Sexual Orientation and Identity, Educational Policy on

Educational Personnel

In the areas of personnel, local school boards have been given wide latitude in regulating public school employees' behavior and identity through the mechanism of the “morality clause,” which typically has been interpreted as the behavior that a majority of the school board members deem as moral. Under these broad and ill-defined morality clauses, school boards have forbidden a range of [Page 710]seemingly innocuous activities, including dancing, smoking, drinking alcoholic beverages, and working in establishments that serve alcohol. Female teachers have been subject to far closer scrutiny and have been barred from riding in automobiles with men who are not their relatives, required to live in “teacherages,” and barred from marrying if they wished to remain employed by the district.

For queer educators, mere suspicion of a nonhetero-sexual identity could mean dismissal as well as licen-sure revocation. Beginning in the 1950s, as part of a larger U.S. witch hunt for suspected homosexuals in almost every area of public employment, school districts and some states began to aggressively ferret out the suspected queers in their midst. At the time, the justifications for these purges were threefold. Queer sexual behavior was a felony in all fifty states. Consequently, queer educators, by definition, were statutory felons, and felons could not hold licensure or work with public school children. Furthermore, homosexuality and bisexuality were considered mental illnesses by a majority of the medical establishment, and most states at that time barred school districts from employing individuals who had a history of mental illness. The third and final justification was that queer identity violated traditional Biblical norms (usually framed as “traditional values”) regarding sexual relationships. Quite simply, queers were religious heretics.

Consequently, homosexuals who either hid their identities or who were open were seen as a corrosive influence upon the tender morals of public school children. A particular irony was that single females, who had long dominated the teaching profession because of their economic utility (they did not have to be paid very much because of limited employment opportunities), were increasingly demonized as potential lesbians throughout the 1950s by public commentators.

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