Gayness, Multicultural Education, and Community -Dennis Carlson

• Absent
• Invisible
• Silent
• The "Other"
• Gayness
• Homosexual Orientation
• Gay Identity
• Socially Accepted
• School Community
• Public Education
• Scared

Denis Carlson argues that these practices, in the school community, are increasingly hard to sustain and that public schools may play an important role in helping build a new democratic, multicultural community, one in which sexual identity is recognized, in which inequities are challenged, and where dialogue across difference replaces silencing and invisibility practices.

1. "The first of these may be associated with the notion of a "community of interest." As the idea of a cohesive, monolithic community is collapsing, new social movements of identity are forming their own, relatively autonomous communities, speaking their own discourses."
2. "A second emergent discourse on community in America is that associated with the new right and cultural neoconservatism. This is a discourse about recapturing a romanticized lost American community, a "Father Knows Best" community where authority was respected, everybody "knew their places" and culture was homogeneous."
3. "A third discourse on community to emerge over the past decade or so in America is associated with the notion of a community of difference and diversity-what I will call a democratic multicultural community. "

I am completely confused. I am reading this essay over and over again but not comprehending his words. I think what Carlson is saying is that homosexuality is not the "normal" sexual orientation or is not the socially accepted way of living. I feel like he is comparing the white, middle class, heterosexual, male to the black, working class, homosexual, female to depict the image of homosexuals and how they are faced with the same disadvantages as the person of color is. Carlson says that the "normal" image in the American community is "Father Knows Best" and this is what is being taught in public school. The image of an American family including a father, mother, and children; never two mothers or two fathers. I feel like Carlson is describing homosexuals just like Johnson and McIntosh described men and women of color. Any issues involving either topic is silenced and overlooked. This includes education on these topics in schools and by parents.