Gay and Lesbian Educators: Personal Freedoms, Public Constraints

The writing in this book, on the plight of the gay and lesbian educator in America, is dry and often clumsy, the type is set in a style more appropriate to an academic journal than a book meant for the general reader and the endnotes and appendices are copious. All that aside, however, this is an extraordinarily conscientious and fair-minded study. Unlike so many polemical writers, lesbian Massachusetts educator and attorney Harbeck views many sides of the contentious issues of educators who are openly gay. In doing so, she makes her case stronger against sexual-orientation discrimination in America's schools and colleges, from colonial times to 1985. Harbeck notes that she has been researching this book, which is the first of at least two volumes, for some 20 years. The work shows. Harbeck uses legal and legislative precedent as the lens through which she focuses on the long battle between a population that thinks homosexuals should be kept away from its children, and educators who make the case that recruitment, molestation, general moral decay and godlessness are not issues that should automatically be linked to homosexual teachers. (Nov.)