Once upon a time, I was a gay immigrant kid who didn’t know he was gay. At seven years old, my family moved from Mexico to a suburb of Dallas, where I attended elementary school. A lot of that time in my life is now a blur — I struggled to articulate much in English, I wasn’t good at sports and the other boys seemed to sense something was “different” about me (why were only girls interested in playing with me at recess?).
During that tumultuous time of my early schooling, one authority figure sticks out: Mr. Lovell, the music teacher who I knew seemed to know I was queer before I even knew what queerness was. He wrote the school anthem, single-handedly crafted the entire music program, and taught us Austrian operas when we could hardly read. When he stood still, his hand hung limp by his side and there were rumors that he was dating Bill, the scruffy crossing guard from the afternoon shift. No one really lingered on the extraneous details, though, because Mr. Lovell was an indispensable pillar of our school’s community.
