A very long-winded thank you to Oliver Sacks.

I lecture on the level 1 methods course at Aberdeen. It’s typical of intro psych courses; psychology as a science, research design, bad science, and nearly an hour’s worth of ranting about Andrew Wakefield. At the end of the section about why psychology is a science I made a joke about my then-wife that went something like “my wife is a chemist and when people ask me what she does I tell them she wears a white coat, she plays with beakers, and she tells me that I don’t do proper science”. It’s not a very good joke I’ll admit (that’s also quite typical of my lectures) but it is a very calculated joke, and in some ways I think it’s one of the most important things I say over the four weeks I teach on that course.

There’s a debate about how much personal information you should disclose to students. Some say it helps, others say it can hinder. Regardless, it’s definitely a personal choice which style you choose to adopt and there are obvious topics that are inappropriate. Whatever your age, gender or sexuality, no lecturer should be standing up and telling students details of their sex life. The thing is, there’s only one sexuality where using a gender-specific term to describe your spouse becomes an issue.

The reason I make that joke is because of the people sitting in front of me. Most of them are 17/18 years old, fresh out of high schools where ‘that’s so gay’ has been normalised as an insult. Some of them will know LGBT people and have absolutely no problem. Some of them will be LGBT themselves and have accepting friends and family. But some of them will have spent the last 17/18 years in small towns and villages and families across the UK where being gay is still not accepted, where they’ve maybe never met an LGBT person in real-life, where their friends and family haven’t been accepting and they have a lingering sense that they are somehow wrong or abnormal. Some will be from countries where not only is being LGBT frowned upon but it’s punishable by death.  

The reason I’m writing this is because I’ve just read that Oliver Sacks has come out as gay in his memoirs and this highlights one of the issues about LGBT visibility. There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have known that Sacks is gay until now. First, because coming out is an entirely personal choice, often fraught by individual difficulties that you can never fully understand unless you are the person in question. Second, because his sexuality has absolutely nothing to do with his life’s work, it’s totally irrelevant to Oliver Sacks the neurologist, so why would we know?

Herein lies the issue. As an academic, your sexuality is probably going to be entirely irrelevant to your professional life. The problem is that the default assumption is that someone is straight until proven otherwise and this results in a lack of LGBT role models – not because we’re not there, or because we’re hiding and closeted, but because there’s very little reason why it would ever come up. For some people their appearance might be suggestive of a particular sexuality, for others not so much.  I have a penchant for wearing waistcoats and ties, but on the days that I don’t dress like a 1950s gangster I pass for a straight woman with stereotypically poor academic fashion sense.

I believe that this is a real problem because we need a broader range of LGBT role models. There are a lot of good examples of LGBT people in the public eye but we need more down-to-earth, day-to-day, non-celebrity (in all its forms) role models – you too can become a slightly sarcastic teaching fellow in psychology! On a more basic level, it can only be a good thing to those students with the lingering sense that they are wrong to realise that if they are wrong, so is the person standing on the stage teaching them and they’ve just made a bad joke about their gay spouse to 200 undergraduates.

It’s about normalisation although I’m not really sure what I’m trying to argue for. I’m not suggesting that every LGBT academic suddenly starts coming out to their students; that would be weird and inappropriate. I’m not suggesting that people who choose not to disclose their sexuality at all start doing so – it’s a personal choice with so, so many individual factors that contribute to the decision to be out or not and I respect all the forms that decision can take.

One of my straight colleagues would occasionally reference his wife to his students – nothing detailed, just banal things like he would be out of the office one day that week because it was his wife’s birthday, that kind of thing. I remember telling him about the lecture joke and him raising an eyebrow at me. I asked him if I had made a joke about my husband being a chemist would his eyebrow have risen so rapidly and he conceded it would not. It’s not the level of disclosure that was the issue, it was the fact that as a lesbian my banal conversations out me if I use gender-specific terms.

So  I suppose what I’m suggesting is that if you are the type of teacher who discloses these little banal details, don’t make them gender-neutral because the more people that don’t, the quicker those details will actually become banal.

In summary:

1. Thank you Oliver Sacks for revealing the irrelevant. As professional role models go, you will be difficult to beat.

2. If you’re psychologist, never marry someone in the physical sciences.