Honestly, though, the best part of teaching Greek mythology is that soft ‘huh’ coming from behind you as you’re finishing up a diagram of the gods and the relationships they have between them.
“Is something wrong?” you ask, turning around while you try, and fail, to clean white chalk off your fingers.
“It’s just,” the boy says, and then he blushes a bit, because people taking Latin are usually good and shy and the last thing they want is to get into a fight with a teacher. “Those two characters here - aren’t they both men?”
And okay, at this point everybody’s paying attention except the resident class child - that one girl who still has to use four different colours for everything she writes and will get upset if you point out she should only use black or blue when filling in exams. So, yeah, you look at the boy, and then at everybody else, and then you turn back, pretend to check.
“Yes, they are,” you say, frowning, as if you never had to answer that question before.
“So why is there a double line between them?”
“Because they were in a relationship at some point. Double lines are for sex, remember? Single lines are kids and parents, and double lines are lovers.”
Someone giggles. The two kids whose parents bring them along to weird art exhibitions - the ones who’ve grown up hearing frank political discussions and the occasional dirty joke - are now looking collected and a bit smug. The others are losing it, and fast - they look at the board, as if only just noticing the thing, and then at you.
“So, they were like, gay?” someone else asks, and it’s always a girl asking this question, because ‘gay’ is just something boys aged 14 and a half never use - a Voldemort word, something that’s on your lips today and on everybody else’s tomorrow.
And this, of course, is the moment you’ve been waiting for - what the lesson was actually about. You wouldn’t plan a lesson around that, but you will mention the subject if it comes up, and so you start talking, about all of it - about sexual orientation being a cultural construct, about the Greek language not even having a term for ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, about warriors falling in love with each other and neglecting their teenage wives, about the fact our society is still coming to terms with something people have known in their hearts for millennia - that there’s no choosing and no free will, not about this. About how the most important thing is to respect yourself and each other, and the rest doesn’t matter all that much.
Statistically, in every class there’s a kid who’s struggling with this. Maybe two. Here things are not as bad as they could be, but it’s still hard, especially when you’re fourteen and you think you may be the only one and you don’t want to be different and how the hell can you even have a conversation about these things, with anyone?
And sometimes when you talk about these things - and dedicated teachers will find a way to include this speech somehow, because you never know who might need an ally, and who might need to hear it said out loud - teachers who love their kids will mention the issue when discussing Michelangelo and Leonardo and Shakespeare and the Iliad - sometimes you see exactly who these kids are. Sometimes you see them looking at you, wide-eyed and fearful and yet full to the brim with that Go on look that’s so endearing on any kind of student. And sometimes all you see is their floppy hair, because they will keep scribbling in their notebooks and pretending like this is uninteresting and embarrassing and Oh my God, but the tips of their ears are getting red, and you find yourself hoping they’ll get a hug today, because they really need it.
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