to me having new faces at the third meeting. A woman I had not seen before was sitting at the end of the conference table, and, as I took a seat, she asked me what had been done so far. Obligingly, assuming she was one of the names listed as a committee member, but who had not shown up previously, I handed her the agenda for the meeting along with some of my papers and filled her in on what had been discussed previously.

It is important to remember that, if the discussions had gone as they could have, there had been a very good possibility that people might have said things that after a little education they would regret having said. They might have wished for the opportunity to take these statements back. For many committee members these initial meetings could have been the first time they said the words “Gay” and “Lesbian” out loud, or even talked with someone they knew was Gay. As it was, even if it had only been a lack of taking a proper breath before beginning the sentence, the chair had choked slightly when he said “lesbian” for the first time at the initial meeting. Because of the possible awkwardness, the meetings, although not being secret, were not advertised to the general public. It was a kind of rational courtesy. Once the initial stages were accomplished and initial awkward statements were made and modified with information, and the actual work on the wording of a policy begun, meetings could be more open. They certainly were not kept secret for any sinister reasons. How much real public interest was there in a committee of district employees reviewing policies anyway?

As the meeting was about to begin and the chair entered the room as it slowly filled, to my surprise he did not recognize the woman I had just spoken with. I had assumed she was one of the people he had chosen to be on the committee, but who had been unable to attend until then. When he asked her to identify herself, she introduced herself as a reporter for the Daily Oklahoman, the local highly conservative, anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-Gay, pro-Republican, Christian-fundamentalist daily newspaper.

I had not contacted any outside agency about meetings or to extend an invitation to attend for the above stated reasons, so the invite had to come from someone on the committee, perhaps without the best intention, or even to stop the committee’s work by “exposing” such an unChristian topic was about to be discussed .

The committee members, along with some other teachers who were present for an unrelated meeting the chair intended to dovetail into ours and were, therefore, totally confused why heads of the various high school History departments were present for a policy modification meeting, watched as the chair emphatically and angrily halted the meeting, upset that the closed meeting was now public, and was angry that someone had tipped off the newspaper. He announced that he was only the chair because he had been told to be so by someone over him and that he really did not want any part of the committee. He claimed meetings were only being held because of a concern one person had presented to his superior.

The meeting was canceled, the committee immediately disbanded, and, as angry as he had seemed to be when leaving the meeting room in a huff, the chair took the time to chase down the reporter before she left the building. He wanted her to know that he could not continue as committee chair because of personal, political, and religious beliefs, and that I, in spite of never having had the chance to address the committee or answer their questions, was forcing the committee in a particular direction, determined to turn the committee’s work into a “Gay Issue”. Most of his anger appeared the next day in the morning paper.

At the School Board’s next meeting following that event, I once again spoke, this time to show how state and local school policies made it mandatory that Gay students be acknowledged and their needs met in spite of any individual’s personal, political or religious beliefs, and to respectfully request that if in the future an official of the district wished to represent my goals and motivations to the press it be done correctly, truthfully, and without misrepresentation.

Through a memo issued by the Deputy Superintendent, committee members were informed that the Board had requested a “cooling off” period which I assumed and hoped would be of short duration. On the year anniversary of the date of my original request for relevant in-services, following further correspondence, I was informed that in spite of the appointment of a new chair, future meetings would have to be placed in Limbo until time and schedules allowed.

The wait would last until the fall of that year, 1998, when a second Diversity Committee was finally convened.

Over the following 11 years there were 10 superintendents in that district with some being seat warmers until a “real” superintendent could be assigned with one being driven out in less than six months by administrators who did not like his publicly questioning why certain administrators in charge of certain departments had no experience or training in what they were in charge of. 

 These constant turnovers would prevent the committee from actually reconvening for many more months because each new shake up of the central office was followed by not having any committee meetings until the new chair was up to speed, an obvious impossibility because of the number of reassignments with each new superintendent or the seat warming ones. 

This second committee, whose chair supposedly needed to get up to speed, was placed under a newly created department for Human Relations/Minority Student Affairs, and its new Director, the former Director of Curriculum, who had as one of his duties being the chair of the Diversity in Education Committee. And so it was, ironically, that the old chairperson who had disbanded the committee in a huff, declaring he did not want to deal with this topic because of his personal, religious, and political beliefs the year before, became the chair of the committee once again.

The members of this new committee being aware of the previous events was a little more receptive to its responsibility and was more in line with the initial agreement between the district and the Union. It was made up of principals, heads of various ethnic and racial minority student departments, such as African-American and Hispanic-American Student Services, and a few teachers, like myself, drawn from the secondary schools in equal numbers. At each meeting the members were eager to do what needed to be done, and when I referred to “my constituency” in general terms I was asked to be more specific, only to be surprised how receptive the committee was to the inclusion of Gay students in the discussions and the district’s policies.

Instead of a repeat of the previous meetings of the original committee, this time, when I asked whether or not Gay students would be included, the chair assured the committee that, as they were Americans who had just as much right to Constitutional protections as anyone else, Gay Students would, of course, be included. This was a complete about face for this administrator which could have come about because of personal growth, or some directive from further up the chain of command. The committee members also were insistent that to leave references to Gay students out would leave their inclusion up to the individual attitudes of teachers which was not always as supportive as one would hope.

As work progressed and the committee members were pleased with the progress and its swiftness, a wrench was thrown in when, in workshop fashion, after months of work, a meeting consisted of one of those annoying group activities that uses Post-It Notes and butcher paper hung on walls for group reports after participants, having been divided into little work groups to answer questions by consensus, return to the whole group discussion. Most of the committee members questioned this as we were well past the point where a team building exercise that usually comes at the beginning not when work had begun and progress made should have happened. Committee members saw this as a stall and a way to avoid having actual policy language to present to the School Board before the end of that school year.

When the committee reached the point where “sexual orientation” had been worked into the language of school district policies, the chair expressed his concern that, If we included any reference to “Sexual Orientation”, this might put the School Board in an awkward position.  The original refusal to do anything or even meet to discuss the need for the inclusive language had been,“While I agree with your basic belief that no student, regardless of the group to which he/she belongs, should be made to feel insecure or threatened in our schools, I am equally sure that local norms would make it impossible…”  and the chair seemed to want to shield his bosses from any backlash for doing the right thing either for their protection or to keep his administrative position if he brought this to the Board in the Buckle of the Bible Belt. 

His attitude gave the committee the impression that a stall had been put into effect to avoid the School Board’s discomfort and need to defend itself from those who decide the local norms, thus sparing them an embarrassing moment or two. At one of the committee meetings toward the close of the academic year, the committee questioned what would happen if we began the following year without the actual language, but wanted to celebrate diversity in our classrooms knowing the spirit of the written and drafted policies. The chair reminded us that as our job was not necessarily the invention of a policy, but, rather, the fine tuning of the existing one, if questioned, or if something we did was met with objection, we could point out that what we were doing was in the spirit of the policy and its, if not specified, implied inclusiveness.

The chair stated that he believed that when the addition of “sexual orientation” was presented to the Board it would automatically turn down all proposed policy and relevant language changes because of those two words. It was a political thing that needed to be considered.

An elementary school principal found this unacceptable, explaining that we had been assigned the task of rewriting and clarifying the diversity policy, and, because of this, it was our job to spell out exactly what the district was expected to do and who was to be protected without any doubt. Anything less was unacceptable. Further, it was imperative that if this belief of the chair was, indeed, the mindset of the Board, then it was up to the Board to state publicly not only their objection but their reasons for it. A rejection of inclusive wording would make it known that there was a segment of the student population which the Board chose to abandon and this could expose the district to litigation.

The chair made the plea that we seek compromise which, again, as had been stated by the person from the Conference of Christians and Jews, consisted of omitting any reference to Gay students in order to have the diversity language accepted, and then somewhere down the road try to have these students added. This idea and approach were deemed unacceptable by the committee members present. I had been told to wait for somewhere down the road before, and I let the committee know that the one later-down-the-road had been enough.

Because we were heading into summer break, the chair suggested that he take all the work we had done, organize it into a neat summary, and, after the summer months when we reconvened, we would finalize our work. Filled with suspicion, but having no other choice, the committee adjourned, suspecting our work was effectively halted and nothing would come of it.

The summer passed, the chair was once again reassigned to different duties, and the committee was not to be reconvened for another few years.

Meanwhile, the Gay and Lesbian Students continued to be victims of overt and covert negative treatment.

The end of the road finally came twelve years after the initial request for inclusion after much active reluctance on the part of the Board, and came about because the chair of the Board who, as a noted local attorney, realized that our pointing out for twelve years that as the topic had become as public as did the district’s ignoring all the information that it had been supplied and the warnings about litigation, made any claim of innocent ignorance on the part of the district indefensible if a parent sued for harm to their child while at school. 

It was not the protection of the students that won the day but the district’s finally realizing a need to cover itself.

On February 6, 2024 when I found the Newport Log entry of February 11, 1895 had been erased from the official New Bedford Whaling Museum’s version of the log digitized for posterity, after initially deciding it was a minor error easily undone, a scrivener’s typo, and unwaveringly referring to it as an “omission” as opposed an erasure with no acknowledgement that an erased Gay man might recognize cultural erasure when he sees it, after multiple emails claiming the system the museum had begun using had enough safeguards to protect manuscript migration to another platform outside the museum’s control, the matter was brushed aside as remedied, not because it actually was but because their deciding from their point of view and experience that it was a minor “oopsie”, they were comfortable with its being put back in.

They could wash their hands now and move on.

I had received a shot-across-the-bow letter from the museum’s attorney who, acting on information received from his client, warned me of possible charges for libel and slander because of my insistence that this action had been deliberate and had the receipts. In subsequent phone conversations and in emails to the attorney, I explained the reasons why I see it as erasure and questioned the veracity of the museum that in defending itself against the offense, was not completely honest with the attorney to whom I sent additional and omitted facts, using him as tool while it did nothing to ensure this would not happen to any other official transcriptions of documents because of someone’s personal, political, or religious beliefs in the future and had not happened to any other transcript on that platform in the past, and agreed to give him a few days to look into the matter. 

The attorney also explained that as I had bad-mouthed the museum in this regard, I was no longer a volunteer because that violated the volunteer code of conduct.

At the same time I received an email from the museum president stating she was glad that I had found the accidental omission so it could be rectified in a timely manner, ignoring the edited document had already been on the internet in its edited form for the four months preceding my discovery.

With multiple emails in response to my concern that certain sensitive log books be kept for internal transcription not placed on a platform that allowed random anonymous people to do them, defending that practice on claims that safeguards would prevent any problems, when the safeguards failed, the museum decided it was a mere error, a choice that made things so easily handled and from which it could move without any examination of the process or consideration for the reliability of what a curator of historic documents is held to. 

A person who has worked against erasure in the past, at times when he was being erased, was ignored, and his concerns dismissed even as the very system so strongly defended and guaranteed had failed. Adding to that, instead of accepting that there may be more to this than an accidental omission in a foolproof procedure, the museum went into defense mode employing some of the very excuses and dismissals that have been traditional since Gay people as a group came out of the closet and demanded respect.

In spite of my having sent proof of my contention to the lawyer and granting him time to consider the issue, after seven weeks of silence and having seen this stall to oblivion before, I took steps to end this “cooling off” period and sent this letter to both the lawyer and the museum, pretending to assume they would act correctly and not use reliance on my politeness and patience to shelve it.

I wrote to the president with a cc to the attorney,

      “On February 10 you wrote, ” we will be reviewing the protocols and best practice for the transcription team to ensure that all have a full understanding of the use of technology”, although this was not a matter of the technology. As it is going on two months since the discovery of the erasure that had been the museum’s official version of the Newport log posted for four months on FromthePage, the Quigley Institute for Non-Heterosexual Archival Archaeology is curious as to how far this has progressed. 

     Since the assurance of dealing with this, a poem from the Newport log was published in Spoutings (the museum’s monthly volunteer newsletter) on March 1 while the erasure was still being dealt with, and the person responsible for the erasure has been assigned the position of a  lead reviewer of all that goes onto FtP (From the Page where the museums “flawless” transcripts are now stored).

•     What actual steps, actual steps not assurances of future action or none, has FromthePage taken to ensure such erasure will not happen again?
• Have they and the museum begun an investigation as to any other erasures to any other document of anything that may offend this and other transcribers’ personal, religious, and/or political views?
• Has FtP or the museum taken the practical step of looking at the work done by this transcriber to ensure this person has not been doing this to other documents?
• Since the erasure was so obvious, being as it skips the entry at the bottom of the page although the original is opposite the space the entry should have occupied on the sanctioned transcript, what has FromthePage done to plug the obvious hole in their review procedure? 
• Is anything more being done than a cursory sweeping under the rug of the erasure since it does not affect the majority and comfort has been restored to those not assaulted by the erasure with the reinsertion of the erased, not omitted, Newport Entry of Feb 11, 1895?

I look forward to your response.”

I no longer have the convenience of time to wait to see if and when the museum will do the right thing, and I have no desire to be flimflammed with promises of some day down the road. The erasure was committed at the beginning of the road and should be dealt with from that point, not some nebulous date in an unending future.

Publicly addressing this is an approach learned long ago when I had the time.

One of the classes I took when getting my Masters in Special Education dealt with reading, and the professor was an experienced teacher of reading and still occasionally conducted classes with Special Education students to keep her skills honed while being head of reading at the state department of education. She was also well versed in behavior modification, teaching it at the graduate school level. She explained that in her early teaching years, when her students read, she would walk around the room to help kids if they needed any help and one student would kick her ankle anytime she passed him. She had begun a series of steps to modify this behavior by using the prescribed multi-step procedure that would require months to accomplish the desired behavior change with his behavior remaining a disruption for the other students and an unnecessary distraction. It had finally gotten to the point that she had to decide which shoes and stockings to wear to adult events so the bruises on her ankle would not be seen. As she passed by that student in class one day and he kicked her, she kicked him back and kept on walking. She was never kicked by him again. Although Bruno Bettleheim had promoted behavior modification protocols to change bad behavior to good, he also pointed out that sometimes you find behavior modification can be delivered very effectively and save time needed for more important things with a swift kick as some students have learned they can continue their bad behavior while seemingly playing along to their own advantage.

I am at that point. 

After past experience, I do not have the time to modify behavior by my being the patient one while my patience and politeness are used to delay action, avoid responsibility, and potentially continue the behavior because patience is permission in their eyes.

Why should the expectation be that I am to be patient when the expectation should be that they take the matter as serious as it is and do something now.

And isn’t it odd that the first time the fool proof system failed was with the Newport Log entry of February 11, 1895, the entry about a Gay man discovered by a Gay man bringing us out of the shadows and into the light of history.

We do exist and we will not be erased no matter how comfortable that makes it for those who aren’t us.

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