REKHA BASU
GAY TEACHER'S GAMBLE ON BEING ACCEPTED
The media love Tim Tutt. We court and quote, follow and photograph the charismatic Hanawalt Elementary School Teacher. We catch him onstage at the Des Moines Playhouse, or telling stories in his booming baritone at an African-American celebration. We traipse after him to Saturday kids' performances at Java Joe's, and follow him to the Polk County Courthouse as he puts himself on mock trial, and lets his students prosecute and defend.
We quote his students saying things like: "If everybody taught like him, there would never be a boring classroom."
Not only is Tutt, 36, endowed with that media-grabbing mix of an infectious personality and a unique teaching style, but he's a demographic rarity one of the only male teachers, and one of the only black people many Iowa third-graders have ever come in contact with. Two years ago, his stock shot up some more after he won the prestigious $25,000 Milken Family Foundation National Educator Award.
So it's not that surprising to pick up this week's Newsweek and see Tutt on the cover. But this headline is different. "Gay Today:" it says, "How the battle for acceptance has moved to schools, churches, marriages and the workplace." The photo shows Tutt between a doctor, a woman police officer, a female minister and a Republican state legislator from Arizona.
Welcome to another side of Tutt's enigmatic life.
He has never made a secret of his sexual orientation, not since coming out in college in the summer of 85. When he told his mother in Davenport, "her biggest concern was that I wouldn't be able to keep a teaching job, and that I would probably be dead of AIDS."
He's written about being gay for his church newsletters, and he's been written about in Outword, the Des Moines gay newspaper. Now Tutt is gambling that when Newsweek reaches his students' families, they'll be as accepting as his principal and others have been.
He talked to me this week after wrapping up parent-teacher conferences. He had let the last one stretch into 30 minutes, waxing on about everything from the child's social interaction to the purpose of social studies to crayfish.
This is a teacher who clearly digs his kids. That's why you fear for him, in a society where gay people are banished from the military, beaten to death for their sexual orientation, barred from worshiping at certain churches, and singled out for scapegoating in presidential campaigns. A Newsweek poll found that 36 percent of people don't think gays should teach elementary school.
Five years ago, Des Moines went ballistic when the school board was considering a curriculum proposal that included sexual orientation. Faced with death threats, former school board member Jonathan Wilson, who is gay, took to wearing a bulletproof vest.
No matter how systematically studies refute any link between being gay and preying on children, popular talk-show host Dr. Laura still spreads such claims.
So Tutt hesitated, just a bit, when asked by a pastor friend in New Hampshire (also on Newsweek's cover) to be in the story. He asked his principal, Helen Oliver, if she thought parents would "storm out of the room and have all their kids pulled out of my class." She assured him not to worry, he says.
Tutt says he did it to offer positive images of gays: "I had no role models growing up no one that was a positive person that happened to be a lesbian or gay man."
He teaches his third-graders about tolerance. He has covered the Holocaust and racism, told them how his grandmother in Kentucky once chewed him out for having his white best friend over because black people could get hanged for crossing race lines. When he told them, he cried. And then he used that as a lesson, too.
"I like to break down sex-role stereotypes," he said. "It's OK to see a great big oversized boy cry.... It's OK for boys to play piano and dance, and it's cool for girls to play baseball and soccer."
He's ready to answer kids' questions about being gay, but says he wouldn't volunteer that aspect of himself in class any more than he'd talk about being Christian, because it might offend people.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Tutt was wondering how things would go over the next few days, when Newsweek got around. He wasn't anxious, he insisted: "I have invested so much time in this educational community and in the families I teach. If you have invested time in developing relationships with people, they will protect you because you're one of them."
He is.
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Last updated 3/24/2000 by Jean Richter, richter@eecs.Berkeley.EDU