Questioning

It’s time to introduce you to a pupil of mine called Paul.  Paul isn’t his real name, obviously (have you noticed how nobody calls their child Paul anymore?  You couldn’t move for Pauls when I was at school) and I’ve engaged in a little artistic licence to throw people off the scent of his – and my – true identity, but the general gist of what I’m about to tell you is true.

My school has had an LGBTQ+ group for almost as long as I’ve been teaching there, but for a while I didn’t get involved in the running of it.  Despite the obvious, I didn’t feel particularly qualified for the job; I was non-scene, terminally single, didn’t feel I had much to offer in the way of knowledge or advice.  I also think that, even though colleagues and even some of my classes knew, I didn’t feel comfortable being quite so prominently gay in the school community.  So I was surprised when a colleague popped into my classroom one breaktime and asked me if I fancied mentoring Paul.

I’d taught Paul maybe a couple of times a week further down the school, but he was now in his GCSE years and apparently struggling.  He had come out as gay, was missing a lot of school, doing some dodgy things outside of it, and this colleague thought it would do him good to have a gay man who he could talk to.  Paul didn’t get on particularly well with the guy who was actually in charge of the LGBTQ+ group at this point (I couldn’t blame him, neither did I), and my colleague thought I’d be a better fit.  I wasn’t sure how much good I would do, but I said yes anyway, and took myself along a couple of days later to grab Paul out of his lesson for a chat.

The conversation that followed was as awkward as you can probably imagine.  Very aware of my shortcomings as a counsellor and faced with a teenager who was about as reticent as any kid would be when a near-stranger of an adult starts talking to them about sexuality, I babbled on at him for a while, trying to emphasise how relaxed these chats would be despite my own obvious nerves.  I was on the verge of cutting it short with a “same time next week?” when he finally spoke up.

“There is one thing I’d like to talk about,” he said.  “I’ve got a crush on a friend of mine.  The problem is, he’s straight.”

Now, I may not have been much of an expert on LGBTQ+ issues, but having a crush on heterosexual friends was an area in which I’d had decades of experience; pretty much all the crushes I’d ever had had been on straight guys, all ending in embarrassing drunken confessions or crying on someone else’s shoulder because they’d found someone female to pair off with instead of me.  In fact, there was only one of these crushes that turned out to be gay, and he’d not come out until years later.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Once Paul had said that, the conversation got a lot less stunted.  I was able to empathise and, although I couldn’t solve his problems, I knew the things to say: how much unrequited love sucked, how unfair the universe feels when someone you have that connection to is never going to like you back in the same way.  We both relaxed, there was common ground, and I went away feeling like I’d actually done some good.

We met once a week after that.  As he opened up more, he showed himself to be a lot more mature than I’d initially thought, and surprisingly eloquent when it came to expressing his feelings.  I knew that there were a lot of things going on in his life that he wasn’t talking about, but the meetings still felt worthwhile; I felt like they were an outlet for him to talk about at least some of the things he hadn’t been able to talk about elsewhere.  And (plot-twist!) they were an outlet for me too; the issues we were discussing were things I’d never really had chance to talk about, either, and it felt like a bit of free therapy for me as well.  The conversations were of course centred on him, but just talking about those issues felt like I was getting a lot off my chest that I just hadn’t had the opportunity to before.

One week he arrived to the meeting with news.  His straight friend, the one he’d had a crush on, wasn’t as straight as he’d previously thought, and now they were an item.  I think I might have been happier about it than he was.  All those failed, unrequited crushes; maybe sometimes there is a happy ending.  That evening I went home and contacted my own formerly-straight crush and said it had been too long and we should meet up again.  He agreed, and I booked the train ticket there and then; I’d head to his for a weekend during the next school break.

In the meantime, Paul and I carried on meeting; we didn’t always have something deep to talk about, but I was told he really looked forward to it each week.  He even agreed to a bit of tuition with me to catch up on his missed work.  We’d meet up and work on some of his lessons, if he was in the mood, or we’d talk about how things were going with his boyfriend and life in general.  I was looking forward to continuing through the next year or so before he took his GCSEs.

Then one week I went to collect him, and he wasn’t there.  He’d not arrived at school.  There were issues at home; I wasn’t told exactly what.  A couple of weeks passed.  I grew more and more concerned, and asked after him, but got told it was being dealt with.

I still don’t quite know what happened.  All I know is that one Friday afternoon he suddenly appeared at my classroom door just as one of my lessons was about to start and said that he had come to say goodbye.  I could only speak to him briefly, just as my class were filing in past me.  He had moved out of his parents’ house, was going to live with his aunt and uncle for a while and would be moving schools.

I garbled something about how I was sorry to see him go and wished him the best of luck, before I had to head back inside the classroom to deal with my Year 8s.  Afterwards I wished I’d had chance to say more: I wanted to tell him that he was a good person, that he was way smarter than he gave himself credit for and that he shouldn’t give up on himself.  I mean, I’m not sure anything I could have said in those few seconds would have made much difference, but it just seemed like such an inadequate ending.  More than anything, what I wanted to say was thank you.

I did see him again, a few years later.  The conversation didn’t get much past the hello and how are you stage before he had to dash off for a bus, but he seemed happy and well.  It’s the sad thing about teaching, really, that you build these relationships and then have to let them go, but I guess that’s the nature of the thing.  We’re there to launch them into the ‘real world’, whatever that is, then after that it’s up to them.  We just have to hope we’ve done the best we can for them in the short time they’re in our care.

And yes, I did use that train ticket to visit my once-heterosexual friend.  He seemed really pleased to see me and we had a good catch up – one of those where the years might have passed, but you seem to pick up from exactly where you left off.  He talked about how he’d known he was gay for a long time, even when we first knew each other, but he’d just not been ready to come out back then.  I thought about Paul and his boyfriend when it got to the end of the evening and I stood in front of my friend and asked him, nervously, if it would be okay if I kissed him.

He said no, spoiling what would have been a lovely ending to this blog post.