To the editor:
Random House Dictionary, c1992, p.1106 states: Queer. adj. meaning strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint….; of a questionable nature or character; not physically right or well; mentally unbalanced or deranged; and homosexual, effeminate or unmanly.
The most important definition is always first on the list.
In my time, this was a true statement, “If you wore green on Thursday, then you are queer”. (see Pokey Point Pond, Aroostook Republican, Wednesday, August 6, 2008, p.11; 10th paragraph, second line) Being gay did not enter the equation, and barely made the definition. In fact, “gay” only surfaced in the late 1970s and we are talking about the late ‘50s … the same generation that didn’t have birth control, cell phones, computers, calculators, and most important of all, the Internet.
Girls made up the sample statement. I think I heard it from Linda Fogg first. She was the most popular in our class and hence, set the trend. I believed it as gospel until I saw my father wearing green pants and sporting a pink tie on a Thursday while heading off to a Rotary Club meeting. So I assumed that the statement meant weird. I can live with weird.
In 2005 I was diagnosed with Asberger’s Syndrome, a mild form of autism and on the other side of the scale from the character that Dustin Hoffman played in the movie “Rain Man”. This confirmed my suspicions that I indeed had been weird in my first 55 years and hence the statement really was true.
The phrase I liked best was that “All girls have cooties” then and probably still do. Girls had varying amounts of cooties and were rated on a sliding scale by their ugliness and shape. And as the girls’ bodies changed into women, the level of cooties would gradually drop off. This phrase was invented by boys.
Kirsten Albair, my classmate from the first to eighth grade, was fired because she uttered the above statement recalling a simple piece of memory when asked a question by one of her students. What the children heard had to have been harvested incorrectly. And as a result, a fine teacher was dismissed.
I live in Atlanta, a city of 5 million people and growing by roughly 100,000 each year. Gwinnett County, the fastest growing one in Georgia, routinely builds 5 to 8 schools each year (The master plan calls for building 42 new schools by 2015) and scrounges the countryside and the East Coast for teachers to teach the average 8500 new students. They simply will go to any college and hire the entire graduating class sight unseen.
Caribou, Maine is a city of less than 8,500 people. Jobs are not plentiful as they are in the South. Where is a 58-year-old English teacher with a master’s degree that was earned going weekends and summers for nearly five years going to get another job in education in Caribou or the surrounding towns? What has happened to her record by simply uttering a false gossiped statement made up by girls in the 1950s to have an upper hand over another?
Are those students and parents proud of what they accomplished by totally up heaving and destroying another person’s livelihood and her ability to make a difference in these children’s’ lives? Your school board has acted cruelly as beasts and I pity their petty existence.
Marietta, Ga.
