Reflection.

One night in 1978 as I sat in the basement of a church in the Castro listening to Dan Allen, an English teacher at City College of San Francisco, talk about gay literature, I thought, "I could do that." Thanks to Dan's influence, we team taught a gay literature course the next year, an experience we wrote about in Radical Teacher #24. Soon "lesbian" was added to the course title. Thus began an odyssey that finds me now on the other side of the country, at the University of Maine, teaching Intro to LGBT studies, a course made possible by the Learning Circle on LGBT Studies.

I taught summer courses in lesbian studies at Maine several years ago, but Intro to LGBT has a higher profile, more diverse students, and strong support from the Learning Circle and from Wilde-Stein, the campus gay group. In the spring semester of 2003, two courses were taught, one in media/communications and one in sociology of the family.

At 63, I feel as engaged as ever by this work, but I am also aware of a generation gap I didn't feel in the 1980s: not only am I older, but the movement has changed, as the current course title indicates. I feel quite knowledgeable about lesbian and gay issues, much less so about bi and trans issues. Students, on the other hand, show keen interest in the bi and the trans material and less interest in lesbian feminism or gay liberation. The outside speakers who call forth the deepest response are Jean, a male to female transsexual and PJ, a female to male.

Although women's studies majors are curious about lesbian feminism and male students with a background in history like to know about gay liberation, for the most part my interests and students' interests diverge. So far this has caused no tension, but the split definitely affects the tone and shape of the class. Ideally, we would have four semesters to introduce LGBT studies.

Should we teach students what they want to know or what we think they should know? In the actual classroom, the difference is not as startling as this formulation makes it seem.

Another issue involves excessive subjectivity. I must be careful in teaching LGBT, a subject so bound up in my personal history, not to replace analysis with nostalgia, anecdotes, and self-centered memories. Students are intrigued by first person accounts, of course. I lived through the assassination of Harvey Milk, the demonstrations and the riot that followed, and the farcical and infuriating trial of Dan White. At the time White became a hero to local cops by killing both the mayor and the gay supervisor, I was working at a short-lived gay foundation. Because of the homophobic fury unleashed by the Briggs Initiative in California (that would have required the firing of all homosexual teachers and their heterosexual colleagues who mentioned homosexuality approvingly in the classroom) we feared an attack in our office. Every time a car backfired, we flinched. Without being melodramatic, how can I convey to students the danger of that time? Thanks partly to the leadership of Sally Gearhart and Harvey Milk, the Briggs Initiative was defeated. It might have passed. As I recap seventies and eighties activism in San Francisco, I must remind students (and myself) that my account is only one.

The generation gap plays out in another way too. The movements I joined were radical. "Out" lesbians in the 1970s regularly lost jobs and children. Gay bashings weren't reported in the mainstream news. These extreme forms of bigotry have not disappeared, of course, but for my students, taking on the identity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, does not require an outlaw or nonconformist spirit to the same degree it used to.

Trans still seems radical. Even though the gay or lesbian images my students have grown up with may have been distorted, stereotyped, or just silly, something in their culture hinted at possibilities for sexual and emotional expression that were completely or almost completely hidden when I was growing up.

For my students, the stigma of homosexuality, while still present, can no longer inspire the terror, shame, and denial that it once did. An anonymous survey of first year students in my Intro to Women's Studies, nearly all from villages and small towns in Maine, revealed that more than half have gay friends. That is perhaps a more significant cultural marker than the decision of the New York Times to print stories of gay and lesbian marriages. Will bisexuals and transgendered people one day be acknowledged by the Times?

Now that the movement has lost its radical edge, a probably inevitable development, terms such as "gay" and "lesbian" will have different connotations for my students than for me. The excitement and danger of an outlaw culture will not be part of their formative experience. On the other hand, the opportunity to take a class called LGBT may give them more sophisticated and complex understandings of our issues than the self-taught like me could have had in the 1970s.

MARGARET CRUIKSHANK's books include The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement and the recently published Learning to be Old: Gender, Culture, and Aging. She teaches Women's Studies at the University of Maine where she is also a faculty associate of the Center on Aging.